The Use of Gender Roles to Obtain Power

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The Use of Gender Roles to Obtain Power

People use gender roles to obtain power. In my life experience this is always been true. I look at it in my everyday life at the workplace. I happen to work with people who have gotten where they are based purely on their sex alone. I am not talking about sex in terms of intercourse, rather than gender. However this does work both ways. It also works for different types of power.

To say that people use gender roles to obtain power is a very broad statement. One must define two things. First "people" must be defined. This is a rather simple definition. People, for the purpose of this paper, are nothing more than men and women. Now these people use who they are, men or women, to achieve power. They use it against one another (men vs. women) and against each other (men vs. men or women vs. women). The second part we must define is "power". This is a little more complicated than the first definition. There are all kinds of power: Domestic, Social/Political and Personal. Domestic power to me is power over ones home and or family. Social/Political powers are over one government or community. The type of power of a tribal chief or a community leader. Personal power is one everybody wants. Power over our own personal lives. I am not sure that everyone can achieve this. We all try but only a few gets to behold this dream. We can catch a glimpse of it in small triumphs in our daily lives. Everyone uses gender to some degree to obtain something that we want.

I would have to say the men are the biggest examples of people who use their gender to gain power. Domestic power is the power that I am referring to. In this day and age we do not really have a lot of this going on...

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...ower struggle occurs in all walks of life. In all social classes today there is some sort of struggle for power. In the upper class, battles ensue mostly over the Social/Political powers. They fight for power in the work place and within the community. In the middle class, the forces of the Domestic powers are present. Here husbands and wives fight to be the breadwinner of the family. Personal power is overwhelming in the lower classes. Living in the ghetto, life is about fighting to make yourself a better person. This is not to say that in each of the classes all three battles arise. We all go to battle for Domestic, Social/Political and Personal power everyday. True, most of us do not have to battle like the characters in the stories, but we still dig in and do battle for what we believe in. The outcome, sad to say, do still depend on what sex we are.

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