How has any pervasive aspect of our culture -- media, religion, art, academia/pop-science? (other?) -- had a resounding influence (positive or negative) on your view of the opposite sex, or your own sex for that matter?
Admittedly, my relationship with people of my own sex, and my perception of my own sex, has been a strained one from an early age. This dates back to my witnessing portrayals of women in various forms of media growing up -- mostly on TV and in video games. For the longest time when I was young, really young, I watched these women, or caricatures of women, in what appeared to be high places do things which I found wholly unremarkable. None of them appealed to me in the sense that I would really want to be like them, but still there was present an uneasy feeling that these women, these females, were somehow "normal", even though they were boring. The men on the Saturday morning cartoons and the men in the video games were the ones who were adventurous, bold, brave. The women, on the whole, were nice and pretty, morally upstanding, and sometimes flamboyant. But, they were not bold. They had no sense of adventure. They did not even seem remotely interested in the kinds of things that I would have been interested in. So, from a very young age I found myself relating to, for the most part, men. My role models were almost always male. I played the male hero in the video game, and I watched the male hero of the cartoon series.
There were some exceptions to this pattern. There were physically strong women who accomplished amazing (to a seven year old) physical feats on American Gladiators. Come fifth or sixth grade I was able to watch Kimberly and Trini fight the alien forces of evil on the show Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Of course, playing as Samus in the Metroid games was always a "blast", hah. I was stoked when I noticed two of the strongest characters in Final Fantasy VI were women. They were always the first to level 99 for me. I appreciated the women on Star Trek: The Next Generation. They seemed down-to-earth, strong, and realistic. Although their roles on the Enterprise were somewhat stereotypical of women of the time, they were able to be adventurers to much of the same extent that the men were.
My love of bold adventurous females and my desire to be one found a home for a time. My two best female friends for a long time were into fantasy and sci-fi games and shows, like I was. We had a lot of fun together. Looking back, we were all such tomboys, even though my one friend was always so damn pretty. We played "adventure" in their back yard. (They were sisters.) We played Magic: The Gathering together, and simple games of Dungeons and Dragons. We played Myst, and other computer adventure games together. (Hah! I just remembered that they were the first people I trolled chat rooms with, but that is an aside!) We challenged one another to daring feats on old playground equipment. They were the only two girls I was able to relate to. No wonder I was so lost when they moved away as I entered middle school.
Forlorn as I was at that time in my life, I guess part of me accepted that maybe I was supposed to look like those women who I felt so detached from since the beginning. This depressed and distressed me at first, and if the chain of thoughts involved had as much fecundity as I'm thinking now then it eventually (along with a lot of other unfortunate distresses) nearly killed me, as I developed a life-threatening eating disorder in high school.
I don't pay attention to televised media much anymore, aside from DVD sets old TV series. Watching all of Homicide: Life On The Street, and witnessing the very realistic and affecting portrayals of the women in the Homicide unit has been a great treat. I think it is wonderful that the writers of that show and the actors were able to portray the female characters in a very positive light while being realistic about the kinds of challenges they would have faced on the force. And, as I believe I've mentioned before, I've been thrilled to watch the sometimes wrenchingly realistic portrayal of the chaotic force that is Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica. As welcome as these "mirrors" are now, I can't help but think of my young self and feel a little upset that I would not have been able to see these characters as my ideal ideals. Only one character in a televised drama which I watched during the time spanning my entire adolescence came close to being that for me. And, on that note (and shifting the topic sightly to relationships):
I had a realization the other day that dealt with my views of relationships, and that was how much of an impact the show The X-Files had on me in shaping some of those views. In addition to the influence on my ideas about relationships, it also provided me with my strongest female "role model" in entertainment media, I guess you could say. Dana Scully was a woman who I felt like I could look up to in almost every way, even though Mulder always ended up proving her wrong at the end of every episode! She was intelligent, very strong-willed, able to hold her own, and she had awesome red hair. She was the main reason that I dyed my hair red for a while in high school! But, aside from the fact that I could look up to her, I also looked up to her relationship with Mulder; the respect that they showed one another, their deep friendship, and finally their acceptance of their romantic love for each other. (And then two almost entirely utterly ridiculous seasons, but I digress.) My lasting impression, though, is that they would always be friends first, and that is what appealed to me most about their relationship. That "model" of relationship is something I've held as a pretty high ideal for a long time since.
I put off posting this because I was hoping to add something about how growing up around a lot of "pop-science" influenced my thinking about human sexuality, but as I was writing about all of that I realized it's something that I'd rather think more about first.