The Trick Patriarchy Used to Disarm Sistership.

If your a patriarchal man and you have a big problem on your hand with a pack of women who are not interested in gaining the approval of men anymore and want to enter the economic world on the same equal terms and even change it to new terms. This group have made some strides, they have an equal pay act and they are pushing to enter fields that were in the past just occupied for men. Everywhere you turn women are favouring each other (yes this was how it was I remember it) and have the ability to put aside competition for men and aim for other things, infact many women at this time have transcended the wish to settle with a man and some are turning to each other. They have freed themselves from caring about the things that have long been used to oppress them, like beauty and fashion, unlike the days when women would fight over wearing the same dress these ones want to wear universal fashions that are functional. These women are not going to hate another woman BC she is in line for the husband of their dreams BC a husband is not in her dreams.

This was some of the motivation and thought behind the second wave, rejection of the system that made women compete for the best home and husband. Middle class women who in the past were kept, wanting to step out and take to the streets along with working class women and fight for shared issues. This was what happened despite what many will claim today.

So how as a patriarch do you destroy this energy, how do you turn them against each other and make them untrusting of each other. How do you get the general consensus on how females interact to move from the co operative tend and befriend which was put as the reason girls were doing better at school a few decades ago, to today’s theory of relational aggression and mean girls as the standard model. How do you get the women who are not motivated towards getting men to join in too, to the point feminism dies and many women don’t want each other around in work places or even bully them. I was only born in 81 and I remember a different era.

The answer is easy,very easy. What you do is create a situation where they once again have to comply with the same impossible standards of beauty and femininity that women were held to in the past to acquire a husband, but this time around it has to be done so it is required even by women who don’t want to seek male approval. For those women it will be an unfortunate side effect, BC as they comply every man on the street will assume it’s for them and  want to be harassed.

What patriarchy does is embrace feminism for a while, set up programs to get women into all the male dominated sectors and feminism feels like it achieved something. All the sisters are happy and they get a buzz every time they see a woman succeed, infact in this area they exceed men who just feel envy at each other. See the class analysis thinking makes every woman’s advancement class advancement. I remember these times when women in groups were happy every time a woman out did a man very much unlike the situation of today’s side glance.

Patriarchy knew it had to destroy the spirit of unity which existed (for real even on the street for a great number of women), a feminist was a good thing to be every woman would smile at the sound of the word, unlike now as now it triggers a source of shame. People look around when someone says the world, almost like you just threatened to blow up the nearest hospital or confessed to being a distant cousin of Hitler. There’s a multitude of reasons why this is the case well beyond the point im making here, but all are related to it in some way.

So what certain blow does patriarchy have to deliver? Easy, start factoring in beauty and femininity when you allow women into all these new positions they have worked to get into. Women will learn that to get any of this new found freedom and not be dependant on a man, they must still aspire to be what men want and they will still have to view other women as a threat even if they don’t want a man or already have one. That’s because now they know they can lose a job they held onto for 20 years because the boss decided he wanted a younger woman to look at. Even worse from that younger womans (probably un political) perspective she is just taking up her new rights and has no idea as to the reality. Now women know any great skills they have cant be used under this new system if they don’t work on their appearance. Women lose pay for weight gain and lose jobs for not wearing heels or make up to the interview. Womens dreams of a non man reliant life is threatened by other women, for things they cannot control. Older woman find they have no economic security despite having years of experience and are close to ending up out in the street because most of the simple jobs are going to younger women.

Women notice the rules don’t apply to men, they’re working in top offices when over weight and covered in acne, women are young and slim or put out of sight. Women in high positions are the ones who could wield most of the feminist power, but now they find  promoting other women risks being displaced themselves. Times were much more easy in this regard when the old misogyny wanted no women in these positions or jobs, because that way women could all be on the same level platform regardless of how appealing they were to men. Now it does not matter if a woman is a sister, if she is inline with the male gaze it will act as a selection method she has no control over and it can lead to women losing in positions where men would not lose to other men. The old sexism told women they were not capable of many things, the new sexism tells them it does not matter all that matters is their looks. Looks are something that goes down over  years, skill improves over years, skill is transferable and looks are limited in how they can be improved.

