The Power of Language and Gender

In the lecture on Monday night we discussed how language connects to gender. We read three
different works but the one about the second graders stood out to me. A group of second graders
were asked to write a story and then the works were looked at to see how males and females wrote
their stories. When the males stories were looked at they included almost no female characters.
The stories were mainly about competition, winning, war, and violence. The female stories consisted
of both female and male characters. The female stories were about cooperation, nature, and
friendliness. This study interested me because it showed how different males and females are even
at a young age and how their stories are similar within each gender. Another thing we looked at in
class was how insults vary between each gender. Male insults include words like douchebag, dick,
asshole, son of a bitch, and motherfucker. Female insults include whore, slut, bitch, cunt, and prude.
I thought it was very interesting how male insults are directed towards their mothers and not even
then. Female insults were always directed towards them. It seems to be that it is almost easier to
insult a female than a male and to really insult a male people will attack their mother, who is a
female. At first I did not pick up on how different males and females were displayed in language
but this lecture showed me that women are even subjected to sexist and inferior tendencies in
language.