Why is there gender inequality; why do men oppress women; do men oppress women; do women oppress themselves? There are millions of questions surrounding the enormous topic of gender inequality, but one thing is certain: there is a problem and no one seems to be able to offer a decisive answer as to where it comes from or how to address the cause. Governments and companies address the symptoms by imposing ‘all women quotas’, or favouring female candidates with similar qualifications over male ones. Some try to blame an inherent male oppressive nature, or even an inherently meek female nature. Some are so concerned with the ‘glass ceiling’ and the inaccessibility of elite jobs to women that they disregard the pay discrepancies that affect women on every level of society. We are pedalled messages like "women are equal to men", but slogans like this themselves suggest a subliminally patriarchal world view.

When first writing this article, I thought it best if I remained anonymous. Not because I am afraid of having my identity known (I don’t think I say anything terrible) but because I do not want my gender, sexuality or background to have a bearing on how people read what I write. Too often valid arguments in gender are cast out because of the writer’s background. I hope this will not be the case with me: I simply want to raise questions and hopefully encourage people to think about gender and sexuality from an angle that they perhaps have not before.

Ideas of gender and sexuality are related. The statement "it is OK to be gay" is, in my mind’s eye, very similar to the statement "women should be equal to men". This implies that women’s rights should be defined against the constant that is men’s rights – that women are still defined by men. "It is OK to be gay" can be understood in two ways. On the one hand perhaps it accepts homosexuality, making it clear that being gay is no negative thing, however, saying it is 'OK' suggests a taboo; that being gay is certainly different but should be accepted, while also defining homosexuality against heterosexual ‘normality’. Surely it would be far more constructive to say that “it is normal to feel emotional or sexual attraction towards any other individual” while leaving out the gender element altogether. I am not so naïve as to say that preference of female or male body forms is a construct, and I am not denying that there are perhaps biological inclinations, but to say that a person is attracted to one singular gender and its social attributes seems to ignore the possibility that ‘sex’ and ‘social gender’ are not necessarily intrinsically linked.

This is a major question for anyone writing about feminism: are sex and gender intrinsic or is there just a correlation? Is the connection between biological sex and social gender something inherent to human nature or is it something socialised into us? Social norms are fluid: blue used to be the colour for girls and pink for boys up until a process of marketing that made them switch between the late 20s and early 40s. By that same token, in ancient Rome and Greece, heterosexuality was often considered to be unusual, and the 4th Roman Emperor Claudius was famously mocked for his interest only in women. My point is that perhaps ideas of ‘womanly behaviour’, of ‘masculine behaviour’, dress sense, makeup, heterosexuality, homosexuality and, indeed, bisexuality may not be quite as universal or natural as we think, and are more defined by social values and constantly changing norms.

If you believe that gender roles are socialised into you from a young age, then both gender and sexuality become far more fluid and have less power to constrain you. Picture books given to children teaching new words have photographs of a male in trousers with short hair with the word ‘man’ spelt underneath it, and a photograph of a female on the opposite side of the page, wearing a dress and with longer hair saying the word ‘woman’ beneath it. These binaries are characteristic of our society, which fetishises labels in a bid to compartmentalise, dividing people up into groups. This alienates them from one and other to the extent that people are so concerned with their sex, gender, social class and appearance that they genuinely seem to forget that the one thing that humans always historically have wanted to do is forge connections. People seem to be preoccupied with following a clear cut identity predetermined by ideals lain down from children’s books to billboards; family hierarchy to shop mannequins.

What puzzles me even more about these ideals is how they are invariably impossibly unattainable: models are airbrushed, mannequins are stick thin and celebrities are elevated to near superhuman status. Our whole way of living is so geared towards impossible states of being that we are distracted from our real humanity. The effect of this state of being is clear, the question of how to fix it boils down to, “Why are we socialised into these utopian groups?” When we find the answer to that then perhaps we can begin to think about how people are similar rather than how they are different. Perhaps we can then begin to define ourselves by what we are, not what we ought to be.