In today’s culture, we have various
norms that are specific to a type of gender but who wrote these norms? Who
wrote that males couldn’t wear a skirt or couldn’t wear makeup? These norms are
not written down anywhere but they are socially written in our society. Now
what will happen if you break these social norms? Take the one of the norms, let’s
say the norm of it is okay for a girl to wear yoga pants or leggings in public
but not a guy, and put them in a public place and see what happens. Instead of
just having this guy just stand in public, let’s have him do something that he
would do like it was just a normal day like grocery shopping. A group of
friends and I decided to do this exact experiment, to have one of us, a guy,
wear yoga pants while grocery shopping, and see what other people’s reactions
would be.
THE
EXPERIMENT
Our friend Jake volunteered to be
our genie pig for this social experiment. He got some yoga pants and we decided
to go to Walmart right around when most people would be getting off work, so
around five O’clock in the afternoon. We thought grocery shopping was an
everyday activity that while your shopping you pass many people throughout the
store. This is why we wanted to go around five O’clock as we wanted as many
people to be at the store. When we got to the store our friend got a cart just
like he would do usually and just start walking around shopping. The rest of
the group just acted like we were shopping as well but was really watching and
listening to other people as our friend walked by. We followed our friend
around Walmart for about an hour or more and we were not surprised of the
results.
THE
RESULTS
The results of this experiment was
not surprising to us. As Jake walked around the store, he felt very uncomfortable
as he felt more exposed than he usually would be shopping and that he felt people
were staring at him. He had a right to feel this way about people as the group
observed that as he passed by people they gave him weird and disgusting looks. Sometimes,
people would eve laugh or even whisper to the person they are with about Jake.
Now what makes these people think that it is weird for a guy to be wearing
this? It all comes from our society. In our society, a guy has to wear ‘boy’
colors and clothing, while a girl has to wear ‘girl’ colors and clothing. If
you take a step back and look deeply into everyday things, you will see that
this norm is in everything. For example, take a look at two different big hit
music videos; Justin Bieber “Boyfriend” and “Call me Maybe” by Carly Jepsen.
These two big hit music videos are different in some ways but also very similar
through the gender norm of guy must do manly things and a girl must do girly
things. In “Call me Maybe” right away you have a girl looking out the window
looking at a guy who is trying to start a lawnmower while she’s inside reading
romantic novels. Now what happens if it was the other way around? The girl
outside doing the “manly” thing of mowing the grass and the guy reading a
romantic novel. Do you think this music video would have gotten over 800
MILLION! Views? I don’t think so. Now move forward to Justin Bieber’s big hit
music video of “Boyfriend.” Same thing with “Call me Maybe,” right away not
even a minute in you have Justin Bieber driving around in a muscle car. He is
showing that he is manly for driving these cars and doing a manly thing. Now
what if it was the girl who drove up to him in these cars? This just shows you
that this norm is placed everywhere in our life. It starts from the time we are
very young and watching cartoons to mid-aged adults watching music videos and
continues throughout our life. This norm restricts our personality from a young
age with this concept of what is acceptable and what is not. Now when you are just walking through the store or driving around, try to take a step back and look to see if you can see this social norm being placed out there.
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