Now all young girls learn that beauty is more important then ever, yesterday lack of them would reduce ones chances of marrying, and for some that was not the end of the world. Today one cannot even get through high school if they don’t get the appearance thing right regardless of what skill they got. Now the foundation of true sister-ship is destroyed because women cannot step out of being a threat and survive a new way. She goes to get a job BC she needs a job, and she is selected on unfair means which can displace other women who have spent years working hard. In the past a woman could look like a model and have the ability to steel any woman’s economic future by taking their potential husband and refuse to do so, and many did. Today women just don’t have the ability to opt out or even know they are opted into a system where they have become currency and where women know each others value just by looking. The days when the attractive woman in the office was the one who might marry one of the top men and vanish are over, instead she may be the one who gets promoted to the job you want or need. Women are not in a position where they can forgive or except that, because it’s an unacceptable position for any human being to be in. Women even find that as they age the treatment they get accessing goods and services to spend their self earned cash changes. How can they build sister ship when they find other womens get an easier time just going shopping based on how they look. Looks have always mattered for women but not to the degree they do today in everyday life.

A small problem is the fact women may get catcalled on their way to work BC of how they are expected to look to keep their job. For many women this is all they recognise to be misogyny, the rest just appears like normal life.

Patriarchy did it; it once again made it necessary for women to comply to survive, it put women in the way of each others escape and made them forget they are all trying to escape from the same thing. With hyped up evolutionary psychology it can convince us all women are out to get each other, and its all about men. It can sow seeds of mistrust between women, and talk about how women are catty, vain and superficial and it’s in their DNA. Sistership is sure to be long dead and forgotten, never to infest the minds of the young again. Within a generation supporting other women will sound insane, and one sure way to be an idiot. Infact women by this time will be going to men thinking they need protection from other women who are out to destroy them, more so the ones deemed attractive and they will think its all down to the things described in evolutionary theory. Many women who are trying to get economic security without a man will be seen as doing the reverse BC they have to do things to please men to get a job.

A false meme has been created and it’s the meme that women naturally care about what men think to the degree they are willing to destroy other women who get in the way of it. This is not true and it has never been true, and it never will be true no matter what evolutionary psychology says. When it comes to economic security thought, which is actually protection from men things are a lot different. A woman who is seen as a threat to another woman’s economic security no matter what that economic security is will react and do what she needs to do to survive even if that means ensuring the woman is outcaste.

Interestingly enough third wave feminism and the ideas it promoted acted as a direct obstacle to challenging the new sexism, and instead it pained attacks on beauty or concepts of femininity as attacks on women. The reality of the situation though is even if all women abandon beauty practices, some women naturally fall more inline with the male gaze and it’s not realistic to expect every woman to dress similar and downplay things they naturally have. Some women will always be younger and youth is one factor patriarchy plays against women, its not one that can be thrown off. Collective abandonment of fashion and beauty wont stop this approach patriarchy is taking, because it will still select based on naturally occurring factors that all women wont have. Plus sex role socialization and its effect on personality traits becomes ingrained and patriarchy will always select for traits in women which act to stop people getting ahead.

I have no ideas as to how to fix a problem like this, because its one of those things one just can point to and say for sure it happened. Women can never really prove they lost a job or pay for appearance factors to someone else or that someone was promoted over them for such factors. But all women today know it’s a reality on some level, all know that they don’t have the option of doing very much outside the male gaze and that the male gaze has in recent decades seeped into the refuges feminism created away from it.

Patriarchy Was A Decision Not A Need

A question that I have been asked a few times is if gender does not exist naturally then what makes men oppress women, what in them that makes them decide to construct gender. The answer radfems give is it’s a construct based on reproductive biology, and this brings to them accusations of biological essentialism, because it’s seen as saying reproductive anatomy influences how we think. This is not what is being said, what is really being said is how men think about reproductive anatomy influences how they behave, patriarchy is a decision that was made by men as a class in response to the differences in the way the sexes reproduce as opposed to an innately driven consequence of it. Patriarchy is a decision rather then an impulse a bit like the decision to stock your cupboards with food because you know you need to eat. We are not born with an instinct to stock our cupboards with food, that is a learned strategy of dealing with the management of the need to eat, and it’s an alternative to many other things like going out every time you need to eat. We evolved under conditions where we needed to hunt or gather food with little room to store it, but we learned to store it and process it and we pass that information down every generation. If we left a bunch of humans isolated from the modern world and its tools they would have to grow up and relearn how to gather and store food again, including what was safe to eat and not to eat. This information is not innate and neither is the learned strategy to manage the need to reproduce.

