Friday, October 12, 2012

Week 4 Gender Roles and Same-Sex Attraction

A person's gender is very important. In The Family: A Proclamation to the World it states,"Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose." Your gender affects your family experience. If you were of a different gender, you would have a different family experience, with the relationships with different members of the family.

 It is known that men and women are different. Females tend to be more cooperative, detailed, relationship oriented, verbal, and aware. Men tend to be competitive, protective, aggressive, spacial oriented, focused on one thing, and task oriented. I have learned through this taking course that parents treat their children differently depending on gender. Parents treat their male children more rough and to 'toughen up.' They teach them hard work and to have a career, and leadership. Parents teach their female children gently and with comfort. They teach them to be domestic and submissive. There is an argument that parents should treat their children the same, but I believe it is a divine instinct to do this to help our children be successful in the world.

A theory of understanding same-sex attraction is called "Exotic Becomes Erotic." This has helped me understand what some of the people I know , who are attracted to the same gender, went through.  The short version is: Boys at a young age are sensitive or are not interested in gender atypical activities and are rejected from 'the guys' because of it. So they get along with girls better, and as they get older they start to get attention from the guys. This acceptance is a new feeling and the need for intimacy becomes sexualized and they believe they must be gay.

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