Masculinity, Femmininity And "Schema"

Masculinity, Femininity and “Schema”

To understand the concepts of masculinity and femininity it’s very important, and essential, to define them as two distinct characteristics of a unique thing:The Person; not meant as men or women, but as the person itself, without thinking about sexuality.
Masculinity and femininity are gender identities that only refer to the degree in which people seethemselves as masculine or feminine.
For example, we can meet a masculine woman or a feminine man; or sometimes it’s possible to find both these characteristics coexisting.
The theory ofWiddowson(one of the most important names in linguistics studies), that says that “When people make an indexical connection, they do so by linking features of the language with familiar features of their world,with what is established in their minds as a normal pattern of reality or SCHEMA.(It is not out there but in the mind)”, helps us to deduce that “Masculinity and Femininity” are only prejudices of thesociety in which we live, like a sort of pre-existing schema of our shared knowledge.
So let’s think about the development that the schema itself had with the passing of the time. Can we say, forexample, that the masculinity of the past is the same of the masculinity of our daytimes? Or can we say that masculinity and femininity are two different things without any relation between themselves?The first step is to understand the reasons that always made us able to distinguish a woman from a man…from the outside of a sexual context of course!!
We can start considering genderstereotypes(maybe the beginning point of our schema) that have always presented man as stronger than woman. This evidence of facts, brought mankind to have an unmotivated thought of male chauvinism that presentedman as the principle character of life and woman as his “assistant”….or object if we like the term.
[pic] Men had always worked to bring [pic]home money for living, had always been the ones implied...