Patriarchy was founded on the fact men by biological design are not able to know the parentage of children, women by design are able to know they are theirs and can know for sure they are also someone else’s because left unrestricted they and only they know how they have had sex with. This is a fact of biology and nothing to do with gender, it’s simply because the baby emerges from the woman’s body. The only way males could get this same level of certainty historically was to restrict the woman’s sexuality and movement. It’s a product of males choosing to compete for scarce resources or possibly being forced to do so by the fact they were scarce originally but males as a class founded patriarchy to ensure control of women not to compete with each other. Men ended up having to compete with each other for resources because they needed to have full ownership of all resources to ensure women could not access them. If they were to restrict women’s movements then it was necessary to own land and build roads where movements could be seen and restrict how women could use those roads. This is why rules exist about women riding bikes, driving or riding on horse back now still in some parts of the world and historically in the west.

This is what explains it all, and it does not say men are born pre disposition to make this decision it says they did do and build a system upon it that became ingrained. Sex role scripts are the enforcement of the behaviours needed to maintain that system of limiting female movement and agency and enforcing male domination of resources. The knowledge has to be passed down every generation, only thing innate is the sex instinct and reproduction results from it naturally. Humans have a developed brain that allows them to plan for the natural events like eating and reproducing and because of this they have an advantage over other animals because they are able to ward off the environmental ups and downs that would get in the way of reproducing and eating but how humans do this is a decision that is ongoing. Men as a class always had a choice they could have stopped caring about parentage at any time and started sharing resources, and today more then ever they have a choice and the decision of patriarchy has remained in place. Today men can determine the parentage of children but they still control women to exploit them for wants.

Women’s movements were not restricted because men cared about them so much they did not want them to take risks or be killed, it was to reduce the opportunities women had to have sexual relations with other men or to refuse them with all men or anything that was a threat to men being able to own a woman for their own guaranteed use. One thing that makes the patriarchy confusing is how women are so guarded and also so abused, and this is why. Another thing is how men don’t want women taking space up in public, but when with a man they are given all the space they want its easy to put it down to men wanting all the world to themselves but that is not where its fully at, it boils down to the fact if women are moving about alone then no man has fully certainty as to where the woman is so if in public she must be giving off cues that tell the men her body movements are restricted and she is restricting herself. While she is restricting herself she still must be visually available to males but in a way that says she is still not free and this is why so much of what women are expected to wear display and restrict the woman’s body at the same time. Women’s bodies are meant to be like trays with things on that men take when they want. Historically women have been made to wear shoes that restricted movement in various cultures, ranging from shoes too flimsy to leave the house to foot binding. Walking bare foot is easier then most of the shoes made for women. Heels were made for men first but as women wore them they changed to squash up the feet more.

Basically many things assigned masculine are only masculine because they did not want women doing things that made it hard to keep track of their movements. Women learn to keep track of themselves and each other, and to gossip about transgressions and this serves the patriarchy as both sexes are doing the same thing to women and women disadvantage themselves when they do it.

What exist today as gender is the reminiscent of a dark and oppressive system that is still operating but is not as structured as it once was but is still trying as much as ever. Today’s patriarchy is a roaring wounded animal knowing its unmaking is inevitable and doing all it can to delay or prevent it.

Patriarchy was a decision, a bad decision and one that has to be unmade by women reclaiming their right to be decisive. Women making decisions was always seen as a threat because she had to be stopped from doing so as if she was allowed to do so she may want to make decisions about her own body. The core of radical feminism contains within it a deep truth about the worst decision on the planet and how to unmake it. The gender system is what keeps the decision in place and when the decision is gone something else fill the space of the gender system and its sex roles, probably humanity’s full creative potential.

The Male Gaze and Women’s Space: Transcending The Inner Watcher

Women are socialized to depend or be depended on but they are not to be independent and know how to fill their time and energy for themselves. Women are trapped in a binary of the need to nurture and the need to depend and the foundation of a true strong woman is one free from this binary. A strong woman knows when to ask for help and when to respond to others requests for help. This is key to being able to go in your own direction and not obstruct the direction of others. This is how all get to be individuals without ones individuality being founded in the taking of someone else’s. Compulsive nurturing acts to obstruct another path by giving those help they have not asked for; it prevents others experiencing a lack, giving them no space to step into. Normally the compulsive nurturer does this at the expense of walking her own path and stepping into the empty space in her own life, instead she fills the space of others so they don’t have to experience a lack.

