There's always something about manhood and womanhood that fascinates me - the beliefs and ideas they generally hold about life, love, work and anything that surrounds them, including ideas about women and men. I say generally because obviously not all men have the same beliefs and ideas of course. By implication, I am also saying that men are different from women in their ideas. And they are, and it's good that they are. It would be deadly boring if men and women had the same ideas and beliefs.
It is also obvious that such differences are mostly the result of the interaction between biology and culture. We know how neural development in the nervous system shapes and is simultaneously shaped by the context. I am not talking about physical differences of course but about ideas men and women have around the physical differences. The beautiful thing though is that neither man nor woman can really know this difference fully because neither is both man and woman. When we speak, therefore, we are speaking from a perspective, a gendered perspective in particular, imbued with cultural (local) and universal peculiarities.
I laugh every time I receive one of those stupid e-mails portraying men or women in a stereotypical manner. But I also weep at the perennial ridiculous reality they hide underneath the comical crust. It's never only comical of course. Such e-mails often hide a political reality. They're simply the rubbish some people want us to be convinced about.
The denigration of women and men in such e-mails is enormous. They reduce men to sexually guided beings whose tri-cellular brain works on beer, football and sex, and the only good thing they do (for those who do it) is work outside the house and bring money home. The way such e-mails portray women is likewise denigratory: sexual objects, mono-cellular-brain beings whose ability to think is stretched as far as fashion, make-up, child rearing and dishwashing. They are busy thinking about how to sap their men's pockets and are ready to fake orgasm for it.
What fascinates me is that both men and women continue to read and re-distribute these e-mails. The subliminal messages underneath remain ridiculously strong and powerful and people seem unable to refuse to read them. Their power is one which nurtures the cultural myths that still brainwash men and women to think about each other in such a stereotypical manner. While for some these e-mails are acceptable jokes, for those men and women who are different and think different, they are not.
Some of the e-mails also contain messages of hatred against one gender or the other. It's like they've been written by someone whose stable personality disorder made it impossible to maintain a good long lasting relationship with a partner. In a paranoic fashion, such men and women then project their disturbing emotions onto the opposite sex and generalise by concluding that all men or all women are crap. Continue doing this and you are guaranteeing your own bitter unhappiness.
Both men and women should stop reading and sharing these messages. If they reach children, they're as scandalous as the pornography we dearly protect them from. They're actually worse, because the men and women in the pornography are there by choice, whereas the men and women of the e-mails are there by default. You are on them! And you become the brainless men or women they try to portray. So when you laugh, you're also laughing at yourself, the spouse or partner you love so much and at the children you brought into this world.
Point made, we all have to struggle to challenge such stereotypical views about gender. This article and the others I wrote before it are my attempts at fighting the narrow-minded views. Mind you, let's not fall into the other stereotype: that only uneducated people from specific areas in Malta and Gozo retain these stereotypes. The subliminal power of these messages is so strong that even the highly educated fall victim to their spell.
Gender stereotyping is not a question of education but a question of intelligence. It is based on one's ability to understand the circumstances of oppression both sexes are restraining themselves into by beliefs that were cultured over hundreds of years of history. Such beliefs continue to remain vivid through e-mails that educated people share and the stereotypes they reinforce remain valid in spite of the changing circumstances which render them maladaptive and dysfunctional.
If you men think you're emancipated because you wash some dishes in the evening and help with the cleaning of the house when you have time, you're wrong. Likewise, if you women think you're emancipated because you go out and work to top-up your husbands' salary, you're wrong. Emancipation requires a psychological and existential shift which is far deeper than work and dishwashing. I honestly think that the current generations can become fully emancipated and our job is to foster an attitude of emancipation in our children. Our stereotypes might be too ingrained in our neurons and we probably cannot unlearn them. Perhaps we're still too fond of them and don't really know what to do if we had to abandon them.
There definitely are those who think they know. But free from gender stereotypes we have never really been and we can therefore only imagine and idealise what a gender stereotype-free world would be like. Let's be aware of the other possible extreme that might engulf us and become in itself a stereotype, that of a world without gender stereotypes. Isn't that a stereotype in itself? Isn't that another form of oppression?
A gender stereotype-free world eradicates the appreciation of the difference. It therefore brainwashes with a different kind of soap. It is merely a shift from one stereotype to another. This is rather good news if we know with what new gender stereotypes to replace our current gender stereotypes. It's bad news if we are merely trying to free ourselves from the chains of one without knowing about the replacement.
