Pink Dresses & Blue Pants : What’s wrong with Gender Stereotypes

The belief that a certain gender has to dress and act a certain way has been around for many centuries.

In today’s day and age, though people like to believe we are slowly demolishing these stereotypes over time, they still prevail in how we perceive people. Whether it be something small like the way they dress, or their role in society, people constantly push these stereotypes onto young girls and boys. The idea of how a specific gender should dress and act changes right in front of our eyes. I myself have seen how women online have been battling with things considered traditionally ‘girly,’ from hating them to loving them, simply because of the implications which come with these stereotypes.

Discussing how gender stereotypes affect us can be a very lengthy topic, but here specifically, I will be focusing on how it has affected people online in recent years. In the years 2019 & 2020, during the pre and early Covid-19 era, people had begun becoming more aware of the societal issues of the world, becoming more ‘woke,’ and a part of doing so was showing that gender stereotypes shouldn’t exist. In these years, people started to dress and act outside of gender norms, which was a great thing, it allowed self expression, which is ignored within these stereotypes, but this began enforcing new stereotypes on people, especially women. During this time, because of the need for uniqueness and stepping out of these stereotypes, women on social media felt a need to go against the traditional stereotypes, even if they enjoyed things considered ‘girly,’ which only made things considered feminine bad, enforcing the patriarchal beliefs people were trying to demolish.

As more people began to notice how women who would step out of how women stereotypically dressed started hating on and bashing women for enjoying those things, the term ‘pick me’ was created, which was meant to shame these women for putting other women down for male approval. The more people started using the word ‘pick me,’ the more the traditional stereotypes started stepping back into play, and anyone who stepped out of these stereotypes was a ‘pick me.’ Many women online were shamed simply for dressing or acting in a way which did not fit in with the ‘feminine’ archetype people have created in their minds, this is society moving backwards. There are so many more instances in how gender stereotypes change so rapidly, but the way in which these stereotypes keep finding their way back to creep into society, and it needs to stop.

Overall, we are able to understand the ways in which gender stereotypes make their way into our society, and that they harm self expression. Even in the span of a few years, we can see how these stereotypes affect society, no one should be limited to act a certain way simply for the way they were born, people should be allowed to do what they want, whether it be traditionally feminine, or traditionally masculine.

Fighting stereotypes should not be a strict program, fighting stereotypes should simply mean not allowing ourselves to be limited to one thing or the other.