When you go in your own direction you experience aloneness because you make decisions without running them through the relay channel. Women are punished for acting without consulting because the social position of women in society is subordinate and subordinates must consult, they must not act like managers of their own time and energy, this is to be managed by men who view it as a resource they own. The wrath women can face from others for decision making and acting is the wrath similar to the way one who acts above station at work is treated, “how dare she“. How dare she reject the sex role scripts, how dare she recognise aloneness as space with potential, time she can use for herself and how dare she transcend compulsive nurturing and compulsive dependence and embrace her strength. How dare she remove the need for a man in her life, and show other women they can do the same. How dare she make us all see the reality of our oppression, and how dare she try and do something about it with out asking first.

Thinking, deciding and acting and effecting change in the world is instrumental, and women are not to be instrumental without running it past their oppressors. Acting in this way is part of growing up, women are denied full adulthood and are keep childlike in some aspects. Women are taught that when people step away from them they have done something wrong, to feel that space as aloneness and not see it as a call to step out in ones own direction. Women are told their duty is to maintain connections at all costs, through connection women are to tie themselves up, to de instrumentalize themselves, to feel and to not think.

Radfem theory says the male gaze goes beyond the surface of a woman, it is penetrative into her mind and it’s internalised as her inner watcher. How women view independence and individuality is related to internalisation of the male gaze as watcher. The inner watcher that tells you how to feel, it acts as obstructer to knowing the self. The male gaze views a woman who has transcended the compulsive nurturer/compulsive dependant binary as alone, not as an individual. This is because the male gaze sorts women into a mass, all the same to be stereotyped. Internalisation of this stereotype is essential to ensure women act like a de-individualized mass, their wants and needs shaped to reflect what men want and need from them. Their ambition must be to depend (wife) and to nurture (mother) and this is to be the fabric of how women move through the world even if they never actually become wives and mother themselves.

The watcher inside the woman will tell her she is the odd girl out, alone or excluded (normally by the other girls/women) as soon as she starts thinking outside of her social script and risks becoming an individual. Because of this women sabotage their individuality and progress and anything that makes others give her this space. Women are not to take up space in this society, and because of this women retract away from women that do. They retract away from women who are going off the charted course, so they don’t end up going off the charted course too. The woman who is acting out of script will feel rejection because of this, as the other women are unable to support her without taking a risk themselves. This is why a woman must transcend the binary she was socialized into, the binary of compulsive dependence and compulsive nurturing before she can fully reject the sex role script. Otherwise her need to nurture others and to depend on others will always turn the space she is given from potential to aloneness.
Some say strong woman is an insult to women, because all women are strong, this is in part true as all women are born strong and the patriarchy cuts them off from that strength. Strong woman is one who has opened a door patriarchy slammed on her and recaptured what was hers to start with, something that always existed within her and can act to wake up the strength in other women. She does this because she deactivates their internalised script, shows them a new direction. She does not do for them what she can see they are capable of and is not apologetic about it. She does not allow others to do for her what she can do for herself even people who have built their self worth around nurturing others. So she does not reinforce the incapability and self disbelief women are taught. Through this other women can transcend the inadequacy that makes them crave to depend and they can see it’s the same thing that makes them compulsively nurture to gain back the self worth lost in that inadequacy.
Over time the internalised male gaze is rejected, and a woman can for the first time find her own and experience life through her own eyes and look at the world for the first time. Look at the parts she has avoided looking at, knowing she has within the capability to change it and knowing it can be changed. Seeing the patriarchal roots of oppression is painful but it also brings with it potential, they can now destroy the very thing they were raised to both depend on and nurture.

A tale of two sisters.

What she is isn’t good enough, even if she is born female with the fully functioning biological package. Hated for being just that a female and prevented from becoming a woman on her own terms. She is to become an object, constructed and sculpted by the patriarchy and its tools. Put to sleep by constant pressure to be other, and othered by the world if she wakes up to be herself and demands subject status in a man’s world. Her mind is to be filled with inadequacy, her ambition to be tied up in inhibition from constant discouragement every time she shows sign of original thought. The discouragement will come in many forms through her life, in can be in the “let me do that for you love” from a strange man on a train or from the boy who says “you’re just here to look pretty” when turning up to a gaming event she was invited to.

