Musteryou came up with the brilliant idea to list the stereotypes we were taught as children. Here is my list:
1. Men are useless and have no willpower. Women have to manipulate them. If you don’t manipulate a man, some other woman will, and that isn’t of any use to you.
2. Everything is decided by women who then make men adopt their ideas as their own.
3. Women are strong and resilient while men are weak and sensitive.
4. Girls don’t cry (unless to manipulate men.) If you are in pain, you have to suffer in silence because what kind of woman are you, if you don’t?
5. Men can be forgiven anything because they are like children or like mentally disabled people. They can’t be expected to exercise any self-control or be guided by reason. So they need a woman to guide them.
6. Men have no tolerance for physical pain. If a man has a hangnail, he will create more drama around it than a woman would if she had a gaping wound in her chest.
7. Your body can be invaded at any time by other women.
8. It’s really horrible to be a woman.
Clarissa's Blog 
I think some of these ideas more closely resemble the ones I was brought up with, than those prevalent in Western society nowadays.
The idea that women were necessarily tough seems to have been imparted to me somehow. I think it was through my father, who doubted himself, but was certain of his mother’s power. This goes to points four and five.
However, we thought men had immense tolerance for physical pain. We thought it was a matter of indifference to be a woman — neither positive nor negative.
We thought men had a lot of will power, but were prone to excesses, that had to be curbed by female reason.
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I don’t know how many times I heard this story that men fall apart whenever they stub a toe because they can’t tolerate pain. The thing is, I kind of keep seeing proof that this is, indeed, the case. I understand that I see it because I’m prepared to see it but it’s still annoying.
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Let’s put yours here, too, in case people can’t find them:
My parents imparted a different set of beliefs:
1. (from my father) Once you start in any particular job, that is your vocation for life. You must never consider changing it, or you are evil and/or lack discipline and character.
2. (from my father) if you end up in any particular situation, for example you are renting a house where one of the main stakeholders is a bully, don’t consider changing that, or you are undisciplined and bad to the core.
3. Women don’t really know what they think and are short-sighted. They may express a view, but they are just being moody. Ignore it.
4. (from my mother) Nobody really means you any harm, even if you feel that. People are just amusing and say funny things. It’s only left-wingers who do harm by making us feel bad and shameful. Everybody else is just expressing normal, human nature.
5. (from my mother) Don’t really bother reflecting or planning, because anything that happens will be the best outcome anyway.
6. (from my mother) divert resources to boys, because they are the flagship of the family. Girls don’t matter, anyway, unless they give us something back, like children.
Old-fashioned gender roles…
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I find it true with American men. You can say, “My health was ruined, my potential was damaged, because of workplace bullying,” and they, from their position of professional achievement or high-income earning status can say, “Well, yes, sometimes I stub my toe, too.”
It’s very clear they draw this judgment on themselves.
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Heh, now that you put it this way, there are truths about the world I learned from watching it, and there were the truths I was told. Clarissa, you list looks very similar to the truths I learned by watching (but I was always a mommy’s girl, and never very close to my father). This just confused me when I tried to match it with the truth I was told “Men wield the power in the family.”
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“This just confused me when I tried to match it with the truth I was told “Men wield the power in the family.””
– I know they exist somewhere, but I never saw such a family in my life.
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Interesting list. I get kind of tired reading it, imagining to be a woman in this system. It must be exhausting. You have to look after your children and your man. You are on your own, while men seem to have it easy. It seems quite unfair.
I wonder, how does this list go together with the observations that most leaders in politics etc. are men, and that men are the ones fighting in wars etc? Do these things just apply to everything in the relationship, and not outside of it? Are men expected to have willpower with regard to their career in this system?
Another super-annoying thing I was taught is that men in general would like to be free and that marriage is a burden on them, while women absolutely want to marry everything that crosses their path. And also that men have this super-strong sex drive, and they suffer immensely if they do not get enough sex, and therefore, once they are married, are at the mercy of women who can make crazy and inconsistent demands from them which they will try to fulfill just to get sex. I was also thought that men are the ones having visions, thinking ahead, and being rational, intelligent but lazy, while women are more practical, remembering details and not being able to think ahead, not so intelligent but very hard-working.
All these things are just so annoying and wrong…
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“I wonder, how does this list go together with the observations that most leaders in politics etc. are men, and that men are the ones fighting in wars etc?”
– The mythology that accompanies politics is that every male politician is guided in his political decisions by a woman who influences him. As for wars, for obvious reasons, we had a huge war movie industry. Whenever you saw female and male soldiers in those movies, the female ones always came out as better organized and mature as compared to male soldiers.
