So here we go again... even in an age when there are female executives and a woman can be considered qualified to compete for a presidential nomination, we're still wrestling with the expectations of a woman's behavior to have a certain level of submissiveness. NPR did a fabulous report on this and it's certainly not one you'll hear on MSNBC (busy focusing on her legally required monetary disclosures, i.e. yep, the chick has cash). The sum is this, why are women still expected to have a different code of behavior than men?
My ex had a wonderful habit of turning normal daily interactions into an analysis of male/female behavior which involved continually asking,
"How would this situation have changed if the woman in the story were a man?"At the end of your day, you'll generally find that there are a myriad of moments where gender played a role in how an interaction played out. This is a great exercise for both men and women to have a higher awareness of how their own behavior intersects with gender expectation. Think about it... would that guy have really said that to you if you had been a man? Would you have talked to a man they way you talked to that woman? After all, an unexamined life is not worth living (Ok, so a man, Socrates, said it, but it still holds true for all).
My favourite news snippet about Sotomayor (well, I am a pronunciation linguist) was when some right-wing commentator criticised her preference that her surname be pronounced in a vaguely authentic Spanish manner (soh-tuh-ma-YOR, I'm guessing). His gloriously ignorant opinion was that the obvious "English" way of saying such a surname would be SOH-tuh-my-uhr effectively treating that -mayor ending as if it were a Germanic-in-origin Meyer, and that by resisting this supposedly natural Anglo pronunciation she was grinding a particular axe. Y'know, being too darned ethnic.
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