Nors

So I think there is a lot of love about WoT. I love the world building and the characters are well defined and, for the most part, interesting. Of course I have my favorites. I read the first 3 books about 10 years ago. I just picked up book 4. It's interesting to revisit a world now that I'm in my 30s rather than my early 20s. A lot of the things I remember not connecting with still persist. The main thing is the way the different binary gendered people think about the other gender. Mat thinks all women can't help but clean things all the time. Nynaeve loves Lan but also thinks he is dumb all the time. For me, this is terribly off-putting in the sense that these social constructed beliefs about gender roles and attributes feel like caricatures rather than the way real people think of each other. It's obvious Jordan understands what he's doing here. In Chapter. . . 16? 17? of The Shadow Rising, Min plays up the whole helpless maiden thing while she's in Tar Valon, acting as Elmindreda. She gives Gawyn and Galad exactly what the first hates to see, and the other believes women to be. This leads me to believe Jordan creates these caricatures deliberately. My hope is that he'll also break this cycle at some point and use that breaking to develop characters. Am I off base here? Has anyone else found this difficulty in reading the series?