One
of the most interesting pieces of both the articles we read and Mr. Robertson’s
presentation to me was the ubiquity of gendered language. In the day after the
talk, I have noticed a lot more of the gendered language. It pervades our vocabulary
in such a subtle fashion that we are far less likely to notice it than other,
more direct ways of asserting gender norms. As the way we frame most of our
interactions with other people, language has extraordinary power and it was
interesting to see the incredible effect it had on people. I found our
discussion of the words “lady” and “gentleman” particularly interesting largely
because they were two words I had not thought about much before. While I had
certainly heard some discussion of gendered insults before, I had almost never
heard about these two words, and perhaps that is where they get much of their
power from. It may seem fairly obvious to us that calling a girl a slut or a
whore is sexist, but the idea that telling her to act ladylike is equally
destructive was new to me. The fact that this language is not outwardly hurtful
makes it far subtler, even if it has similarly negative results. The other
thing that struck me was the impossibility of avoiding gendered language. Even
in second grade, many children already seemed to subscribe to gender norms, and
I think a large part of the reason for that was they had been taught to act one
way by language.
I
also found the idea that women focused more on details than men, especially as
young children, fascinating. The idea that this focus originated from gender
norms of women talking about more trivial things was interesting, but I had
trouble seeing it as a full explanation for such a complex behavior. One
alternative explanation, and one that might work in tandem with the first, is
that women are expected to be more observant as part of a domestic role and as
the gender who are expected to focus more on emotional connections. I also
found it interesting that something that is likely caused by negative
expectations had the positive result of often making women, especially younger
women, better writers than their male counterparts. It was extraordinary to me
that something with such negative origins could have such positive results.
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