Compose a 2000 words assignment on being a man: the aspects of gendered society. That is the natural ideal of parent reinforcing gender identity. I never really thought twice about not playing with Barbies and instead of wanting to climb trees. It was just something that little boys my age were doing. I guess societal influence, as well as parental influence, tries to help define who we are according to our biological gender immediately. Girl babies wear pink, boy babies wear blue. Gender identity is something that seems to be passed down from parents. Even single parents, in situations where people only have one parent, who is to say that a woman being a single parent of a male child will grow up having feminine characteristics? Also, in retrospect, why should a male raising a daughter to expect her to be a tomboy when of course, she will someday menstruate too. However, we cannot blame our parents for giving us the gender identity through nurture and environmental factors. Instead, it was the way they were brought up too. Through my days of growing up, I thought I always identified with the traditional stereotype of a male. I knew that I enjoyed sports, I was masculine in every way, I hated shopping and I did things that most young boys did like playing with cars and being mean to girls that I liked. It was not until I was an older man that I started to identify more closely as my friends and I began to have more in-depth discussions about what guys talk about. I feel that being a man is somehow just being masculine. I find that in any way that if I date someone, I have to be the safe and secure guy that protects my significant other. I find myself practicing chivalry and being traditional in a way that displays my duties as a man. I played sports and did all of the things men do. With my father figure, I played catch and watched football. He implied about the sex talk but it was actually my mother with whom I had the sex talk with as she started to become paranoid as I entered my teens that I may somehow make a mistake that would ruin my future. My father explained to me that being a man was simple. He told me that you listened to the lady of the household, did as she told you and always did things to get you out of the doghouse. He enforced Kimmel’s sociological theory that sometimes even though it is in our biology to be male, the stereotype and gender identity of being a male are often exaggerated. The element of gender identity is not one of a person’s reflection of individuality, but instead is a socially constructed institutional phenomenon created by society (Kimmel). Upon puberty, was when I discovered what being a man was like. The transformation of my body and the hormonal changes I had were what made me really feel like I had changed from a boy into a man. Being a man meant having hair in places that you did not know you could grow hair and while it was sometimes embarrassing at first, it was the first significant change that made me identify who I was: a young man ready to embark on the rest of his life. All of a sudden, I had an interest in dating. I found my friends and I would often talk about our dates and discuss women in some of the crudest ways. As a teenager, the main focus was about what a girl was chasing me and which girl I was going to pursue.