Do you know what psychologically androgynous means? Some people encountered this term, but only few of them understand its entire concept. If you don’t know the exact meaning and ideas about psychologically androgynous, this is your chance to expand your knowledge.
Psychological Androgyny Defined
Psychologically androgyny refers to a person’s ability to be at the same time nurturant and time aggressive, rigid and sensitive, and submissive and dominant. This ability can be experienced by both men and women. Some experts claim that this term is often used to explain someone whose behaviour go down somewhere in between the characteristics that are connected with males and females.
Traits and Studies
Interesting studies denote that a sizable fraction of the inhabitants shows personality traits that on the whole are not associated with their gender. Some traits that were characterized as feminine and others were included as being masculine. The main explanation for the improvement of psychologically androgyny is offered by Sandra Bem. She is an American psychologist recognized for her works in gender and androgyny studies. Her approach is based on gender schema theory wherein children have functioning schemas.
These schemas are categorized gender information and help them interpret new situations. According to her studies, male tend to have masculine schemas if they take in information and trait of their own gender. Females, on the other hand, are more likely to be schematically diverse in gaining information of feminine, masculine and neutral types.
Gender Schema Theory Explained
The gender schema theory tries to explain the cognitive process that happens as people learn and internalize gender roles. This theory denotes that gender becomes a core lens through which people learn to see the world, recognize people, things and characteristics as being inherently feminine and masculine. The two concepts, psychologically androgyny and gender schematism, sparked a furry of psychology research into gender and how it affects intellectual health. Experts claimed that psychologically androgyny was linked with positive psychological results, especially in women.
Sandra Bem states that if a person takes on both feminine and masculine personality traits in profusion, they become mentally androgynous. It means that they can pick personality traits as they want and people are not inhibited by cultural stereotypes symbolizing their sex. In her study, she revealed that sex-typed individual favoured stereotypical activities even if it cost them to do so. She also claimed that androgynous individuals were also more capable of showing a minority opinion and having greatest flexibility in approaching situations. These traits are psychologically vigorous for them.
Psychologists explain that there are some things that men do that are completely considered as feminine. The typical examples of these are cooking and crying. Similarly, there are some traits that are considered as masculine which can be used to identify some women like tough or strong. Some degrees of masculine characteristics in women and feminine attitudes in men are considered normal. However, it is essential that you should not be confused psychologically androgyny with hermaphroditism. When an individual is a hermaphrodite, he is of mixed sex. Thus, the person’s sex may not be absolutely definable. The androgyny person, on the hand other hand, has mixed gender.