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Gender Roles And Its Characters Essay

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The story of Zootopia and its characters connect to audience members in several different ways. The first way is through the issue of gender roles and how they are pushed onto children. A gender role is society’s idea of which behaviors are appropriate or desired for men and women. These qualities have always been pressed onto young children but this films teaches girls and boys to defy these traditional roles. Usually the traits that coincide with masculinity are strong, active, logical, etc. and the qualities that are described as feminine are weak, passive, and emotional (Linkletter). Most people think that gender roles are biological, when in fact, they are not and they can have a major impact on children. The deputy director for the University of Warwick’s Centre for the Study of Women and Gender, Maria do Mar Pereira, observed teenagers in Portugal and then questioned their ideas about being feminine and masculine. Many girls stated that even if they liked physical activities, like sports, they would avoid participating in them at school or around boys. They feared that this would cause them to look unfeminine or be ridiculed for looking funny. The teenage boys said that they felt the need to constantly participate in “everyday low level violence” by physically fighting with other boys. They also felt like they needed to consume unhealthy amount of alcohol to demonstrate their manliness (Culp-Ressler).
Many people have these same ideas planted into their minds,

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