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I wasn’t sure I wanted to reply to this, but then I started thinking about the stereotypes I was raised with and decided to weigh in. My initial hesitation stems from the fact that many of mine were similar to yours, but then, when I started thinking about it, I realized that there were some big differences, too. Anyway — here are mine.
1. Women are the only people who can properly care for children, but they resent every minute of it.
2. Women will never fulfill their dreams, so stop having them.
3. Men who are ambitious are sexy, smart, and completely unattainable. But men who are unambitious will be take any kind of abuse from you, so grab one.
4. Women will always hate and resent their slave-like husband, but never get divorced because that makes you a tramp.
5. Women who have sex with more than one man in their lives are tramps.
6. Children are only valuable if they are boys (I come from a family of all girls. When my little sister was born, my dad came out to announce to us, “It’s a damn girl.”)
7. Girls are only valuable if they are cute/beautiful. There will always be comparisons in the family of “the pretty one” and the “smart one.” (I was the latter and hated it. Now, I’ve grown to know that “the smart one” is the one to be.)
8. Men are useless lumps that you have to baby forever.
9. Men are wimps when they get sick or hurt.
10. The only people who can have integrity and honor are men. Women will always be lacking.
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I recognize #1,2,3,4,8,9 extremely well. How come we had such similar lists?
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Being kind and respectful of others is a weakness a real man gets what he wants by being rude hurtful and offensive.
Men are inflexible and can’t change.
The only reasonable emotional state for a man to express is somewhere on the spectrum on almost psychotically violent rage.
Being calm and diplomatic makes you look weak men must always attack, attack, ATTACK! Even when that would only escalate the situation and make it worse.
Women don’t know what they’re talking about half the time so it’s perfectly ok to undermine them and talk over them even on subjects they know more than you about than you.
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“Women don’t know what they’re talking about half the time so it’s perfectly ok to undermine them and talk over them even on subjects they know more than you about than you.”
– I was taught this about men. Unlearning this shit is very hard.
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1. Men are better at spatial ability, mathematics, engineering, and hard sciences. Women are better at verbal ability.
2. There’s something wrong with women who don’t want to have children.
3. Men are rational. Women are emotional.
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“1. Men are better at spatial ability, mathematics, engineering, and hard sciences. Women are better at verbal ability.
2. There’s something wrong with women who don’t want to have children.”
– Yes, I heard these two so many times. . . Brrrrr. . . Plus “there is something wrong with men who want children.”
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This view fits with a prevalent idea that men are somehow more primal than women in certain respects. In terms of my shamanistic studies, the capacity to retain visual information is precedes the capacity to verbalize. This implies that verbalization is a higher function that visualization, but also perhaps in some respects less fundamental to existence. Consequently, men might want to claim the more primary aspect for themselves as somehow representing depth. Certainly, this is the construct of gender one sees in Nietzsche’s philosophy. He argues that men do eventually gain the capacity to express intelligence, despite being more primal, because their primal energy drives them further than women in general. Women kind of reach intelligence, and then stop. They don’t have the deep undercurrents necessary to push them ahead.
Of course this all sounds very metaphysical, but I’ve given a different sort of analysis as to why this seemed to be the case to men from earlier eras, here:
http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com.au/2010/02/nietzsches-views-on-feminism.html
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The funny thing is how many of these conflict with each other: Men are the only ones with real honor and integrity, but they’re also big babies who need to be mothered and manipulated until the day they die, and they’re not emotional except for when they’re in a RAGE, and they’re leaders except for when they’re submissive sheep following women, etc. etc.
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The contradictions are not merely apparent but are the result of men acquiring many of their characteristics through projection, especially when they project their negative qualities out of themselves into women, hence psychologically disowning them, although they don’t necessarily disappear in reality.
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6. (from my mother) divert resources to boys, because they are the flagship of the family. Girls don’t matter, anyway, unless they give us something back, like children.
But are those resources being diverted to boys on the condition that they will give something back as well? Like the providing for their families, building up the reputation of the family, etc…
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“But are those resources being diverted to boys on the condition that they will give something back as well? Like the providing for their families, building up the reputation of the family, etc…”
Interesting question, because it involves addressing the issue of what is “something back”?
Certainly, both my brothers went on to have families later in life, as did my sister. My sister and I were pretty much outsiders since puberty, but my brothers established their value as males, who offered the promise that males offer by virtue of being males.
