You can be your own person but in this square.

              In Friends with Benefits we are delivered the same worn out romantic comedy story where the couple meet and go through whatever conflict that breaks them up and that they soon realize that they are meant for each other. They do bring up an interesting point of where they try to have a friendship that included sex but no emotion. They use their characters work and lives to set it where they even make fun of romantic comedies within the movie. Within the whole movie we are slowly given the stereotypes of men and women and how they interact in a relationship. We touched on what is expected in gender roles and the differences in what they mean for each gender in class so here it was somewhat acted out. Some examples from the movie was that men always had the motive for sex no matter the circumstance, and that women always had immediate emotional attachment for the man and had high expectations. They talked about how no matter what men and women always performed their roles. And there are multiple scenes of dialogue that talk about the other sex as a sort of creature that has been observed and can be predicted.  It was meant to be jokingly but it all has a sort of truth to it in the fact that it was written as it was.

            As I stated earlier, these points were only kind of joked about, and I couldn’t believe the casual way they were delivered in these one-liners.  Butler speaks on the way genders are in the constructed way, “Just as a script may be enacted in various ways, and just as the play requires both text and interpretation, so the gendered body acts its part in a culturally restricted corporeal space and enacts interpretations within the confines of already existing directives.“  We have these predetermined expectations that are culturally constructed that we must perform from a very early age that we are suppose to be this type of person when we are this sex, yet when we do grow up we complain about these characteristics that develop from the attitudes and responses we are taught such as no emotion or too much emotion. We also have the hypocrisy of being told to be individualistic within these boundaries of your sex. It all seems kind of funny to me all these different ways that this system that has “No genesis” as Butler puts it, works all out with all these “essential” necessities for each gender that are only a hodgepodge cocktail of what was expected of people years ago. The idea of what these roles are only of European patriarchal style thinking anyway and have been at play for centuries creating these roles for us now, a deep ingrained idea that has been taught to generations to where it is fact for many. Either way we have a large portion of America to convince to quit these binary style gender roles that we already curse as they do in this movie. We should and have let start a generation become people they want to be from what I can tell of my colleagues and me. The millennial generation for the most part has seemed to at least cultivate the idea of relabeling gender for the next generations.