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As a female, I literally feel others’ discrimination to me under many circumstances even in a country like America (which praises equality as many others countries don’t). Recently, I have been thinking the similarities and differences between various types of gender discrimination. In this sono-essay, I want to generally introduce three types of gender discrimination occurring in our daily life and we might ignore.

  The first one is stereotyping. I want to talk about both the old-fashioned style of stereotyping of portraying women as obedient and quiet images and the new style of stereotyping women as aggressive as men want.

Although the old-fashioned stereotype is abandoned by many western countries now, this kind of portrays is still popular in many Asian culture based countries like China, Korea and Japan. Women in these countries are encouraged not to work anymore and only stay at home, take care of the house and children and the parents of the couple.  Even in nowadays, many millions of women in that kind of culture can never realize that they actually didn’t choose this lifestyle and was brainwashed to accept that kind of lifestyle as the best way of living. This is sad, in a modern Japanese drama, a chauvinism man says he wonders why the divorce rate is rising after women have right to choose whom to marry with. He insists that the happiness index is decreasing with more freedom in love relationships, which is disgusting and becomes a popular theory in the internet among Asian culture based countries. He cowardly and pathetically chose to ignore the low divorce rate before free marriage is due to women’s fear of being abandoned by this society.  

The new kind of stereotyping is portraying women as assertive, brave, cold, smart and ironically, full of proud.  They never take anything from men and ask anything, exactly what many men wants. This is why I hate the movie Mad Max: Furious road. Many say it did a great job especially in gender equality. I doubt so because the women in this movie is just another stereotype men portrayed. Men are tired of always being “benevolently” being relied by women and then they came up with this, letting aggressive and capable women do everything for them, meanwhile enjoying both the actual benefits and being praised as treating women equally. This kind of stereotype always revel themselves by making the male characters finally be useful or the key of something in stories. In the other word, women still cannot success without them. I cannot even imagine how shameless the authors are.

  The second one is objectification.

The most obvious example is, in many cartoons, authors draw women’s boobs as large as they can. I am not judging this personal preference of women. Well, yes I am. Long legs, big boobs and butts, certain symbols of a beauty… This is because women are designed as a possession of men, thus they are assigned to have certain traits and characteristics. We suppose to be adorable. (debate issue) We exchange our social image of being adorable to being intelligent. You just cannot be both.

Also, social psychology has survey shows that men need to prove they are men, thus women can never lose their identity as being a female. In the other word, men can choose what kind of image they want to display. They are neutral when born. But women are regarded as women naturally for their entire lives.  This also happens in the group of females. They judge other females who are not famine enough to maintain their own self-esteems. Many females also objectify themselves to trade for something from a male-domain society because this is just the way.

The third one is called as benevolent discrimination. People do this are often regarded as “gentlemen”. They prejudice women as weak creatures and always in need. Many females also drown in this illusion of being treated gentlemanly. But no, this is a discrimination.

    TBC