Gender Differences Determine Relations between Individuals - Essay Example

Gender Differences Gender differences determine relations between individuals and their behavior patterns. Most of the papers identify the experience of relationships, and the need to be connected to others, as important elements in personality. The development of a mature capacity for relationship is a process parallel to, and equal with, the development of the capacity for a separate, autonomous identity. Following Kimmel (2000): "Gender is not simply a system of classification by which biological males and biological females are sorted, separated, and socialized into equivalent sex roles. Gender also expresses the universal inequality between women and men" (1). The topic selected is Punishment Worse than the Crime Two sociological perspectives used for analysis are cross-cultural variation and psychological development. Kimmel explains that gender inequality and differences are the core of Muslim society determining its main norms and traditions, relations between women and men, husbands and wives. The case Punishment Worse than the Crime shows that gender relations are a part of cultural traditions. "One of the key determinants of women's status has been the division of labor around child care. Women's role in reproduction has historically limited their social and economic participation" (Kimmel 53). The case shows that gender differences are socially determined. Those values, customs and behavioral norms that account for the sexual differentiation in adult personal identity and behavior are transmitted from generation to generation. In Muslim countries, gender identity is being constructed at every developmental stage of the life cycle, from infancy right through to late adulthood, as the developmental antecedents and behavioral consequences interact with the personality. For Pakistan women punishment is worse than the crime because women obtain a low social role in society and cannot accuse men in wrong behavior. In many Muslim countries, a woman is "a thing" owned by a man (a father or a husband) who has no rights and freedoms (Connell 43). The case shows that culture and social practices passes on to children, who once they have put on the lenses. This process holds true as a general but not an absolute pattern. Not everyone is so preprogrammed. There are in every society and culture mismatches whose bodies are of one sex and their psyches of the other. They develop their own gender identity by looking at rather than through the lenses. Far from being unnatural, such phenomena are part of the diversity of nature interacting with culture, very much, she says, like the diversity of food preferences: the natural desire for food does not in itself determine what is acceptable food in one culture as against the next, or what one person will prefer as against another within the same culture. "Rape may be a strategy to ensure continued male domination or a vehicle by which men can hope to conceal maternal dependence, according to ethnographers, but it is surely not an alternative dating strategy" (Kimmel 55). The picture presented here is of a community in which traditional cultural norms and ideal practices form the basis on which patriarchy is reproduced. Two factors, education and unemployment, are countervailing factors, both of them having had and continuing to have a profound effect on the most central institution in East life, marriage, and the relations between men and women. Education and other Western influences, bringing about significant changes in the way East fulfill their roles as fathers. The most important part of the story would be a rape itself and its perception by men. It is possible to assume that men do not feel guilty or do not perceive the act of rape as a crime. Cross cultural perspective can be applied to all situations described in this case. The psychological theory suggests that labor division influences perception of women and their social roles. In this division, a woman's role is ideally that of housewife and a man's that of provider working outside the confines of the house. In reality, many men report taking part in household activities and many boys are trained to undertake chores ideally reserved for girls; and conversely, as the reader may have already observed, many girls are often drawn into helping in productive activity outside the household. In such departures from the ideal, where children are concerned, a lot depends on the personal ideas of the parents, the changing cultural environment, as well as on the birth order within a family. "Gender was acquired, molded through interactions with family members and with the larger society" (Kimmel 67). Outdoor economic and domestic activities are generally performed by males, though women participate in the labor force also as traders in the market and wage-earners in the city. Ideally, most men and women prefer women staying at home to take care of children and manage the home and home-based economic activities such as dressmaking, hairdressing and retailing, but economic realities dictate otherwise. For psychological development theory, the most interesting would be a part of punishment and explanation of its meaning and significance for men. It is possible to say that punishment helps men to prove their authority and 'ownership' of women perplexed by accusations and claims in rape. It is possible to say that gender divisions of labor, which begin after the toddler stage, somewhere at age five, are uniformly patterned in assigning males mainly outdoor and females mainly indoor chores. In many Pakistan families, the first is that many parents insist on cross-gender work, teaching boys to iron, girls to help in the field. Often, this cannot be helped, as in the case of a family having all boys or all girls, or depending on the birth order of the genders. Boys who have only brothers or who are born before their sisters have no choice but to perform indoor domestic chores. But such activity is rationalized by parents - as men they need to be able to help themselves, or future spouses are impressed by a helpful mate. But they take great care to avoid over-domestication of their sons, since this would make them too soft. Second, the outdoor-indoor dichotomy is often rationalized as a calculation to save the heavier work for the male, since males are supposed to be stronger. In her famous nature-culture article shows in fact that when the division of labor is considered from this binary oppositional frame, culture is given greater value and a male assignment. The poignant example of this is cooking, which at the domestic level in most cultures is a woman's chore, but once it becomes a cultural (public) matter it is assigned a male role in the person of the chef. There is thus a latent but fairly widespread fear of the power that women can exercise over men owing to their closer association with natural biological processes. As essentially marginal beings women are a potential threat to men. The psychological development theory would ignore the punishment itself (Cornell and Hartmann 61). Cross-cultural variations theory is more convincing because it explains historical and cultural causes of gender roles and inequalities typical for the Middle East. Male supremacy often generates wife-beating, the use of physical violence to subordinate wives. Wife-beating also occurs among the Africans, thus some women also share the view that under certain circumstances the victim is to be blamed. The last is directly linked to a woman's nurturing role, which she begins training in from the childhood stage when she is assigned to model her mother's role in taking care of younger siblings. The softness and warmth which her nurturing roles is supposed to bestow on the character of a woman directly contrasts with the tough personality the young boy is socialized to take on, to avoid a show of tears on every occasion of inward hurt, to learn to suffer deprivation with a self-sacrificing nobility of spirit. Punishment has a symbolic meaning underlining male authority and power, social dominance and superiority. Works Cited 1. Connell, R. W. Masculinities. University of California Press, 2005. 2. Cornell, S. E., Hartmann, D. Ethnicity and Race: Making Identities in a Changing World. Pine Forge Press; Second Edition edition, 2006. 3. Kimmel, M., Aronson, A. The Gendered Society. Reader. Oxford University Press, 2000. 4. Kimmel, M. The Gendered Society. Oxford University Press 2000. Read More