We live in a time where gender-based roles are changing and few pathways are marked as we try to figure out the right way to make our lives work in relationships. What complicates gender relations is that the world we inhabit today would have been almost impossible to envision even as recently as the 1950s. Gender relations in contemporary society present a seemingly paradoxical picture.
What has not changed, apparently, since the 50s is the desire of men and women to figure out what is appropriate for their own and the other gender–and to find ways to live together. What has changed is that we are now less sure about what is the right way to be a man or woman.To a large degree, the ambiguity everyone’s feeling about gender is part of a greater uncertainty about what is real, true, and right in general. Human relations and the search for identity, which translates into ways of believing and being, have grown particularly complicated courtesy of the technological explosion and information saturation we all now experience.This process is further compounded by the challenges in society to many of the beliefs that we have held as self-evident for so long. Gender is but one of the traditional categories of self-identification that is deteriorating. That encompasses not only the belief in two genders but in notions of masculinity and femininity. Result: rampant confusion about how men and women are supposed to act.What we call “gender” encompasses biological sex but goes beyond it to the socially prescribed roles deemed appropriate for each sex by the culture in which we live. Complicating the issue is that only the broad outlines of gender roles are drawn by the larger society. The gender roles we each carry out are highly individualistic, built on our biological and physical makeup, appearance and personality, life experiences such as work and education, and history of sexual and romantic interactions. Each element influences how others perceive us as a man or a woman and how we perceive others’ intentions and expectations for us.