Gender Differences in the Family

    Does gender matter in the family? This is a question that has unfortunately been merely looked over in the past five years. There are so many circumstances where there is a single parent in the home, two moms or two dads, or just the mom or dad is just not involved in the home so the people in the home are affected by it.

    This week I learned a lot of things about the stereotypical man and woman compared to what I thought I knew. Men’s brains are more completely different than women’s. Men have little boxes and they have a box for each and every conversation, so to speak. Where women have a brain that is much more wired meaning everything conversation connects for women. Some other examples of how we are different are women are typically more social, learn to speak earlier, are better listeners, and have relational orientation. Men however are more physically violent, learn to speak later, are better problem-solvers, and have spatial orientation. When talking about relational and spatial orientation, some of you may not know what that means. When you think about when men give directions, they usually involve more “scientific” words than women do. They would say something like “travel west down the road for 12 miles and then you are going to take a left and it will be on your right.” Where women would ask “do you know where the golf course is? Once you see it, it is on the right of that.” Now, this is typical behavior for men and women but I am by no means saying that every man and woman will act like this. I know many men and women who have the opposite characteristics.

    For the past few years, the phrase “toxic masculinity” has really swept the world. When asked what toxic masculinity meant to us, the answers consisted of a man who makes fun of emotions or the characteristics of a woman. It can also mean a man that doesn’t think he is allowed to show his emotions. This is usually where the saying “boys don’t cry” comes from. On the other side, we also talked about toxic femininity. This refers to when a woman is a bit too extreme with their thought process of “we don’t need men, we can do everything by ourselves.” While discussing this, we talked about different examples of when women have told men “I don’t need you to open the door, I can do it myself” along with other things. When these ideas and examples were being tossed around, a gentleman in my class raised his hand to share something that his mom told him in high school and I really liked it. A bit of a back story is his mom raised him to always open doors for women and just to be chivalrous. So when he raised his hand he told us that his mom said “ Women are trying so hard to be queens for themselves because no one has treated them like one.” I really liked that because I realized that that is probably where the hatred for men comes from. Most women I know say they hate men is because they have only had negative experiences with them. Now, I am not saying that it is ok for men to be toxic and not gentlemen, but I am also not saying that it is ok for a woman to act the same way towards men. It’s a double standard.

    A lot of men today still think that it’s not ok to express their emotions but in class, my professor went over the list of how women usually act and asked if we would want a man who knows how to express his emotions and feelings and if we want our future husbands to be more social and better listeners, and every single girl in my class said yes. I think society has really skewed expectations of what a man should be and how they should act when in reality, it never hurts anyone to be out of the normality of what society has set for years.