When entering a kindergarten class you notice groups of girls and boys that play with toys or each other. You notice how they are already playing with toys suitable for their gender. A boy grabs a doll and the teacher takes it away from him, giving him a transformer full of guns and gives the doll back to the girl. The group of girls is constantly asked to behave nice and quiet, and if not, are told to act more like ladies.
Visiting the same group of people a couple of years later in their first grade, the behaviors that were only at their beginning in kindergarten have started to evolve. Now you can see that the group of girls that was leaving the group of girls gathered together in some part of the class talking and boys wanting to interact in rough, physical groups to show their manly power. These kinds of behaviors are constantly shown throughout the years. Teachers and parents seem to be okay with this behavior. The students, are not being told what to do anymore but influenced by their early stages in kindergarten, continue to show their manly power or their quiet and feminine side.
When you differentiate genders since the early stages of their lives, you have a broken society. When you tell boys they should be strong, have power, not show emotions and when you tell girls what to wear, be submissive and act ladylike, you have achieved sexism. A sexist society is a broken society. A “normal” family is composed of a father, mother, and children. A sexist family is composed of a leader in the form of the father, an assistant that agrees to the leader without actually helping in any decision in the form of a mother, and those that will see these positions and fit accordingly to their gender, which is the children. This sexist family, not only has the mentality of men>women but quite often is seem to be homophobic, racist and violent. As a result of these mentalities, negative thoughts and stereotypes will be formed such as; “a man that became a CEO worked very hard to get there”, while “a woman that is a CEO must have flirted with almost half of the company to get there”. Stereotypes seem fun and games until they become related to you, in the sense that you are being stereotyped. Now you are the girl that flirted her way to the top and you are the guy that’s acting like a girl with all the crying and emotional mess.
Most close-minded families avoid talking about feminism, equality, homosexuality or intimate relationships with their kids because of embarrassment or shyness. Because of this, these children will end up searching on the internet about all of these and we all know that nowadays it’s hard to figure out the real and fake. Internet nowadays has a huge impact on people’s behavior and actions. Telling children that you can find everything on the internet nowadays so go search for it – feminism, equality, homosexuality, etc. – and then blaming them for becoming “bad”, is something that happens often in the teenage years.
This is an observation of the first stages of the taste of sexism that is given to children. Our parents or grandparents may have had excuses because they lived in a closed mentality, closed-minded society but we don’t. We are living in a time when we are able to see so many different people, so many different events and have seen and heard what has happened to people facing sexual, racial abusement and we know how terrible it is. It would be a shame if we did the same mistakes as the old generations.
Prepared by: Xhois Qorri
Beat Sexism 