You're a Person, I'm a Person
Two truths:
1. You have the ability to choose.
2. Truth is not subjective.
A lie:
1. What is true is entirely up to you.
I'm the second of the 7 kids in my family, so I've observed a lot of growing up. I also have five sisters, which made for a fun dynamic. As I've mentioned before, I kind of grew up in the middle of nowhere, and so most of my interaction with other people took place within my own family. My siblings have been my best friends for as long as I can remember, and many of the earliest memories I have of them involve playing pretend. Because my big sister was the oldest, she made the rules: She was the princess. Because I was almost as tall as her, I was her prince. I traipsed all over our front and back yards on quests she sent me on to save her, often to find that she had already saved herself (she's the heroic type). Those days were fun. :)
It's a popular notion in our society that gender roles are pushed on us from infancy. Parents buy their daughters Barbies, their sons trucks; girls are dressed in pink, boys are dressed in blue; some theories even present the idea that boys are treated more roughly from infancy than girls are. It's not uncommon now for parents to deliberately avoid these practices like the plague for fear of corrupting the mindsets of their posterity.
In some ways, my parents did follow the traditional style of child-rearing: my sisters and I had dresses and played with baby dolls and had a toy kitchen and watched Barbie movies. At the same time, we played baseball and had with toy cars and dinosaurs and spent a lot of time outdoors -- not everything our parents exposed us to was girly, and I don't feel like the traditionally female items they bought for us or thoughts they presented were given with the intention to brainwash us into being girls.
I don't just have 5 sisters; I have a brother, too. He's the youngest of us, so I got to participate a lot in his childhood. I've been thinking about it hard, and I don't believe my parents spent a lot of time and effort when he was born buying more toys that were distinctly 'boy'. He had access to all the same toys and movies that we did, but he was different. He leaned toward building things with Legos and "vroom"ing cars up and down the walls from the beginning. To illustrate this point, there was even a day, when he was probably 8-9 months old, that we dressed him up in a dress for my big sister's school project and called him "Susie Q". He's been surrounded by females his whole life, and he's had equal access to things feminine and masculine, but he's still distinctly boy.
This is my belief: To say that two things are different is not to say that one must be better than the other. Look at the differences that exist between every person: none of us are the same! None of us have exactly the same capabilities or aptitudes. No one person can be exactly like someone else; does that mean that they're lesser? Does it diminish the value of what they can do, or make it undesirable? If someone can correct my paradigm, or would like to share their own perspective on this, I would love to hear it. My belief is that men and women are different, but one is not less than the other in any way, shape or form, and there is a reason that we are born as we are.
1. You have the ability to choose.
2. Truth is not subjective.
A lie:
1. What is true is entirely up to you.
I'm the second of the 7 kids in my family, so I've observed a lot of growing up. I also have five sisters, which made for a fun dynamic. As I've mentioned before, I kind of grew up in the middle of nowhere, and so most of my interaction with other people took place within my own family. My siblings have been my best friends for as long as I can remember, and many of the earliest memories I have of them involve playing pretend. Because my big sister was the oldest, she made the rules: She was the princess. Because I was almost as tall as her, I was her prince. I traipsed all over our front and back yards on quests she sent me on to save her, often to find that she had already saved herself (she's the heroic type). Those days were fun. :)
It's a popular notion in our society that gender roles are pushed on us from infancy. Parents buy their daughters Barbies, their sons trucks; girls are dressed in pink, boys are dressed in blue; some theories even present the idea that boys are treated more roughly from infancy than girls are. It's not uncommon now for parents to deliberately avoid these practices like the plague for fear of corrupting the mindsets of their posterity.
In some ways, my parents did follow the traditional style of child-rearing: my sisters and I had dresses and played with baby dolls and had a toy kitchen and watched Barbie movies. At the same time, we played baseball and had with toy cars and dinosaurs and spent a lot of time outdoors -- not everything our parents exposed us to was girly, and I don't feel like the traditionally female items they bought for us or thoughts they presented were given with the intention to brainwash us into being girls.
I don't just have 5 sisters; I have a brother, too. He's the youngest of us, so I got to participate a lot in his childhood. I've been thinking about it hard, and I don't believe my parents spent a lot of time and effort when he was born buying more toys that were distinctly 'boy'. He had access to all the same toys and movies that we did, but he was different. He leaned toward building things with Legos and "vroom"ing cars up and down the walls from the beginning. To illustrate this point, there was even a day, when he was probably 8-9 months old, that we dressed him up in a dress for my big sister's school project and called him "Susie Q". He's been surrounded by females his whole life, and he's had equal access to things feminine and masculine, but he's still distinctly boy.
This is my belief: To say that two things are different is not to say that one must be better than the other. Look at the differences that exist between every person: none of us are the same! None of us have exactly the same capabilities or aptitudes. No one person can be exactly like someone else; does that mean that they're lesser? Does it diminish the value of what they can do, or make it undesirable? If someone can correct my paradigm, or would like to share their own perspective on this, I would love to hear it. My belief is that men and women are different, but one is not less than the other in any way, shape or form, and there is a reason that we are born as we are.
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