Thanks for your comment!
It’s the rigidity and the strong pushing of gender norms onto others that is damaging. And none of us is living in a purely enlightened…
Thanks for your comment! I don’t think, in case it didn’t come through in the piece, that any time a person adheres to a traditional gender role, that it is because of toxicity. There are a lot of variables in the system: cultural programming, physiology, personal temperament, personality-based preferences, etc, etc… and sometimes, a person truly loves or feels affirmed by something that is also in line with what society has told them to like. And that’s okay. And it seems very human that people would notice overall gendered trends and draw conclusions from them about how “men” and “women” are. And some of those generalizations, while super flawed and overly simplistic, are related to real truths about what different hormone levels (for example) do to the body and mind.
It’s the rigidity and the strong pushing of gender norms onto others that is damaging. And none of us is living in a purely enlightened, freed-of-gendered-bullshit form. Even though I had the good fortune to grow up in an era where trans and nonbinary people were gradually gaining acceptance, I still have a lot of traditional/sexist/binary-based ideas rattling around in my head, and so do people much younger than me. And we might not ever have a human society that totally lacks gender norms, as much as that might be my pipe-dream ideal.