From Welfare Girl to Biker Chick, whatever lifestyle or wonts adult female lead, theyre edge to a stereotype which either do good or bad. What have you been called? Daddys Girl? Dumb Blonde? Feminazi? Are female stereotypes based on cosmopolitan truths? Are they hyperactive phantasies piled on top of one another? Why does our civilization produce so many classs for adult females?
The Oxford English Dictionary ( OED ) defines “ stereotype ” as a simplified construct or thought that gets invested with speacial significance by a certain group of people. An original is somewhat different: It ‘s a theoretical account or an ideal from which extras are made.
Think of it this manner: A stereotype is a box, normally excessively little, that a individual gets jammed into. An original is a pedestal, normally excessively high, that she gets lifted up onto. Some originals can be stereotypes, like a Mother Teresa or even a Bombshell. But there are tonss of stereotypes that would ne’er be considered originals: Trophy Wife, Bitch, Gold Digger, etc. Stereotype or original, it ‘s seldom a miss ‘s ain pick: It ‘s a label person else gives you to do you less or more than you truly are.
Some stereotypes are positive ( The Girl Next Door ) , but many more are dyslogistic ( Old Maid, Jewish-American Princess, Welfare Queen ) . Lots of them cut down a adult female to a sex object or abuse her by connoting she ‘s a cocotte ( Wench, Slut ) .
There are stereotypes that grow out of spiritual myth. The Virgin/Whore duality evolved from the contrast between the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene during the life of Christ. Lilith, the Bitch Goddess, was Adam ‘s first married woman. She demanded equality, got kicked out of Eden, and was replaced by Eve.
Other stereotypes are rooted in the model lives of existent adult females, like Florence Nightingale, or in the tragic lives of others, like Marilyn Monroe, the incarnation of the Dumb Blonde/Blonde Bombshell. Some are invented to sell merchandises ( Aunt Jemima ) . Some, like Lolita and Vamp, were conjured up by poets and novelists. Others have mutated over clip. Broad and Ho, for illustration, used to mention to cocottes, but subsequently came to mention to any female of the species.
Stereotypes are populating beings, capable to Torahs of cultural development: They are born, they grow, and they die and/or alteration to suit the times. They have an umbilical connexion to linguistic communication: They gestate in popular civilization and are born in everyday ‘s slang.
The most fecund primogenitor of stereotypes today is the media: films, Television, music, newspapers, and magazine. Media-specific stereotypes leap across boundary lines and civilizations with terrific easiness. For case, immature misss today in every portion of the universe and in every ethnic or economic substrata conceivable get bombarded via Television and the Internet with the Rock Starlet stereotype: A thin, immature, long-haired ( normally blonde ) adult female with her shirt manner down to there to demo her cleavage and manner up to there to bare her middriff, crunching into a phallic micrphone. Stereotypes like this have great power. In fact, psychologists are convinced that the projection of stereotypes leads to pigeonhole behavior. For old ages, the belief that misss were inherently inferior at math trickled down to a shockingly little figure of adult females confident plenty to come in callings in Science. If this Rock Starlet stereotype persists, I think it could do human cloning irrelevant. Many of us will be practical ringers already.
I want to extenuate the power of female stereotypes over our lives. Every stereotype has a history or at least a few good narratives behind it. I will get down by sing the top stereotypes, the 1s that follow us from crade to sculpt, from Daddy ‘s Girl to Bitch. Then we ‘ll take a spin through some of the stereotypes that surround all the assortments of our sexual egos. After that, we will travel behind the lives of existent and ficitonal adult females who have become sterotypes. Some invented their ain stereotype ( Carmen Miranda ) , some had it thrust upon them ( Tokyo Rose ) . I ‘ll besides look at occupational stereotypes, from Gold Digger to Supermodel.
A Daddy ‘s Girl is the apple of her male parent ‘s oculus. And she ‘s proud of it! Daddy is so fantastic and of import, and she is so particular to have his attending. A 1977 survey of adult females executives found that all of them had an particularly close relationship with their male parents, much closer than with their female parents. On the surface, the thought of a Daddy ‘s Girl is guiltless. But scratch the veneer and all kinds of out significances, compulsions, even sexual deductions emerge.
By the twentieth century, “ Tomboy ” was a label for a physcially active miss who liked to make the same physcial things as a male child – in other words, a athlete. At a clip when misss were expected to lodge around the house and learn to cook, clean, and sew, a miss who liked athleticss was thought of as unfeminine. I see it a small otherwise. Girls who were Tomboys took a expression around and saw male childs had all the fortune: They could run, leap, drama athleticss, and show themselves physically. These misss ignored what was expected of them and joined in the merriment! Tey did n’t needfully desire to be biological male childs ; they merely wanted to make what boys ever had the freedom to make.
