From Helen Boyd‘s She’s Not the Man I Married.

The overwhelming pressure to conform to masculine and feminine ideals – or die trying – is constant.  The obligation to conform is also somewhat invisible and harder to put your finger on.  It comes out in …. the funny looks I get pushing an elevator button myself instead of waiting for the guy nearest the panel to ask me where I’m going.  Or the way a man might tell a woman he doesn’t even know to smile, as if it’s a woman’s job to keep up that cheery countenance for his sake.  It comes in the form of subtle reactions, jokes you hear, ideas about what men and women are.  And if you start breaking the rules, you start to feel cut loose, a little adrift; you don’t know why all the jokes other people are laughing at make you uncomfortable.