Some girls view it as constant compliments and assistance, and are quick to put others girls down as ungrateful when they show ambition to do it themselves only seeing it as rejection of male wish to do it for them. The discouragement will become more overt, the closer a girl gets to the line created by the sex role scripts. At this stage it’s like a slap in the face “why don’t you start acting like a girl” or “let your brother do it that’s not a girl’s job”. The message is very clear; she will not be rewarded for doing the things boys are rewarded for. Maybe she will want to be a boy, like many girls do at some point. When a girl is placed in the tomboy box a clock begins to tick, in the first few hours while she is still young her parents may just let her be. She is the one who is expected to grow out of herself, she is the one who is expected to abandon all she likes or is good at, whose praise comes together with discouragement. That’s if she’s lucky, if not the clock strikes 12 for her almost straight away and she is forced into femininity and is never even given any time in the tomboy box at all.

As she goes through her teens as a tomboy with more liberal parents she finds society isn’t as tolerant and the onslaught of daily reminders begin, even if it means destroying the will of the person, it is to be done rather then let her become herself unobstructed. Through her teens the clock speeds up, conform now or we will force you. We will force you by making sure most jobs require conformity to gender in some way, by making sure you have no friends, by making you feel like a freak. Or by convincing you that you’re not even a woman if need be, anything but allowing you to reach adulthood as female and without the sex role script installed. If all this fails, someone will come to you directly and tell you to grow up and start acting like a young lady. This maybe your liberal parents at the age of 22, the ones who accepted you believing you would grow out of it as you went through college. This may be a strange man in the street that stops you to tell you how you should be walking and dressing. At that point the clock has struck 12; she can either conform and drink a sudden onslaught of approval from all directions or forever walk the line as other.

The one who changed

The sudden onslaught of approval she will get for giving in will be short lived. For some time you will receive compliments for everything she hates about who she has become, through this she will grow to hate complements. Her new way of being wont suit many of the things she likes to do, she won’t be happy but will be expected to smile more now then ever before as she is not some young tomboy anymore, she is a grown woman in patriarchy’s eyes. She will fall asleep as subject in her own life experience, just as all the other girls did long ago. She will be the one who says “I used to be a tomboy but I grew up” and by this means she became an adult woman on patriarchy’s terms. She may find her way into feminist circles, and be told how empowering femininity can be, especially the pornified version. All the time another like her has chosen to walk the path of other, for not conforming to femininity she is viewed as a failure and not a true woman by society under patriarchy. Here in these feminist circles she learns she did the right thing by changing and giving into the pressure. Here she learns rejection of her sex role is really the rejection of her own sexuality and power. Here she learns that who she really is on the inside is not accepted. Then one day she meets a woman who on the outside is just like her on the in, she is the one who walked the path as other, she never allowed the patriarchal wind of change to shape her. She does not fit in as well in the feminist circles, this is to be expected but what shocks her most is how she is viewed as a failure to feminism.

The one who resisted

They view her as conforming to the stereotype that all feminists dress like lesbians and want to be men. All while they join in with men’s anti second wave feminist and ugly feminist banter. She can walk away from feminism, feeling like her lack of femininity makes her somehow diminished and less powerful, or even under the illusion she is masculine. But everywhere she goes her gender non conformity is viewed in some way political. Despite all the rights women have gained over recent decades the one thing she can’t be is herself. She can be a doctor, a lawyer or a boss but an adult woman outside of the femininity script is still not allowed. Over time she comes to believe she is masculine and falls asleep under a different illusion, one where she thinks she has to become other to be a subject. She may at this point want to change her sex, thinking that’s what’s wrong. If she moves past this point, with a solid sense of masculine identity she may find a place in the world as a she or maybe a he. She has accepted her status as other, and through that she becomes a subject. She will then resist any attempts to tell her she isn’t masculine, as she has worked hard to attain that masculine sense of self. For her learning how her sense of masculinity has been constructed will be a painful one. Mean while her counterpart the one who changed is finding the minefield of femininity swamping her, and as she ages her privilege and status diminishes. Her power was an illusion, resting in her usefulness as an object in the male game. Now she sees what the old feminists (second wave) she met in her early 20’s were talking about. Both of them together went on the same journey, but took different directions and both arrived at the same destination. The journey of life as a woman in a time when all believed the lie of equality and thought they were free, the direction was the compromises they both made to navigate around a structure they both thought had long gone. The structure of women’s oppression through sex role scripts, a structure as hard and inflexible as ever, not a fluid continuum of self expression. The destination is the end of the illusion and the realization that how one dresses or identifies does not give them any real power or freedom to be themselves and it wont until sex role scripts are abolished.

