Are Masculinity and Femininity Real or Constructed?

by Matilda Atkins

It is often easy to tell who is a woman or a man from how people look, what they wear, and how they act. It is obvious that physically men and women are different, but how much about behaviour is biological and how much is a result of environment and influence. Biological factors are hormones and genes. Environmental influences include family relationships, childhood, life experiences, toys given to you when you’re younger and influence from the people around you when you are growing up. Humans naturally copy what they see around them to fit in. Especially today with social media, it is easier for vulnerable people to be influenced, and change their behavior to fit in. 

Essentialism is the theory that there are fixed, intrinsic and innate qualities to women and men. Essentialists tend to think that all the factors mentioned in the diagram should line up. For example, if you are physically a woman you should feel like a woman, act like a woman and be attracted to men. Essentialism can be used as an argument against homosexuality as it is seen as deviant from the natural way. People who are transgender feel that their gender identity is different to their physical gender. But that is assuming that different genders feel differently to begin with, so you could say that transgender theory is essentialist. 

Anti-essentialism is the view that gender differences were socially constructed; people conform to gender difference in society. Feminists such as Simone de Beauvoir argued that there is no reason why biological differences between the sexes should lead to specific expectations for male and female behaviour. Also, 1.7% of people are born intersex, meaning they have different chromosomes, sex hormones or genitals from either female or male. This is about the same percentage of people who are ginger, yet it is not something which is well known. This shows that people often assume that gender is either female or male but when so much of the time it is more complicated. 

Gender expectations and roles differ across the world. For example, in Belgium boys are put in pink when they’re born and girls are put in blue, this was the same in England until the twentieth century. In southern Vietnam the dominant culture is mostly female. The men do not own property and things are passed down to the girls in the family and the women own property. Men take the woman's last name and move into the home with them. In Japan women are meant to look after the men rather than the other way around, for example women buy men chocolates or flowers. These examples show that many gendered differences are created by culture rather than essential to our identity.

Overall, I think that there are physical and hormonal differences in men and women, which create differences, however it is difficult to tell which characteristics are biological or socially created. If people had no influences in the way they made their choices, I’m sure that all of us would be completely different people. As with everything, gender is an issue which gets more complicated the more you find out about it. I think that the best thing to do is let people chose to act how they want to, and try to rid of unfair biases to either sex.