Sex roles

I'm not an expert, except perhaps in the sense of having lived through it myself, but puberty is awkward and confusing enough even with society's help. When the guidance is "You decide your life" or worse, when people who profit from your confusion get the magaphone, it is surprising as many kids turn out as well as they do.

With roles, you start out a boy or a girl, with the understanding that eventually you'll be a man or woman. Thanks to the roles you have a formal idea of what that means, but not a visceral one--yet. When you hit puberty, you have categories for the new feelings, and ways to understand and express them. Generally along with the roles come social rules for interacting with the opposite sex, and a path toward marriage and social frameworks to help you be a parent and grandparent. A few people have troubles with the roles, because they're from the tails of the distributions, but for almost everybody the roles mostly just work. If you aren't cut out for marriage, there are often roles for that too--sometimes religious ones and sometimes other "secular" insofar as that concept is even defined in your society family support roles.

But without anything clear, all you know is that you aren't quite the person you thought you were. If it is all your choice, what do you choose? You're too young to know the trajectory of any of the choices.

I'm fairly smart, though not always wise. When I started out in marriage I didn't have a firm handle on what things were going to be the most important long term. I'm not sure I would have taken advice, but roles are more embedded in "what everybody knows." "What everybody knows" is harder to argue with. And you can probably think of people who would have had a less bumpy start with clearer roles too.

Depending on how flexible those sex roles are, some folks would be squeezed hard. If men's roles involved not just willingness to protect your family, but regular fighting against each other, I'd not do well. Perhaps in some really dangerous era it's essential to be ready to fight at the drop of a hat, or be willing to help spear a lion for the tribe, but that would be a little exaggerated for our place and time. (I didn't do wonderfully well in sports either.) Some flexibility is important. But roles need some rigidity too: the parents are supposed to take care of their children, and only serious disability excuses them. And men and women are objectively different, no matter what the fashionable madness claims, so their responsibilities (roles) will, on the average, differ--and a little collective experience (tradition) can tell you how. Of course in a pinch you do what you have to.