A Tomboy was diverting and accepted, but at puberty she was expected to “ turn out of it ” and go ladylike. If she did n’t, and kept up her boylike behavior as an grownup, good so, possibly she was… homosexual. Many parents feared that a Tomboy girl might turn up to be a Lesbian. Female gym teachers were ever suspects.
Now, The Girl Next Door. Harmonizing to OED, she ‘s a “ trusting, Sweet, and faithful but inventive adult female. ‘ She is the familiar, the unexotic, the undifferent, a mirror of conventional household values. She ‘s about ever white. The Girl Next Door is pure, loyal, and would ne’er believe to oppugn authorization. She ‘s Sandra Bullock, Julia Roberts. She ‘s NOT Madonna or Lucy Liu. The Girl Next Door may hold morphed into an educated, working, sexual being, but she is n’t an endangered species. She still stands for what most work forces still want in a adult female: Sweetiness, servility, trueness, and a good piece of you know what!
“ Bimbo ” started out gender impersonal – from the Italian word “ toddler ” ( babe ) – and became increasingly female. In the flapper epoch, a Bimbo was a terrific individual of either sex. By the 1930s, detective novels made a Bimbo the antonym: A pot, a fathead, either male or female. Somewhere between the Second World War and the sixtiess, a Bimbo became entirely female: Normally a beautiful, bosomy blonde with tight vesture, high heels, and a not-so-high IQ. In the mid-1980s, the media became haunted with the illicit female sexual comrades of celebrated work forces. One after another of these adult females – from Donna Rice to Jessica Hahn to Gennifer Flowers – were canonized as Bimbos in the imperativeness. The Bimbo stereotype was born! Today ‘s Bimbo is a immature, ambitious owman who has sex with an older, powerful adult male in order to go celebrated or arrogant. She ‘s babelicious with large breasts and sexy apparels, and she ‘s so fleeceable she does and believes everything he says. She besides happens to be white. Variations on Bimbodom have emerged, excessively: Bimbette ( a really immature Bimbo ) , Jumbo Bimbo ( air hostess who is a Bimbo ) , Bimbo eruptions ( Bill Clinton ‘s sexual adventures ) , Bimbo control ( the occupation of maintaining the former to a lower limit ) , etc. Then, of class, there are the male opposite numbers: Himbo and Hunk.
Bimbos prove the tiresome, sexist premise that adult females ca n’t hold both beauty and encephalons. Work force and other adult females feel superior to a Bimbo because they assume she ‘s dense, easy dominated, and normally humiliated.
Name a adult female a Bitch or a Ballbreaker and what image comes to mind? A strong, aggressive female who is n’t afraid to talk her head, suffers no saps, and takes no nonesense. Not bad personality traits. Confusion over the acceptable usage of “ Bitch ” abounds. One celebrated linguist thinks it ‘s such an abuse that we should halt utilizing it to depict female Canis familiariss! Contemporary street civilization plays fast and loose with the word “ Bitch ” , utilizing it so frequently it has come to intend non a hard adult female but any female at all, and frequently any adult male who deserves to be belittled. The BBC Standards Commission late ruled that it was okay for a comedian to name the Queen of England a Bitch on air because the word is no longer violative, it merely means any adult female. In a 1995 study of work forces and adult females in the U.S. , 93 per centum of the respondents felt it was “ really inappropriate ” for work forces to mention to adult females they do n’t cognize as Bitches. Another study the same twelvemonth produced a different consequence: Fewer than half the participants felt Newt Gingrich should apologise to Hillary Rodham Clinton for naming her a Bitch. What ‘s a miss to believe? Obviousoly, Bitch is a stereotype in passage. A underdeveloped civilization of impenitent Bitchs can be found everyplace! There ‘s Bitch magazine ; there ‘s a turning industry of Bitch-empowerment books.
Carmen Miranda spent her first 5 old ages in her native Portugal and her last 15 in the U.S. But to the universe she was ever Brazilian. Americans loved her movies, but South Americans felt manner they were superficial and violative. Down Argentine Way was banned in Argentina. Brazilians were annoyed that Carmen portrayed herself as the incarnation of their state, but her music assorted Brazilian obeche with Caribbean rhumba. Some believed it was a shame that she preferred to be a financially successful unidimensional stereotype in the U.S. instead than a flesh-and-blood creative person back place.
Although her public character was unrelentingly cheerful, the life of the Latin Bombshell did non hold a happy stoping. In her last functions, Carmen Miranda played a lampoon of herself, talking lines that made merriment of what she had become. Scripts continued to be written in her early fractured English when she no longer speaks that manner. Driven by her work agenda and disregarding her ain wellness, Carmen Miranda collapsed in the center of an visual aspect on the Jimmy Durante show in 1995 and died the following twenty-four hours. In decease, she became a Carioca once more. It ‘s interesting to theorize on what might hold happened to Carmen Miranda if she had stayed in Brazil. Her endowment and aspiration were unquestionable. She was leading stuff from the getgo. What sort of an creative person might she hold become if she were non the alien ‘other ‘ but the best among many?
