Lesbianism: Freud, Bandura And Vygotsky

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The start of high school marked a new point in my life. It was when I first starting coming to terms with what I had consciously known about myself since fifth grade, and decided it was time to be truthful to my friends, family and classmates: I’m a lesbian. I resented the term, but used it because it is accepted and recognized by the American culture. The word lesbian came with so much baggage, so many stereotypes. It overwhelmed me to identify with all these things when I was really just trying to be honest about being me. After telling my friends in high school, it became my label. It was who I was, whether I liked it or not. I tried to embrace it, and lost who I was in the process of attempting to be what I claimed to be. I started wearing boy’s clothes, skateboarding, talking about dating girls all the time, and tried to fit the stereotype of what I thought a lesbian would be like. I no longer allowed myself to be interested in spirituality, psychology, writing, and all the other things I used to enjoy exploring. I thought to myself, “Well, now that you admitted to yourself that you’re a lesbian, you might as well learn how to act like one.” I held this façade for almost a year from ages 14-15, and during that time I would put my arm around girls, verbally objectify them, and rejected anything feminine… but why? Alfred Bandura argued that we learn largely through imitation, by observing models and mentally coding what we see (Crain, 2011, p.205). These models can be virtually anything: television, books, people and even symbolic modeling through verbal instruction (Crain, 2011, p.206). This is certainly an adaptive behavior, because if we were to act out our own disorganized impulses, we would likely fail to properly function in society. Learning through others, specifically by observation and imitation, we are able to acquire new behavior immediately and

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