Masculinity and Femininity – Social Evils?

“Historically, man has been obsessed with dominating the world, capturing animals, dissecting them, domesticating them. He has also fought wars of incredible destruction, against demonized enemies. ” (Blake, 1995) While the woman has been the keeper of the hearth and the nurturer of the family. Society has defined the way we look at ourselves in gender roles. Adopting one (gender role) means totally ignoring the other. According to John Kennedy (1999), orthodox masculinity is the opposite of femininity. To find out the public’s opinion whether boys and girls have to be taught to be more masculine and feminine (respectly), an interview was taken with two college students, one male and one female to get to get a better insight on this debatable topic. The interviews were conducted for about 15 minutes on the questions mentioned in Appendix 1 and the response from these interviews were not entirely what I had expected them to be.

When asked to define their versions of “masculi...