Casual sexism . . .
(Aimed at a young audience to attempt to show them the problems with casual sexism)
... = pause for effect
'What a b***h', 'shes smart and pretty', 'swearing is so un-ladylike' ...
These are just some of the things you may hear on a day to day basis, this language is referred to as casual sexism.
But why do we use this word casual in conjunction with the word sexism? Surely this just makes it seem normal.. ok even. It should not be acceptable now to use sexist terms on a daily basis. Young girls should no longer have to grow up seeing verbal abuse towards women as a normal experience that they have to put up with. If we teach children that this sort of language is not acceptable it may become less frequently used by future generations...
There are hundreds of incidents regarding sexism everyday, upon further research I managed to find several facts including that the UK is joint 57th in the world for parliament gender equality, 18 out of 108 high court judges are female, in the national gallery out of 2300 works only 10 females work is displayed.
These are just a few of the potential examples i could give...
Many different people experience everyday sexism and the 'Everyday Sexism Project' was set up to enable people from across the world of all different backgrounds to share their stories from comments to assault men and women enter their experiences of sexism for others to view, this website encourages a sense of community enabling people to know that they are not alone.
The awareness that this site raised has meant that some more positive stories have been posted where people have stood up to sexism, stories such as one about a woman who was catcalled 'show us your tits' from across the street by two men only for a man who was walking in front of her to turn around and raise his top towards the two men, and another of a woman how goes jogging regularly when she was called over to a car and asked for directions where she was assaulted after telling the man which way to travel...
So next time you hear someone make a sexist remark think about the everyday sexism project ...and be the person who steps in when someone is assaulted on the bus stop ...or be the person to say actually what you just said is offensive...
strive to prevent sexism ...for everyone... everywhere
It was effective to use sexist language to start the speech; watch out - you need a specific context for the speech e.g. school assembly (and probably a smallish age-range for this level of sophisticated language) and you would probably not be allowed to say "bitch" there and there's no way of censoring it the way you have here when you say it aloud.
ReplyDeleteProofread carefully for sentence boundary issues - you need to avoid comma splicing e.g. in these two sentences, which would probably be best linked with a semi-colon to show that they are closely related: "These are just some of the things you may hear on a day to day basis, this language is referred to as casual sexism."
I think you need to explain what you mean by 'casual sexism' straight away (moreso than you do - what does casual mean in this context?)and show why those phrases in particular are sexist before you go on to show how endemic they are and why they are damaging. Think and plan carefully what your audience needs to know as well as what you want them to think/feel/do.
You need to find a way to link the ideas to language theory as there is no theory content and you would therefore get very few marks, however good the writing is. How could you twist the focus to be more on language and be able to use theory to back up your opinion?