• Dr Azzopardi is a systemic family psycotherapist.
It is also obvious that such differences are mostly the result of the interaction between biology and culture. We know how neural development in the nervous system shapes and is simultaneously shaped by the context. I am not talking about physical differences of course but about ideas men and women have around the physical differences. The beautiful thing though is that neither man nor woman can really know this difference fully because neither is both man and woman. When we speak, therefore, we are speaking from a perspective, a gendered perspective in particular, imbued with cultural (local) and universal peculiarities.
I laugh every time I receive one of those stupid e-mails portraying men or women in a stereotypical manner. But I also weep at the perennial ridiculous reality they hide underneath the comical crust. It's never only comical of course. Such e-mails often hide a political reality. They're simply the rubbish some people want us to be convinced about.
The denigration of women and men in such e-mails is enormous. They reduce men to sexually guided beings whose tri-cellular brain works on beer, football and sex, and the only good thing they do (for those who do it) is work outside the house and bring money home. The way such e-mails portray women is likewise denigratory: sexual objects, mono-cellular-brain beings whose ability to think is stretched as far as fashion, make-up, child rearing and dishwashing. They are busy thinking about how to sap their men's pockets and are ready to fake orgasm for it.
What fascinates me is that both men and women continue to read and re-distribute these e-mails. The subliminal messages underneath remain ridiculously strong and powerful and people seem unable to refuse to read them. Their power is one which nurtures the cultural myths that still brainwash men and women to think about each other in such a stereotypical manner. While for some these e-mails are acceptable jokes, for those men and women who are different and think different, they are not.
Some of the e-mails also contain messages of hatred against one gender or the other. It's like they've been written by someone whose stable personality disorder made it impossible to maintain a good long lasting relationship with a partner. In a paranoic fashion, such men and women then project their disturbing emotions onto the opposite sex and generalise by concluding that all men or all women are crap. Continue doing this and you are guaranteeing your own bitter unhappiness.
Both men and women should stop reading and sharing these messages. If they reach children, they're as scandalous as the pornography we dearly protect them from. They're actually worse, because the men and women in the pornography are there by choice, whereas the men and women of the e-mails are there by default. You are on them! And you become the brainless men or women they try to portray. So when you laugh, you're also laughing at yourself, the spouse or partner you love so much and at the children you brought into this world.
Point made, we all have to struggle to challenge such stereotypical views about gender. This article and the others I wrote before it are my attempts at fighting the narrow-minded views. Mind you, let's not fall into the other stereotype: that only uneducated people from specific areas in Malta and Gozo retain these stereotypes. The subliminal power of these messages is so strong that even the highly educated fall victim to their spell.
Gender stereotyping is not a question of education but a question of intelligence. It is based on one's ability to understand the circumstances of oppression both sexes are restraining themselves into by beliefs that were cultured over hundreds of years of history. Such beliefs continue to remain vivid through e-mails that educated people share and the stereotypes they reinforce remain valid in spite of the changing circumstances which render them maladaptive and dysfunctional.
If you men think you're emancipated because you wash some dishes in the evening and help with the cleaning of the house when you have time, you're wrong. Likewise, if you women think you're emancipated because you go out and work to top-up your husbands' salary, you're wrong. Emancipation requires a psychological and existential shift which is far deeper than work and dishwashing. I honestly think that the current generations can become fully emancipated and our job is to foster an attitude of emancipation in our children. Our stereotypes might be too ingrained in our neurons and we probably cannot unlearn them. Perhaps we're still too fond of them and don't really know what to do if we had to abandon them.
There definitely are those who think they know. But free from gender stereotypes we have never really been and we can therefore only imagine and idealise what a gender stereotype-free world would be like. Let's be aware of the other possible extreme that might engulf us and become in itself a stereotype, that of a world without gender stereotypes. Isn't that a stereotype in itself? Isn't that another form of oppression?
A gender stereotype-free world eradicates the appreciation of the difference. It therefore brainwashes with a different kind of soap. It is merely a shift from one stereotype to another. This is rather good news if we know with what new gender stereotypes to replace our current gender stereotypes. It's bad news if we are merely trying to free ourselves from the chains of one without knowing about the replacement.
• Dr Azzopardi is a systemic family psycotherapist.