A Tokyo Rose is an evil female treasonist who uses her gender to juggle and bewray. The stereotype grew out of the tragic narrative of Iva Ikuko Toguri d’Aquino, an American. The duteous girl of Nipponese immigrants, Iva graduated from UCLA, and so left for Japan as her household ‘s representative at a relation ‘s sickbed. That was 1941. When the war broke out, Iva was trapped in a state whose linguistic communication she did n’t talk and where, as a U.S. citizen, she was an ailen enemy overnight. Her relations did n’t even desire anything to make with her! She found a occupation as an English-language typist for Radio Tokyo. There she caught the attending of an Australian captive of war, Charles Cousens, who had been ordered to compose Nipponese propaganda. He thought Iva ‘s voice was blatant and sexy, perfect for a new wireless show.
So started the ‘Zero Hour, ‘ a hebdomadal wireless plan broadcast throughout the South Pacific on Sunday eventides. Iva and more than a twelve other English-speaking adult females appeared on it, each with a anonym. Hers was Orphan Ann ‘ an disposed description of her state of affairs. None were named Tokyo Rose.
Orphan Ann would come on the air with a message like this: ‘Greetings, everybody. This is your number-one enemy, your favorite playfellow Orphan Ann from Radio Tokyo. The small sunray whose pharynx you ‘d wish to cute… ‘ This was supposed to corrupt the GIs. But Allied commanding officers thought the messages really built up morale and helped transfuse a combat spirit, kind of like those drill sergeants who use abuses to actuate. The generals gave Iva a commendation after the war, particularly because she refused to denounce her U.S. citizenship.
But the U.S. governemtn took a different position. They imprisoned her for 12 months in Japan. In 1948, when she wanted to return to the States, there was a public call to lynch her, led by Walter Winchell, the American Legion, the Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West, and the Los Angeles City Council, whose members officially opposed her return. They feared she might motivate other Nipponese Americans who had merely been released from internment cantonments. Her hubby was disallowed in the state ; she miscarried their kid. The imperativeness flung the label ‘Tokyo Rose ‘ at her. And it stuck. Although there was small existent grounds, she was put on test. It became a media event and cost half a million dollars in 1948. The justice refused the jury ‘s petition for a dismissal. The jury so pinned a individual count on her. Iva Toguri became the first American adult female convicted of lese majesty. Sentenced to ten old ages, she served siz behind bars and was released in 1956. No 1 else who participated in the wireless broadcasts was of all time incarcerated or even charged.
A Gold Digger is a adult female whose aspiration is to happen a rich hubby. ‘Gold Digger was a Flapper-era term foremost used in the 1920s to depict a modern adult female who pursued a adult male, known as the Gold Mine, for his money. A cat did the same with adult females was a Forty-Niner. Marilyn Monroe specialized in Golder Digger functions, most notably in How to Marry a Millionaire autonomic nervous systems Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Gold Diggers mirrored the cultural clich ‘ that when work forces search for in a mate, they are interested in what she looks like, and adult females, in bend ; want to cognize how much money he makes.
Work forces were angry about being bossed by a adult female. To pacify those frights, Female Execs acted like ‘one of the male childs ‘ : They donned power suits, talk tough, and learned to play goft. That worked reasonably good, but did n’t wipe out he myths and misconceptions that cast the Female Exec as an imposing, chilling adult female who works long hours and is a atrocious Bitch when she has her period. If she was individual, the Lady Boss was even scarier because her whole life was her occupation. If she had a hubby or spouse and childs, she was seen as non focused plenty on work. She besides was thought to be excessively emotional and missing the assurance needed to acquire to the top.
First, stereotypes are ever in flux. It ‘s astonishing to detect how clip, specific events, and sometimes persons have influenced the development of a peculiar stereotype. A Bimbo may be a dense blonde white miss today, but who knows, possibly someday Bimbo will come to intend a supersmart black female spaceman!
Second, the media has mind-boggling power when it comes to bring forthing new stereotypes and maintaining alive the old criterions.
Finally, female stereotypes have non begun to catch up with the enormous alterations in adult females ‘s lives formented by the libreation motions of the twentieth century ‘ civil rights, feminism, and homosexual rights! By authorising you to make your ain stereotypes and to reject the 1s our civilization tries to squash us into. I am certainly the universe will be a much better topographic point from male chauvinists and woman haters everyplace, but most significantly have fun along the manner, ne’er it take excessively personally.
