Sexism and Advertising is one of the topics for an intermediate level conversation class we do. I find it ridiculous to have to try to teach our language fetishes to the Chinese. Some students think I am talking about sexiness and the idea of gender inequality never occurs to them. If they do understand, the students all say that China was more sexist a hundred years ago. The idea that imposed gender roles by a patriarchal society seems absurd to them, as does my demonstration of alleged sexist English words (I tell them that "manager" should be replaced by "personager").
So when I do the class, I talk about advertising first and if I have time, I brooch the topic of Sexism and Racism.
Last night, I showed the students magazine ads and asked them if they thought it was "sexist" or "sexy". An ad that showed a G-string was deemed sexist by a male student because it seemed to say that only women could wear G-strings. Or so I understood him to say...
1 comment:
Uh, "manager" ultimately comes from the Latin "manus," meaning hand. It has nothing to do with man. So what the hell are you talking about with "personager"? As far as I can tell, you invented that in order to ridicule some opponent that doesn't actually exist, or perhaps you listed it from a satire that does the same thing. I suppose I should congratulate you on vanquishing this non-existent opponent. Well done!
Anyway, when I taught that class, in addition to using some magazine pictures, I also asked students to compare 安 and 男. If you really follow all the different words that have "女" in it, there really are a lot of sexist etymologies in Chinese.
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