How Can Gender Roles Be Considered Deviant

Cultural shifts regarding gender roles have led to a drastic change in the way in which people are allowed to express their sexuality. The rules of sexuality have always been rigid and stepping outside of the acceptable boundaries of sexuality expression has led to people being ostracized, ridiculed, and even imprisoned. In accordance to the gender roles that people have followed for centuries, women were to never even admit that they had a sexuality, much less a sexuality that was free. Women in particular are a group in society that have historically been sexually repressed and this in part due to gender roles that tell them to be lady-like and subservient. In the U.S., the dominant culture instructs women to adhere to these strict rules and any women who opposes is deemed as a

Deviance is defined as the recognized violation of social norms and sexual deviance is people going beyond prevailing cultural and subcultural scripts to invent their own. As shifts in gender roles become more prominent, women are beginning to express their sexuality more and what was once considered deviant is quickly becoming the norm. However, when engaging in sexual activities that deviate from the norm, there is a difference in who is considered deviant.

In the past few decades, “young adults became even more sexually liberated in the 1960s, with the rise of feminism, growth of college party events, widespread availability of birth control (condoms and oral contraceptives), and deposing of parental expectations as central to mating and marriage,” (Garcia, Reiber, Massey, Merriwether 1).As a result, things like hookup culture have risen, partly due to the rise of social media, but also due to third wave feminism, where “many constructs