Men vs. Women

     Okay so this week the topic was gender roles. Just for a definition, "gender roles refer to the behavior associated with being either male or female."-- quote from my textbook. So, gender roles. We all know that they are out there; women cook, men work. Women clean, men fix cars. Women take care of the children, men take care of the trash. Obviously those are some of the more traditional ones. But it seems they still stick today. Not in such definitive, hard and fast lines, but they still exist. It is more unusual to see a 'Mr. Mom' husband and a breadwinner wife then it is to see a traditional stay-at-home mom and a career driven father. Or probably more accurately, two career-driven parents with the wife who still comes home to cook dinner and tuck the kids in more often then her husband does. Why is this? Why have these traditional roles held out in our country for so long? Obviously we as Latter-Day Saints have our own belief about such roles. We believe that gender is eternal and that it is the role of the father to be the presider and provider in the home. We also believe it is the mother's role to be the primary nurturer of the children (see The Family: A Proclamation to the World; http://lds.org/family/proclamation?lang=eng). Now, that doesn't mean that there isn't some flexibility in that; men can definitely nurture their children and women may choose to have a career. But we still believe these roles of men and women to be divinely appointed. But doesn't it seem strange that people all over this country and other parts of the world hold this same general idea? Why is it that women are almost always the ones found in charge of the children, even if they also have a career? With such a forward and intense movement by the feminists to make everything absolutely equal, why hasn't that caught on yet? Why don't men take more of nurturing part of raising children? Why don't women go out there and make all that money in the corporate world? Again, there are many men and women who do do those things. They don't fall into the traditional roles. But often women and men do fit right into those roles. How has that stuck for so many thousands of years? I believe it is because it is inherent in us. Gender is eternal, as stated earlier, and some of the gender roles have been established by God. Therefore it is inherent within our very natures to be the nurturers or the providers.
       We watched a video for class one day that talked all about this. It was a news report, like 20/20 or something like that, about how girls and boys just seem to be different. They have different interests and different likes. For example, some of the parents that were interviewed talked about how they never allowed their boys to have weapons. They didn't have toy guns, swords, or anything else. They felt strongly that they "were not going to be the ones to arm [their] children." But somehow, those boys managed to turn their carrot sticks into guns and their sister's barbie dolls into swords. It was just the way that they were. This video is filled with tons of examples like this, that there just is something biologically different in the way boys and girls think. I loved this video because it basically was saying everything that the Proclamation says and proved the things that The Brethren have been teaching us all along. We are different, and that is okay. I'm sure you've all heard the analogy of the airplane: the right wing is completely opposite in design and shape from the left wing, but together they make the airplane fly. It couldn't fly with just the left or the the right, nor could it fly with two left wings or two right wings.  Men and women were created differently so that they could compliment each other, not so that they could be above or better than one another.
         Thanks for listening! (I don't have a link for the video of the 20/20 report, so I can't post it. Although it's almost an hour long so you all probably wouldn't have time to watch it anyway!)