Gender – How did my gender affect me as a child?

Well I am a girl, most boys would then say that I had an easier childhood than them when it came to discipline: girls didn’t receive the same punishments, we got away with the things boys didn’t and we were able to be so much more mischievous than them without having to worry about the consequences. Well I believe that was utter nonsense, well it was in my school and my home environment anyway. I remember getting in just as much trouble if not more than the boys in my school because the activities and things in which we were engaging with were not at all ‘lady-like’ and therefore we were shouted at for doing them. A boy was able to run around at lunchtime sliding around in the wet mud getting entirely covered without much fuss. But when my female friends and I did the same it was considered beneath us and therefore we got into so much more trouble because it was expected of the boys to ‘be boys and get dirty’ not of the girls. As girls we were less than impressed.

And the same in my home life I constantly was told “we would expect this kind of behaviour from your brother not you”.

I think people need to remember that there are two sides to every story. And while the boys always say that they were treated unfairly and had severer consequences than the girls, we too were not treated as equal to the boys.

Gender should not be viewed as being solely discriminative towards males, because it can be just as bad to the opposite sex.

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