When Laura Franks says that she refuses to play gender games she means that there’s a difference in being female and male and what the expectations are for being one. This has to do with fear because she states in her article Components of Gender, “It’s safe having an identity- it’s secure. It’s safe having a gender. But there’s a price for that safety and security within some hard shell ” (Franks, 55). When one identifies themselves a gender and their identity they’re trapped within the standards of that gender identity and gender role. Laura Franks is try to make a point that we shouldn’t just live up to those standards but be willing to find new ways of experiencing the world and living out of the regular norms of being a specific gender. In the book The Bell Jar in Chapter 11, Esther goes against the gender role of being a female when she says that she hasn’t washed the clothes she came home from New York in three weeks and she also didn’t wash her hair either for those three weeks (Plath, 127). Her explanation for her behavior was that it was silly to her to wash one day when she would only have to wash again the next (Plath, 128). Readers would react to this by being grossed out since she isn’t really caring about her hygiene. Females are expected to be on top of their hygiene so for Esther to go against that norm of being a female, its very surprising.