Raven Evans: Food for Thought

In today's world, the line dividing gender and gender roles are slowly but surely being blurred into one homogenous group. More men and women are performing tasks and actions that would normally be performed by the opposite sex. People are realizing that tasks are not specifically assigned to a certain gender and that any gender can do anything that they want to do as long as it's within the legal confines of one's culture and government. In the conservative South however, gender roles are more rigid and concrete in a sense that you would be an outcast or looked down upon if one were to deviate from those set roles.  Franklin expressed in "Hunting Years" that in order to be seen as a man, a boy would have to kill a deer. The problem arises when the narrator doesn't want to kill animals and could potentially be seen as what he calls a pussy. Conversely, in "Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady" the narrator's mother is very verbal about her disdain for a man so much so that she threaten physical violence. According to King's story, a southern lady is suppose to the very essence of fragility, submissiveness, and femininity, but the narrator's mother is very much the opposite. Both characters are perceived in a negative light because they don't follow gender norms or develop later than others.

I feel like this notion of having to exude masculinity or femininity based on the gender that society perceives you is dangerous. This makes young men fear crying they could be seen as weak or less of a man. This causes young girls to suppress suppress dreams of certain careers because of the perceived masculinity of the career. With this aged thinking of gender, we lose potential creative and intellectual minds that could change the world. It's as if society is saying, "Don't be yourself. it's bad and we don't like it."

 In addition to the danger of gender roles, I feel that these displays of gender almost mirror the primal actions of animals in the wild. For example,  female elephants have a certain smell that lets bull elephant know that they are ready to mate. The scent can attract multiple bull elephants to one female elephant and in order to court the female elephant the bull elephants must show off their strength and fight other bull elephants. The same goes for lion, chimpanzees, and other animals where the female species must be submissive while the male shows of their strength like a Mr. Universe show. The problem is that wild animals don't have a higher sense of thinking and can't differentiate right and wrong, yet human can tell the difference between right and wrong and still act like (excuse my French) jackasses.