Learning through Culture

In our society, culture is established birth when the doctor says, “It’s a _____”. We are told that a child has to be either (a) or (b) in order to leave the hospital and start living to their culture’s expectations. This weeks readings have talked about how gender is different in every culture and that we categorize ‘male’ and ‘female’ differently. The ideas and realizations of gender that we come to understand start at a very early age. When watching the commercial from Fischer Price I was again amazed at how different the narrator and the children acted towards each separate toy. The boys were very aggressive and wanted to continue moving the cars and racing as fast as they could while the narrator was also speaking in a more aggressive tone. When the panned over to the girl, the music changed to a less intense theme and more of a fairy like tune. It was such a dramatic change that it made me ask, “wait… did that really happen?”, and sure enough it did. Our culture has become so caught in the idea that gender can only fit into these two categories and if you’re not part of either of them, than you’re either cast out or forced to change.

In order to get a different idea of gender, I just simply typed in ‘gender’ on youtube. I got a whole array of videos but one was of a man interviewing little children on what they think gender is. The children (boys and girls) agreed that boys have to dress like boys, and girls have to dress like girls and if either of them switched clothes than that “wouldn’t be okay”. We aren’t able to allow gender stereotypes to be reserved because we just don’t feel alright with it; in order to feel comfortable with someone, we have to put them in one category first and then go from there. The fact that we have to put someone into a category in order to be able to communicate with him or her on some level is ridiculous in itself, or the fact that we have to put ourselves in a category in order to do anything in society is also a cultural idea. We put these gender forms into people’s minds at such a young age because that’s what is considered ‘normal’ in our society to do. At a young age I remember being told to wear more dresses or hear the saying “little girls don’t behave like that “ ( I was a rambunctious child), and my idea of gender was constructed over and over again. Growing up watching my sister’s put on make-up and doing their hair made me think that this must be what “girls” do and that I was only allowed to do things in the ‘girl’ category. My culture supported the idea that this what normal girls and boys do and if you don’t match up to your gender then you have to change.

It’s amazing to see how much our idea of gender affects everyone in his or her lives everyday. We see it when younger children play with one another and the girls play with dolls while the boys play with action figures or mud because that’s more ‘boy’ like. In considering the question, “how do humans learn culture”, it can be seen that humans learn culture by being taught at a young age what their gender is and how their culture treats that gender. What would happen if people stop caring about gender and just accept what people feel like and take time to understand that individual? We try too hard to put people into categories that we forget how those categories started in the first place.