Gender Roles. Get Over It.

You know how you can tell a man is gay? He likes men.

Why do I make this bleeding obvious statement? I read an article recently on mamamia titled ’10 Ways to tell if the guy you like is gay’. The author had littered the piece with gay stereotypes and identified the piece as ‘tongue in cheek’, even going so far as to use his own sexuality as a justification for the humour. My instant reaction was anger, then disbelief, and then a resounding ‘Why is this newsworthy?’

Society throughout the ages has been trapped in a cycle of placing us all into little ‘niche’ boxes. Women take care of the home. Men are the hunter gatherers. Girls shouldn’t play sports. Boys shouldn’t be interested in fashion. Yadda yadda yadda. It’s time for a new tune people! I’m so increasingly bored with it all. Gender roles are passé. There, I said it. It is no longer cool to talk about what makes a boy a boy or what makes a girl a girl.

I’m of the personal belief that we spend far too much time trying to identify what makes each other tick, and how to reconcile what that means about that person. Truly, do you need to know why it is that someone prefers a particular piece of music? Does it matter who sleeps in whose bed?

Rather than focussing on a person’s true worth, whatever their achievements may be, we seem to only ever see what identifies them as a particular social entity. For example:  'Robert dresses so well, he must be a gay man'. All this achieves is endless social pigeonholing, rather than progressive social change.

I’m not here to debate whatever the reason might be for this circular ‘gender mapping’, nor am I interested in the scientific or moral explanations as to why we place such importance and have certain expectations from the male and females of the species. Quite frankly, that subject has been done to death without proper resolve. My answer is simple. Let it go. No one cares.

Let’s focus on the importance of how that person interacts with the people they choose to. Are they unkind, cruel and disingenuous? Or do they show empathy, kindness and honesty? Once we’ve established these markers as more important than gender stereotyping, I think we’ll have achieved a society we can actually be proud of.

Finally, then, we can all stop justifying the tiniest details of our lives to everyone we meet. Your music choices will remain simply that, the tunes you like to listen to. The clothes you wear will be indicative purely of your own fashion agenda. Your recreational activities will be whatever you choose to do in your spare time. What a relief that will be.