There are certain roles in our society that we can’t live without, a good example is how we can not live without a leader or any kind of power division. These roles are made to support each other and they are meant to benefit from each other as the community develops. Unfortunately some roles can only be filled with people that have a specific trade or it has become a stereotype where one can not escape it even if they tried.
Over the course of the past century the importance and the limitations of gender roles have been decreasing, with this decrease the roles became somewhat more gender neutral. Even though the increase in gender neutral roles in society has been increasing there are still certain jobs like mining that require a specific physique to do, that is also one of the main reasons male population do the more physically demanding jobs. The reasons for this decrease in gender roles are still widely unknown but many speculate it may have been caused by things like nationalism and women’s rights movements.
We are currently living in an era where males can do house chores while the females in the household can work and it has become a normal thing for us thanks to the decrease of gender roles in society. However most movies and television shows still misrepresent or stereotype people depending on gender. Many women in movies or popular television shows get represented as elegant and delicate while males are often represented as people that don’t think much while using brute force to solve problems in the simplest way.
The way current stereotypes represent our society especially in the less developed countries are very wrong. In the less developed countries females have to stay home and take care of the house chores, if they don’t they are not normal which is something none should support since this pressure from society limits how we express ourselves as human beings. Males on the other hand have to work day and night to feed their family. With these roles many people have a set role in society they need to follow to fit in and this brings order at least to some extent but with these limitations in place many people are not going to be happy to follow a certain role in society which they do not like.
A very good example of how this situation both leads to chaos and freedom is the Ellen show which aired between 1994-1998 in which Ellen DeGeneres starred in. Ellen as a female took on a more masculine role in the show as the main character and later she came out as an lesbian. This happened in 1997 and after only one more season the show had to shut down due to the limitations it got because it included a homosexual indivusual that did not fit the gender roles that society has set out. Parental advisory warnings had to be set out before the shows airing which played a big role in the shows slowly decreasing fanbase and at last long cancelling. In a later interview Ellen stated that she was proud that she had the courage to come out and in the later years she would get her own show which is still airing to this day.
Many of us think freedom is important and must be protected at all costs while we contribute to setting gender roles in society. It is written in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, color, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.” but we ignore this declaration and force people to live in a certain way we want them to live which is unfair. Also without realising it we set the same standards for ourselves. That is why I think we should break the vicious cycle and try to create a world where we are equal to express ourselves without having to meet the standards to me considered normal.