Interpersonal Relationship and Communication

I was wondering to myself how cliches and archetypes come about in popular culture when in class we started playing 'battle of the sexes'. For someone who has generally negative thoughts on the idea of gender roles and stereotypes I was shocked by how quickly we assigned characteristics to genders that seemed to mirror that of TV sitcoms. That's where most of this comes from, I think, popular culture. We stop seeing people as individuals and fall into stereotypes when it comes to groups mainly because it is all too easy to generalize when it comes to groups. I know I rarely conform to the typical female stereotype, so why would I assume that somebody else with a vagina does too? We all want to be treated like unique individuals, but the first chance we have we tend to assign qualities to people based on the groups they fall into. Hardly seems fair, hm?