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Personal Narrative: My Experience with Gender Roles Essay

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Personal Narrative: My Experience with Gender Roles

A secret agent. A professional football player. A fire fighter. These would have been my responses when asked that inevitable question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" Family, Media and Peers are said to have influenced my views concerning the role I am to play society. All of these factors had one thing in common. They all were influencing me to behave according to my gender. Everything from the clothes I wore to the toys I played with contributed to this. Even now as a young adult my dreams and aspirations are built around the gender roles that were placed on me.
There were several instances in my childhood when my Family had a direct influence on me according to …show more content…

The main character Fred Flinstone is the head of the family. He is the one who earns the money to support the family. His wife Wilma takes care of things such as house work and raising the children. Finally, my peers as a child also had a large influence on me. Because other children my age were also being raised with gender roles, when they came to school or over to my house to play, the toys they brought would be results of gender roles. When we interacted socially we would play with trucks and army men. Parents would not give their sons dolls or dress-up games, because they were trying to teach us to become the stereotypical adult male. As you can see, my childhood dreams were greatly influenced by my family, media and peers in a way that is a direct result of gender roles.
As I enter my early years of college, I am forced to deal with the fact I should know what I want to do with the rest of my life, or at least have a solid plan. I wish I could say that I have totally matured from my childish dreams of professional athleticism, but I haven't. Currently my aspirations for life not only include becoming successful in academics, but athletics as well. Now that I know the sociological theories behind gender roles I can pick out things that are still pushing me towards that stereotypical male figure I was raised to become. Now the influences have matured from cartoons to the government. Upon

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