Back to "stereotypes," Christopher, although after all these POSTS (!!) I may be beating a dead horse. (Wouldn't be the first time!)
I obviously don't agree with the radical feminists who viewed a man's opening the door for them as a "sexist" act, although I think I can understand where they were coming from. My standard is simple. Does the act imply that the woman is too feeble to open the door for herself? Too stupid? No. When you stand up when an older person enters the room, does it imply that the older person is likely to fall down, and you will have to rush to his/her rescue? No. So the act is designed to display respect. In my opinion, there is nothing wrong with a little respect. And there is everything wrong with getting hung up on trivia.
I personally don't care for definition #2 (too vague), especially if Lippmann did in fact introduce the concept of a stereotype to mean a "simple and erroneous idea...that negatively affects one's ability to understand members of other social groups and that is resistant to change."
Of course, there can be "positive" stereotypes ("all Jews are brilliant") as well as "negative" stereotypes ("all blacks are lazy"). But many of the positive stereotypes, I would argue, can ultimately be as harmful as the negative ones. Examples:
Women are spiritually superior to men.
(This was a biggie in the 19th century.)
Very hard for individual ordinary females to live up to that billing! Especially when it is assumed they are "purer" as well.
Men should be strong.
In Anglo-Saxon cultures, this is generally interpreted to mean that men should not show their emotions. (And little boys, of course, should not cry: "Don't be a girl!")
But it is, of course, the negative stereotypes that we associate more frequently with sexism, and which underly the kind of behavior we generally find objectionable:
Women aren't as smart as men.
All men are pigs.
And then there are the corollaries to the above, things that may sound "nice" on the surface, but have an unacceptable (at least for me) subtext. This one was a favorite of my late husband, who had read far too much D. H. Lawrence:
The woman is the bow, the man is the arrow.
And no, I did NOT shoot him with my bow and arrow. <g>
And so forth and so on.
Joan
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