about how the world treats gender today, and how I might like it to change. The last question on the final asked, “Having taken this course, how would you like to change your process of doing gender in the future?” To clarify, “doing gender” is taking actions which are in some way conforming to the social construct of your given gender.

I’ve been trying to be less about doing gender than doing Tyler. I would like not to have to worry about whether an action is gender appropriate, whether its socially acceptable. I’d rather just be able to live, act, breathe, and do who I am, not who society or gender stereotypes say I ought to be. That’s not to say that I feel overly constricted in my life, but I’d like to be able to admire a flower, write a poem, and be appreciated rather than scoffed. It wasn’t so long ago that poetry was the realm of men, you know. Now, poetry is considered an effeminate thing. In my future of “doing gender” I’d rather not worry so much about it at all. I’d rather just be.

I’ll make it a point to not be so quick to make gender stereotypes myself. It’s tough, having been conditioned for the past 21 years, and continuing to be conditioned every day for the rest of my life. If I’m to expect freedom to act in ways that are not explicitly masculine, I should allow for the same before making judgment calls, either for men doing “women’s” roles or women doing “men’s.” In doing so, I’ll have to become increasingly aware of how I “do gender” and apply gender toward others.

I was really thinking about how this plays out in the blogging world, and as I look down through my Google Reader subscriptions, and out of 34 subscriptions, 8 are males. One of those is my own feed. (No, it’s not narcissism, I just like to know that my feed is working properly.) So, 7 out of 33, roughly 21 percent. That could largely be due to the fact that Rachelskirts is the one who really got me going with this whole blogging gig and introduced me to several of her favorite blogs, but the fact still remains, the majority of my online socialization happens with women. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I realize that my socialization outside of the net also happens to be with women. Most of my really good friends are female, my mentor is female, and while I have lots of guy friends, there are relatively few who I’d consider to be “close.”

How about you? Do you read more blogs by people of the same gender or of the opposite? What would you have be different about social perceptions of gender?