Unconscious Rules - Emily Martinez 2/15

In Abandon Your Tedious Research Karen Bornstein outlines the "objective" rules of gender established by our society. While clearly tongue in cheek the whole way through, she got me thinking about how (seemingly) set in stone gender seems. How from literal birth we're brainwashed into believing that we are only what we are born. Children are dressed by their parents in a way that signifies their assigned gender, their activities are limited to certain things, they are raised differently from the opposite gender. They are molded into what society thinks they should be. As if humans cannot change should they want to! Humans are like clay. People with curly hair flatten it, people with flat hair curl it. People where contacts to change their color and use glasses to correct their eyesight. They cut their hair and grow it out. They decorate their skin with ink and metal and stones. They change their inside, their values and morals as they grow and mature and form their own feelings. So why is it that gender is one of the few things society is adamant that you don't change? People claim tradition, well, traditions change and new ones form all the time. Why does the shape of someone's reproductive parts mean so much? We never see them. It's actually illegal in most places to display your genitals. So why does it matter? Could it be our society's morbid obsession with sex,an omnipresent facet in life, despite a vicious taboo against even speaking about it? Or could it because humans are a species of habit and category; that anything not fitting in a box is 'too difficult' to bother understanding? Perhaps it is both. Perhaps it is neither. I cannot say. I am, however, going to be studying this topic further. I was thinking about using it as a basis of analysis for Essay #2.