Gender Roles vs Equal Rights

Defending our roles gives us the right to be a certain person and to act how we like. Through various historical periods the role of being a man in social structures was dominated through an image of power, strength, and superiority. But this was the image that the role projected, and not the role itself. You might be thinking that these are one and the same. However there is a difference between roles and the social implications roles hold – and understanding this difference is fundamental to both our personal freedom and self-expression.

Your Fundamental Rights

Not too long ago a friend of mine was proclaiming how women need to stand up for their rights to take back the world and rebalance gender roles. I told her that she is not just a woman. She responded that this assertion is ridiculous — of course she was a woman, and proclaimed that she would even prove it if she had to. However the emphasis I intended to place was on her being not just a woman.

Now that I look back on this I see that I was referring to the social role of being a woman, not the womanhood itself. Equal rights movements often mix up the social role associated with a gender and the essential nature and essence behind that gender.

Fickle things that we like to call Roles

It is not enough to be Yourself in our world – people tend to expect others to win a role contest through their actions, thoughts, and character. It is these roles that drive our world. The successful businessman, the demanding wife, the reticent daughter… our roles are what people assume us to be overall.

This assumption is outrageous. How can a person be reticent, demanding, or successful? The single thing a person can be is Himself or Herself – and then, later, that person can project the role of success, reticence, or demand.

woman

It is not the role that makes up a person at all. Roles can be changed like transforming a pot back into the clay that moulded it.

The questions I ask are how come we value a role more than a person in our world? How come we have state-wide and international debates about gender roles and never consider who stands behind the gender – the individuals themselves despite race, gender, and status? How did a role came to have more meaning to us than essential individualism?

Being Yourself

In the modern world women often claim to have the same power as men do, however men do not often go out and claim the right to be warm, sensitive, and gentle. These characteristics seem out of place. But power for women is not misplaced. How come? The reason is that our dynamics of gender balance often attempt to neutralize all roles including roles that come from the soul such as exquisiteness, compassion, protection, intuition, and so forth.

Roles such as these are unique to each person and each one of us has the right to express those roles. To take them from us in an attempt to equalize rights is the same as taking from us that which makes us who we are. If a person is better at one thing than another in a relationship then what is the problem with that person taking on this particular role and allowing their significant other to utilize his or her talents, to complement each other? It is impossible to suppress all of our talents and to just hope for the best in a role-structure that looks like a flat line from point 1 to 2.

Power Struggles

No-one seems to complain about un-equal rights where a role of being sensitive or caring is dominated in one gender more than the other. There is no problem stating that one gender is too dominant but stating that overall a particular gender is too sensitive does not happen, right? Not quite. Most women might well have as much of a problem with a partner being too sensitive as they do with a partner being too dominant.

The reason behind this is that the balance of power lies in the social roles themselves. Each person seeks out partners and friends based on a set of social or global standards and roles that are expected of others. If a man is more sensitive than a socially acceptable amount, then this is seen as a threat to power – as much as other role variations are. The reason this is so lies in our desire to make others fit a certain social role rather than allowing them to be their true self and to express their natural roles of personhood that are unique to them.

There are a great number of people who would prefer to see the successful businessman, the demanding wife, and the reticent daughter, rather than discovering who the real person behind that role is. If there is no good role to slot others into then we often label them as social outcasts. If we do not, we might just end up realizing that our gender role equalization process promotes deprivation of expression and strikes deep into the heart of individualism to compromise the spirit that makes us who we are.

StumbleUpon - Twitter - Facebook

Free meditation course

Join 184 subscribers

Latest Posts