Script? No thanks, I'll just wing it.

If the title has you confused, the script I'm referring to is the one for the world famous musical: Life. It's not something that you have to see on Broadway or even have to reserve seats for because it's a production that all of society is a part of. Everyone has a role that they play, and and that is the Gender Role.

In the book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Sociologist Ervin Goffman compared social interaction within our society to that of a theater, saying that everyday people are actors performing in a play, and that everyone plays some sort of social role when they are around other people. There are roles to be played, fronts to be put on, and props that are used. In the context of gender, people have to decide if they want to read the script that they know conforms best to stereotypical society, or of they want to be the authors of their own script and risk being labeled as a social deviant.

Which role do we take?

The ideas of how gender codes work in Goffman's book closely relate to that in a film called The Codes of Gender by Sut Jhally in that they both have a similar concept of how gender is acted out in American Culture. The summary of Goffman's book supports the Codes of gender in terms of what is acceptable and what is not in our society. We see that like a play, when actors deviate from the gender script, such as a man who likes to cook and clean, he gets labeled as gay or queer for participating in a front or scene usually reserved for women in our society, and the same thing applies to females. In Groffman's analysis, sometimes people don't want to conform to certain roles of gender and they decide to break abandon their current role and take upon a new role with new lines, props, and characteristics. If that is to much for some, there is always the opportunity to remove your social mask when nobody is around or if you are with a group that shares your same code. 

Society makes this seem weird. 

Association with a specific gender starts at a a very young age and is influenced by parents, institutions, friends, and the mass media. We are quickly put in a gender box and are told that that is our role and that breaking it will not be accepted. Both Jhally's and Groffman's views are supportive of this stage like reality that we all live in and both seem to agree on how individuals express, change, inhibit, and hide their ideas of how one should behave in public. 


Personally, I grew up in a family with a lot of girls, and because of that, I happen to be different than most men my age. I am more emotional, have a decent sense of how to do household work, and I happen to like TLC's What Not To Wear. I don't really like sports and I know when a girl has had their hair done. So, I may not be the worlds idea of what the manly man should be like, but that doesn't mean that I'm gay ( Although some people think I am.) I just happen to to be not be the modern stereotypical macho man, but I'm cool with that. But if you want a Hollywood example of what a REAL man looks like *sarcasm* just watch this clip from the Boondock Saints 2!