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...
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!
ReplyDeleteAnyway, 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.