TV media has been the strongest influence for my generation.
I bascially grew up with a nagging feeling all of my life that I was not being a good enough "woman" judged for my attire, my hari styles, my lack of make-up, and my feverish drive to win at sports and games...not so demure, or subtle.

It took until my 40th year to meet a group who teaches a method of communication to address the societal non-acceptance of anything in the realm of "other"

http://www.yesinstitute.org

Moving beyond right and wrong; win/lose; and onto overall purpose

I no longer orient my perspective to labels of male or female...gay or straight...not for myself or others.

The media however is very clear and encourages judgment and discrimination between these binary concepts.

as a side note: A child I am working with during a PT session wants to see if HE can use regular roller skates, not toddler ones. The only ones I have to use for a trial run have Barbie on them. He really wants to get his own pair of skates but his mom doesnt want to buy them unless he is ready to use them. I asked if he wanted to try on the Barbie one just to see if he could do it- 5 minutes to test it out. He had teary eyes, and began to cry and said OK, and when they were on he had not yet stood up and was saying "I dont like these Barbie ones" I took them off and said that I didnt want to make him uncomfortable, and inside I felt so bad that wearing Barbie skates would hurt him so much at 5 years old. dramatic

Our media images of what constitutes "girl" and "boy" are so narrow and restrictive. If you watch young children, they don't make these distinctions until a grown-up intervenes and tells them what is appropriate for their gender. I see little pre-school boys (as well as elementary age boys) who like to dress up and decorate their faces and paint their nails. There was one little boy I know who always made a beeline for the dress up corner each day at preschool to put on a skirt. His mother squirms each morning and tries to redirect him towards the firefighter hat. I think we knock the emotions out of boys at such a young age. In that sense, girls have more emotive freedom to experiment with their "look". They are able to dress like boys and well call them a "tomboy", while boys who wear pink or nailpolish are beat up and ostracized. In that sense there is a strong double standard for young boys and I think the fall out is they shut down and close off their emotions.

when we are small kids, we do not have any concept of gender and as such biasness about any gender. as we grow up, we learn from our elders about the set pattern of behaviour of 'girls' and 'boys'. often they hear the words 'these are not to be done by a girl/boy' or 'a boy should be like this/a girl should behave like that'.the behaviour of elders they see also shapes their mentality. these remarks gradually create a picture in their mind about sexual difference which does not have a scientific base. it is gradually diminishing but is so deep seated in the society that it will take a long time to eradicate.

As all of the others in this forum have stated, it is a mixture of the media and other individuals around us who form our definition of feminine and masculine roles in society. This mold of what our sexual identity "should be" is definitely restrictive on us all. From a young age it has always been drilled into my head that I am female. As soon as I uttered the words "down there" in front of my mother, she whipped out this book : "What is a Girl/ What is a Boy?". This book was meant to serve as means for parents to explain to their children what it meant to be of a certain gender. I am grateful for my mother's honesty and openness about this subject. I feel that in retrospect my mother only reinforced the same ideas that put such a strain on many of us when it comes to figuring out who they are in terms of sexuality.
And even though, my mother had made me quite aware of what was down there, I never really understood it until I hit my teen years. As a young child I didn't see the difference between myself and all the other children regardless of what their sex was. I think both the media and the rules that society says we should abide by and get enforced subconsciously by us all, have beaten the simplistic child view we all had (which I always thought was profound for seeing a person as a person, nothing more, nothing less.) right out of us.