In the end they realized they have both always been resisters, all women are resisters on some level, and all have to juggle being themselves and surviving.

Radical Feminism: De-Constructing Gender vs De-Constructing Sex.

Radical feminism is against the gender system and its sex role enforcement, and it’s completely for women having control over their own body. The way to dismantle patriarchy isn’t by lumping sex roles and sex into one box, and then de-constructing it. Sex roles are the product of  a hierarchy and structured around sex assigned at birth. If sex cannot be determined at birth, it is assigned by modifying individuals to fit the sex binary. Biological sex exists in nature, most humans are physically male or female, and a minority are intersex. The creation of a socially marked out sex binary is part of how the gender system functions, it lays the foundations for sex role scripts to be assigned.

Whats termed the gender binary has nothing inherently to do with biological sex. It’s a power structure, constructed by the patriarchy to assign roles based on sex.  The entire concept of masculine and feminine is based on nothing more than a socially constructed overlay, placed on top of male and female and its grounded in what the sexes are forced to do to keep the patriarchal system intact. Creating more gender options wont bring an end to this system, and they will only bring freedom of identity at best to those who fit them, true freedom of living will never be awarded until sex role scripts end for everyone.

The solution is to strip away the power structure completely, to stop socializing people into gender via sex role scripts. Everyone should be viewed as human first, sex second and sex identity along with all the things considered gendered now will be set free. At present we have a situation where man is one kind of human being, and woman is a different lower kind of human being there to serve man. If someone’s outside the sex binary and people aren’t freaked out simply because what’s in their pants may be different, it’s because they don’t know what’s up stairs in their head and are unable to know how to interact with them as a result. Society does not collectively have a template for seeing someone outside of the social boxes of man or woman. People changing their sex or being born outside the sex binary wont matter post patriarchy, it matters now because they don’t want to make a mistake when allocating someone to one sex class or the other and because people are passing through a socially created class system when doing so and this makes waves. The gender system has made biological sex political and that’s a fact outside individual control.

When radical feminists talk about sex as a class, and woman as a class they are talking about the class of woman created under patriarchy. The ones raised female from birth, and socialized into the subordinate class of woman. When sex role expectations are stripped away, we will be left with biology only. Most humans will still fit a sex binary, and will have different needs because of it, females will still be the ones having children with exception to a few trans and intersex people. The put it better humans with one type of biological system will still be the only ones having children, regardless of words used to describe it. It’s also likely some people will still develop sex dysphoria and wish to transition, but without sex role enforcement less people will develop a concept they have an identity incompatible with their biology. It will be impossible to have a personality incompatible with sex role expectations as there will be none so this layer of struggle will be abolished. This is because under patriarchy female biology and its capability is forced into a narrow box centred around reproduction and the sexed have to be clearly marked out. The patriarchy, its notion of man and woman and what it has to turn both sexes into to maintain the hierarchy, is not natural. Radical feminists are not going to remain silent on the fact that many are transitioning who would never have become dysphoric without the patriarchy. A lot of what is considered cisgender is a constructed illusion where people are living up to layers of expectations that are sex specific.

Pretending the biological sex distinctions themselves are constructed isn’t the way out of the patriarchy or its sex role system. The sexual diamorphic nature of humans very real, but the patriarchy wants everyone to continue to think their sense of self as a man or a woman is grounded in its constructed sex role based masculinity and femininity it continues to hold up as standard. Assigning a title to people based on biological sex distinctions is clearly constructed, and refusing to allow flexibility in this is clearly socially constructed. Its not clear if the human need to identify sex or have a sex identity is a product of this system or a product of human wiring itself. What is clear is there is no need to assign the sex role scripts, there is a difference between being called he or she (or other) and being told what to act like or look like because of it. Sex role scripts are an imposed direction based on sex, an obstruction to one charting their own course in life, ones sex identity, sexual orientation or gendural orientation.  Sex role scripts and the scripting of life based on biological distinctions clearly can go, and has to go.