Gender and sex Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Gender and sex - Essay Example Let’s first talk about gender. Gender is something that is defined by the society, and not by Nature. That is why, gender is not natural, because it can be modified, recreated, and protested against. Sex is natural. One culture will define an actual man who beats up his wife; while another culture will consider a person a man considering his height and voice. Some cultures define a woman as a person bearing children; while, others will define a woman as individuals with delicate stature. These are all the gender roles that every culture assigns to men and women, thus associating these roles with one gender. Generally speaking as in all cultures, male gender is associated with roles like going out for jobs, playing games, joining clubs, and becoming politicians; while, female gender is associated with roles like running a house, bearing children, raising them up, doing grocery, serving the family, and the like. Thus, we assign specific roles to one gender, and call it man or wo man. Biologists talk about gamete size when defining sex; but, culture talks about power and freedom while talking about men; and, about frailty, sex and cowardliness while taking about women. This distinction of gender is defined by the society depending upon the societal roles. ... They are obnoxious toward reverse gender roles. Stephen (2002, 50) gives example from Latin America, and states that, â€Å"As the Spanish explored northern Mexico, which later became the American Southwest, they found same-sex sexual interaction among men and men who seemed to be dressed like women.† This shows that gender can be adopted. Also, Kulick (1997, 574) describes in his paper how the Latin American society generates diverse arrangements of gender, consisting of men and not-men, instead of men and women. Hence, gender and gender roles are changeable, and this is the main difference between sex and gender. So, gender is not natural. Now, let’s talk about race not being natural. Races do not exist, because there is no biological category of races. It is also, like gender, a theory constructed by society. Someone belonging to a specific geographical location, with features resembling the people of that geography, belongs to a certain race, as defined by the socie ty. But those features could have been changed if someone was raised in a location different from that of his ancestors. Hence, race cannot be passed on to the next generation, because it is not based on biological facts Goldstein (1999, 564) also states that race is not just determined by phenotype, but by context. The idea of race not being natural is a bit hard to understand when compared with gender. Simple is that race is defined by geographical distinctions, and these distinctions are not defined by nature. Races only make divisions of otherwise disordered biological patterns, as the separation of these biological patterns makes it easy to allocate resources between populations. In the film, â€Å"Blacks in Latin America†, we come to know that blacks in Latin America