One doesn’t know what they offer until they start to go and become whomever they were going to be. In this case, they did get married, to fairly conservative women, although my younger brother is less conservative than the older one is.
My sister is the most conservative of all. She had a deep, fundamentalist faith. Did she give back something, like providing for her family or building up the reputation of The Family?
Well, she certainly does provide for her family and if you are a conservative, you might perceive that she has enhanced her original family’s reputation as conservative? Or did you mean did she improve the reputation of her own family?
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One doesn’t know what they offer until they start to go and become whomever they were going to be. In this case, they did get married, to fairly conservative women, although my younger brother is less conservative than the older one is.
I can see that. I think the problem is despite this there is some sort of expectation of what one should be giving back based on gender alone. “Men are supposed to….” “Women are supposed to….”. This is how you end up with men and women are treated like failures at their respective genders, because they didn’t do what the were “supposed to do”.
Well, she certainly does provide for her family and if you are a conservative, you might perceive that she has enhanced her original family’s reputation as conservative? Or did you mean did she improve the reputation of her own family?
Well as a girl/woman your sister was expected to “give back” by having children and being the home maker and child care giver (the expectation may have been imposed on her by family, by others around her, from the media message she received, etc…). And I suppose you could say that she is enhancing both her family’s position as conservative and that she improved the reputation of her family by doing so.
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You still have the problem that these ideological constructions as to what it means to “give back” are subjective, which is to say, shared by those who approve of conservative values, but not self-vindicating apart from the conservative paradigm. All you have done is explain that in terms of the paradigm, the paradigm is consistent with itself. But all of its formulations are imaginary or strained at best. The idea of predetermined gender roles, or the notion you raised, of “reputation”, are all rather meaningless within this context. A politician, for instance, might benefit from a good reputation, but not an everyday worker, so much.
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You still have the problem that these ideological constructions as to what it means to “give back” are subjective, which is to say, shared by those who approve of conservative values, but not self-vindicating apart from the conservative paradigm. All you have done is explain that in terms of the paradigm, the paradigm is consistent with itself.
Actually that is precisely what I was intending to do from the start. I wasn’t trying to justify the paradigm only explain it which is why it seems like that’s “all I’ve done”.
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And I still fail to see how you have added anything new to what I had already stated, namely that the system is arbitrary. You have succeeded in affirming that it is so. But I had already implied that in various ways.
It’s as if you were to point out to me that capitalism is a system that makes money for the capitalist, after I have pointed out that the everyday worker doesn’t necessarily benefit from the system.
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And I still fail to see how you have added anything new to what I had already stated, namely that the system is arbitrary.
If my chime in only affirmed what you already know then so be it.
Or is there some rule that I can’t say anything unless it’s new and compelling?
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Imagine if you said to me, “There is factory where the heads of Dannys are chopped off by the hour, and this is not conducive to the life of Dannys.”
I replied: “Well Dannys heads are lopped off so that we can create loam for the sunflowers to grow. You see, it’s a complete system!”
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Once again our (somewhat) shared cultural heritage reveals itself!
I was definitely taught that men can’t control themselves or their tempers and that women are really the “strong” ones…but of course, since I grew up in the U.S. starting at age 6, I heard a completely different set of stereotypes whenever I left my house.
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Really interesting idea’s I’ve got a school asignment on this subject and stumbled accross some really good stuff, found this great read i think people here would really appreciate reading. I posted the link to the Blog i found check it out.
#newfavoritewebsitehaha
http://psychalive.com/2009/06/sexual-stereotyping/
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Pretty much every feminist on the internet seems to agree with number 8 at least.
also 6 and 3 unless they are talking about their child, SO, or family member that they don’t loathe.
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“Pretty much every feminist on the internet seems to agree with number 8 at least.”
– They are being coy. 🙂
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I used to equate being of my gender with an extreme form of violence. I read up on violence and became very interested in violence, because the strength of my hormones meant my life was subject to monumental violence. Nowadays, I have the Mirena IUD and I am much more on an even par. Watching anything violent on TV doesn’t interest me nearly as much.
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I discovered that I feel exactly the same on birth control and off birth control. Still as obsessed with violent TV shows, too. I never tried Mirena specifically because you can’t get it here if you haven’t had 2 children.
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Very interesting and a shame you can’t get Mirena. It’s the best. It is slightly more difficult to insert if you haven’t had a child, because the Uterus is firmly shut. Actually, though, the sharp pain only lasted a fraction of a second. It was a bit like someone clawing your eye.
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