What we are exposed to in childhood helps set the tone of our expectations later in life. Consider the female role models little girls and boys are exposed to while they are making up their minds on what and how they want to be.
-Woman Hating. Andrea Dworkin
Contrast this passage with male role models who are actively adventuring, swashbuckling, and generally getting shit done. The gender roles and socialization are woven deeply into every aspect of our society. Gender roles are for the most part, destructive social constructs, whose expectations and limitations hurt women and men. We should strive to counter the normative messages that our socialization breeds into us because ultimately, gender is a hierarchy that happens to discriminate against half the human race and we need less oppression not more in our society.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
2 comments
August 24, 2016 at 3:44 pm
Miep
My favorite fairy tale was Rumplestiltskin. It’s an oddly legalistic one, and the mother in the story is oppressed, but she wins via tricking the magical helper. It’s not a passive role model.
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August 24, 2016 at 7:37 pm
Sha'Tara
For thousands of years the world’s history has been shaped, and looked at, from the point of view of the patriarchy. Following the direction of the article, we see why the world is now poised on the brink of disaster; the sword of Damocles hanging over the leadership’s heads. There is nothing essentially wrong with the way fables depict “woman” – in fact, give “woman” the way depicted in the tales, that she does “nothing” and you can save the world from disaster. Man’s doing is man’s undoing. Woman, passively, will let nature take its course and instead of monuments to folly we will have clean air, unpolluted waters, tall trees, grassy meadows and we will once again hear the laughter of children by the shores of a river, a lake or a sea. We might even see the day when “a child will play by the hole of the cobra” and “the lion will play with the lamb.”
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