Imagine that you were told that the left side of your body is worse than the right, and therefore you should be ashamed of your left arm and leg, and it is better not to open your left eye at all. The same is done by upbringing, which imposes stereotypes about what is male and female. Here is what psychoanalyst Dmitry Olshansky thinks about this.
Once a truck driver who “works in the north” came to me for a consultation. A healthy, huge, bearded man barely fit on the sofa and complained in a bass voice: «Friends tell me that I’m too feminine.» Without hiding my surprise, I asked him what this meant. “Well, how? For men, a down jacket should be black; over there, you also have a black coat hanging. And I bought myself a red down jacket. Now everyone teases me with a woman.
The example is funny, but most people form their gender identity precisely on the basis of the “opposite” principle.
Being a man means not doing what is considered feminine. Being a woman means denying all your masculine traits.
Which looks absurd to anyone who is even in general terms familiar with psychoanalysis. But the modern system of education is built in such a way that children receive gender identity through denials: “a boy is not a girl”, and “a girl is not a boy”. Children are taught to create their image through the negation of the opposite, that is, in a negative rather than a positive way.
Ae muamua, the question immediately arises: “not a girl” and “not a boy” — how is it? And then a lot of stereotypes are formed: a boy should not like bright colors, show emotions, should not like to be in the kitchen … Although we understand that this has nothing to do with masculinity. Contrasting dolls and cars is as strange as opposing «orange» and «thirty-six».
Forcing to suppress a part of your being is the same as forbidding the male body to produce the hormone estrogen.
Every person has both feminine and masculine traits. And the hormones produced are the same, just someone has more estrogen, someone has more testosterone. The difference between a man and a woman is exclusively quantitative, not qualitative, even from the point of view of physiology, not to mention the mental apparatus, which is the same for both sexes, as Freud proved.
Therefore, all speculations on the topic of male and female psychology look ridiculous. If in the XNUMXth century it was still permissible to say that men by nature are born somehow different from women, today all these arguments are unscientific and forcing a person to suppress a part of his being in himself is the same as forbidding the male body to produce the hormone estrogen . How long will he last without him? Meanwhile, upbringing just forces you to press, be shy and hide identifications with the opposite sex.
If a man likes something feminine, the same red color, for example, they immediately look at him as a pervert and create a lot of complexes for him. If a woman buys a black down jacket, no truck driver will marry her.
Sounds crazy? And this is the nonsense that children are brought up with.
Lua, all gender stereotypes are arbitrary. Who said that not experiencing emotions is a sign of a “real man”? Or love to kill «inherent in the nature of any man»? Or who can justify, in terms of physiology or evolution, why a man should distinguish less colors than a woman?
A male hunter just needs faster reactions, subtle intuition and sharp feelings than a woman, the keeper of the hearth, who does not really need these feelings at all, since her life world is limited to two square meters of a gloomy cave and an ever-screaming flock of cubs.
In such conditions, in order to preserve the female psyche, hearing must be atrophied so that the cries of dozens of children do not lead to a nervous breakdown, smell and taste are lowered so as not to be very picky about food, because there will be no other anyway, and sight and touch to a woman in a cave generally useless, since all the objects in her living space are well known and always at hand.
But the hunter must distinguish thousands of smells and shades of flowers, have sharp eyesight and hearing, in order to discern a hidden prey or predator hundreds of meters away in dense thickets. So from the point of view of evolution, it is men who should be more sensitive, refined and subtle than women. As history proves: it is men who are the best perfumers, chefs, stylists.
Fiction is needed to clearly separate the sphere of male and female and to establish rules for relations between the sexes.
However, social stereotypes present us with everything topsy-turvy: a man, they say, must be less sensitive than a woman. And if he follows his true masculine nature and becomes, for example, a couturier, then truckers will not appreciate or support this.
You can recall many such stereotypes that you can’t come up with on purpose. For example, in Bulgaria I came across this: knee-highs are an attribute of a woman’s wardrobe, and a normal man, of course, cannot wear them. «But what about the players?» I asked. «They can, it’s like in a theater role you need to paint your lips and wear a wig.» In no other country in the world have I seen such a stereotype about golf.
All these inventions arise completely by chance. But for what? They are necessary for any social group in order to clearly separate the sphere of male and female and establish rules for relations between the sexes.
In animals, this question does not arise — instincts suggest how to behave in a given situation. For example, color or smell allow you to distinguish between males and females and find sexual partners. People need symbolic substitutes for these mechanisms (wearing knee socks and red down jackets) to separate men from women.
Tolu, modern education forms a deliberately negative attitude towards the opposite sex. The boy is told “don’t whine like a girl” — being a girl is bad, and your sensual part of your personality is also something negative that you need to be ashamed of.
Since boys are taught to suppress all allegedly feminine traits in themselves, and girls are taught to hate and suppress everything masculine in themselves, intrapsychic conflicts arise. Hence the enmity between the sexes: the desire of feminists to prove that they are no worse than men, and the desire of machistas to “put women in their place.”
Both are, in fact, unresolved internal conflicts between the female and male parts of the personality.
If you do not oppose male and female, it is likely that conflicts between people will become more complex, and relationships will become more interesting. Girls should be taught to accept masculine qualities in themselves, and boys should be taught to respect feminine traits in themselves. Then they will treat women as equals.