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Gender Differences In Saul Kaplan's The Plight Of Young Males

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For genders to be unbalanced, there has to be a clear difference between them in the first place. Once the gender is revealed, unnatural differences begin to show right away: the baby’s clothing in the hospital will vary in color, typically a gendered name will be given, and how the baby is spoken to will vary. In Eckert and McConnell-Ginet’s Learning to be Gendered, they write, “Indeed, we do not know how to interact with another human being, or how to judge them and talk about them, unless we can attribute a gender to them.” In today’s society, gender has become a fixture that has to be defined before any other thought or decision is made toward someone.
Once a gender has been assigned, interaction with the child changes drastically. For …show more content…

In Saul Kaplan’s The Plight of Young Males, he brings to light the fact that as women have progressively become more equal in the eyes of society, men have begun to dwindle. Kaplan offers a range of statistics proving how men are now in turn sliding down the equality scale. He first says that even though males comprise 51% of 18-24 year olds, only about 40% of today’s college students are male. He also says that women are achieving higher academic honors than men than ever before by dominating high school honor rolls and nearly ¾ of the time being class valedictorian (Kaplan 733). These statistics further prove that genders are unbalanced, only this time offering evidence that it’s unbalanced in favor of women.
Some individuals, of course, may want to question whether the unbalance matters if it’s constantly going back and forth between genders. The answer is that if it’s constantly changing, then either group is at some point going to be viewed as unequal. Inequality in itself is something as a society we struggle with, so there shouldn’t be any reason to want to do anything but fix the problem. Everyone wants equality, but the constant imbalance between genders limits that possibility and makes it nearly impossible to

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