Social Media And Gender Identity

Throughout the course of this year’s presidential race a variety of controversial topics have been accentuated in social media to bring awareness to these issues and encourage our nation’s leaders to take action. Perhaps one of the most emphasized topics featured on social media was gender equality, advocating for the equality of the sexes, this includes equality for women and members of the LGBT community. However, before we analyze what role the media played in advocating for the equality of the sexes we must understand the relationship between society and the different sexual orientations. Furthermore, through the understanding of the relationship between society and the different sexual orientations we can then understand how the media has shaped the way society sees sexual orientation. A key concept in the relationship between society and gender identification would be to know what roles exist in society, what gender is in reality.

As I explained previously one of the first steps towards understanding the relationship between the media and gender identification is to understand what gender is and how society created gender. “The idea is that If sex is a biological concept, then gender is a social concept and It refers to the social and cultural differences a society assigns to people based on their (biological) sex” (Sociology: Understanding and Changing the Social World, Comprehensive Edition chapter 11.1 “Gender as a social construction”). Created by society to classify and assign gender roles we expect members of our society to behave a certain way based on whether they are male or female. Therefore, in relation to the idea that gender is a social construct we can then assume that as society evolves and changes th...

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... pernicious ways social media can sway elections. La Times).

Referring to the beginning of this research paper, media influences the way society views gender by allowing the incorporation of everyone’s ideas and viewpoints on what it means to be male or female. Furthermore, by being a society that is heavily influenced by social media we often get influenced by a popular trend that influences the way you think about something important such as equality between the sexes or gender roles in society and often it can be easy for us to follow a bad trend that focuses on hate. In conclusion the way we view gender in our society or community if heavily influenced by all types of media that help shape our perception of gender and because of the nature of how rapidly thing change in social media our view on gender identification or gender role is constantly changing.