Gender diferences Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Gender diferences - Essay Example Kimmel explains that gender inequality and differences are the core of Muslim society determining its main norms and traditions, relations between women and men, husbands and wives. The case Punishment Worse than the Crime shows that gender relations are a part of cultural traditions. â€Å"One of the key determinants of women's status has been the division of labor around child care. Women's role in reproduction has historically limited their social and economic participation† (Kimmel 53). The case shows that gender differences are socially determined. Those values, customs and behavioral norms that account for the sexual differentiation in adult personal identity and behavior are transmitted from generation to generation. In Muslim countries, gender identity is being constructed at every developmental stage of the life cycle, from infancy right through to late adulthood, as the developmental antecedents and behavioral consequences interact with the personality. For Pakistan women punishment is worse than the crime because women obtain a low social role in society and cannot accuse men in wrong behavior. In many Muslim countries, a woman is â€Å"a thing† owned by a man (a father or a husband) who has no rights and freedoms (Connell 43). The case shows that culture and social practices passes on to children, who once they have put on the lenses. This process holds true as a general but not an absolute pattern. Not everyone is so preprogrammed. There are in every society and culture mismatches whose bodies are of one sex and their psyches of the other. They develop their own gender identity by looking at rather than through the lenses. Far from being unnatural, such phenomena are part of the diversity of nature interacting with culture, very much, she says, like the diversity of food preferences: the natural desire for food does not in itself determine what is acceptable food in one culture as against the next, or what one person will prefer as against another within the same culture. "Rape may be a strategy to ensure continued male domination or a vehicle by which men can hope to conceal maternal dependence, according to ethnographers, but it is surely not an alternative dating strategy" (Kimmel 55). The picture pre sented here is of a community in which traditional cultural norms and ideal practices form the basis on which patriarchy is reproduced. Two factors, education and unemployment, are countervailing factors, both of them having had and continuing to have a profound effect on the most central institution in East life, marriage, and the relations between men and women. Education and other Western influences, bringing about significant changes in the way East fulfill their roles as fathers. The most important part of the story would be a rape itself and its perception by men. It is possible to assume that men do not feel guilty or do not perceive the act of rape as a crime. Cross cultural perspective can be applied to all situations described in this case. The psychological theory suggests that labor division influences perception of women and their social roles. In this division, a woman's role is ideally that of housewife and a man's that of provider working outside the confines