Gender Roles and Stereotypes Explored in Judy Manns The...

Gender Roles and Stereotypes Explored in Judy Manns The The Difference: Growing Up Female in America and Bernard Lefkowitzs Our Guys Gender stereotypes are common in the United States today, even though many men and women have been working hard to defeat it. The task is made difficult however, when society in general implants the idea of gender roles into the mind of a child. Two authors, Judy Mann of The Difference and Bernard Lefkowitz of Our Guys face the issue of gender roles and stereotypes, and how they affect our lives today. Our Guys focuses on the way that young boys are brought up by society by telling the true story of a group of Glen Ridge, New Jersey teenage boys who sexually assaulted a young retarded girl.†¦show more content†¦The fact that the ‘guys’ were brought up to be domineering and sports oriented made them a perfect match for Glen Ridge and a terror for society. They lived for sports and for the power it brought them, for as Lefkowitz points out, Glen Ridge was football (72). If one didn’t like or didn’t play the game, he or she was a nobody (72). For the parents of Glen Ridge teenagers, it was a fate worse than death to have a son uninterested in football or sports in general (73). It was this obsession over football and the boys’ ability to play it that granted them so many liberties. Jocks get drunk at parties. Jocks acted boorishly on occasion. Sometimes jocks were a little more aggressive with girls than good manners permitted (73). A ll of these actions were overlooked however because they were being boys and it was thought that they would grow out of it. This is the underlying base of Lefkowitz’s book, that the behavior of the guys was assumed to be stereotypical, and therefore all right. What kind of justice is that for the girl who were the victims of such aggression? Assuming that they would grow out of such behavior is ludicrous, yet it remained the solution to the problem of jock behavior; let them grow up, no harm done (73). But irreversible damage had already been done to the teens involved in the case, not to mention their peers. The boys had lived rooted in aggression. A characteristic that strong and