Question Lady, thanks, i think you're right as usual :lol:
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wonder if it is a way of breaking down a person's individuality by getting them to behave in conformity with certain gender stereotypes.
Yes, that makes sense. The three things that brings to mind are:
1. People who don't follow strict stereotypes are more likely to be non-conformists; their appearance is usually some kind of rebellion - think of hippy men with long hair, heavy metal types etc and the same in reverse for women with shorter hair etc. Those people particularly need to broken down so they get 'special' attention.
2. Gender is an easy way to shame people - e.g. calling a man a 'mommy's boy' or simply 'a girl' because of long hair.
3. Gender is a crucial part of identity; if they can take a trivial gender aspect of a person's appearance and use it to call their whole identity and gender value (being a 'real' man or a 'real' woman) into question, then that probably goes quite far towards breaking people down.
Passionate, I don't know how that fits in with Impact's sending men off to find their 'feminine side' :? In what way did they do that? And I guess you're thinking of the stretches, where obese women were made to do sexy dances? At Impact do they also give "I Am A Man" and "I Am A Woman" type contracts?
Anyway, that's all gender, but then that leads to sex, (well, so do the stretches of course) because it results in a highly polarized-genderized-sexualized environment, don't know how much that caused the promiscuity that seemed to go around Quest and also the problems in relationships. Obviously gender is always around and noticeable, but normally there is at least some degree of people relating as human to human rather than one sex to another or one sex to the same sex.