In most if not all societies there are prescriptions regarding gender roles. The traditions, and even sometimes the laws, of a society direct that certain career choices and lifestyles are appropriate to men, and other career choices and lifestyles are appropriate to women. In recent years many people have strongly challenged the social forces that would prevent, e.g., women from becoming fighter pilots or men from becoming geisha.
Men who defy or fail to fulfill their expected gender role are often called effeminate. Women who fail to fulfill their expected gender role are usually not so strongly critcised.
Examples:
Some Christian congregations enforce the rule set forth in I Corinthians, 11:4 and 5, that in praying or prophesying no man should cover his head, but that every woman should cover hers.
I Corinthians, 11:14 and 15 indicates that it is inappropriate for a man to wear his hair long, and good for a woman to wear her hair long.
Genderroles have long been a staple of the Nature/Nurture debate: Traditional theories of gender usually assume that one's gender identity, and hence one's genderrole, is a natural given.
Genderrole can vary according to the social group to which a person belongs or the subculture with which he or she chooses to identify.
When an individual exhibits a genderrole that is discordant with his or her gender identity, it is most often done to deliberately provoke a sense of incongruity and a humorous reaction to the attempts of a person of one sex to pass himself or herself off as a member of the opposite sex.
Gender is one component of the gender/sex system, which refers to "The set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed needs are satisfied".
As long as a person's perceived physiological sex is consistent with that person's gender identity, the genderrole of a person is so much a matter of course in a stable society that people rarely even think of it.
Only in cases where, for whatever reason, an individual adopts a genderrole that is inconsistent with his or her perceived gender identity will the matter draw attention.
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