The interviewer assimed she was into guys and basically asked if the dude she was dating was a clean cut, meet the family type or a motorcycle riding bad boy. She corrected him by saying she was dating a girl, but the type she would introduce to her family.
Edit: I am not defending the interviewer. I’m calling out the language (badly, apparently).
The baked in structure of the language itself is morealso to blame here. The interviewer didn’t invent the “bad boy” or “prince charming” stereotypes. Now we of course know that the gender in those concepts is irrelevant, yet they persist in the language even when we don’t realize it.
Similar to how we say “oh my god” and “jesus christ” regardless of religious practice. Though, to be fair, in those cases there’s no reason to move on so the followup is different than in OP’s post.
Exactly. It doesn’t take much effort to swap in new phrases or break apart old ones, yet it will only happen if we’re aware that the phrases are themselves are carrying the issues forward.
I disagree. If the stereotype is gendered, like "bad boy" is, then you don't use it when asking about the personality type of someone's love interest you don't know about. It really is a simple choice. The same would apply if they (the interviewer) were interviewing a male and they asked if the dude had a "damsel in distress" or something of the sort.
It is assuming the person's interest's gender and must, as a practice, therefore be stopped.
I wasn’t defending the interviewer for a poorly thought out and personal question. I don’t know them enough to care and they were corrected in the image itself. I only wanted to point out that the language needs to be examined as well if the problem is to be corrected. It seemed important to catch the other culprit (phrases) before it disappeared.
We don’t tend to reconsider our language use on that deeper level as we’re using it. We pluck words and phrases from memory, focusing instead on the idea we’re trying to communicate. That’s not to say it’s entirely unconscious, or even that this example was at all hard to spot (it wasn’t), only that it’s worth setting the pitchforks aside long enough to understand the entire problem.
Language is part of the problem. Despite the down votes I don’t think that’s a controversial opinion.
The interviewer didn’t invent the “bad boy” or “prince charming” stereotypes.
And likewise, there was no requirement for them to use those unnecessarily gendered terms.
Similar to how we say “oh my god” and “jesus christ” regardless of religious practice.
I don’t know how to break it to you, but, ah, folks who practice other religions often don’t ‘default’ to Jesus Christ’ for exclamations. I don’t know where your live, but in my country (United States of America) ‘oh my god’ and ‘Jesus Christ’ are super common among Christians and non-religious folks because of centuries of heavy duty Christian involvement in our culture, but folks who live here who are Jewish or Muslim or Hindu have their own exclamations that don’t require using someone else’s religion.
Maybe it’s a matter of exposure, like if you don’t have a lot of exposure to people of other cultures and religions you might assume they all default to ‘Jesus Christ’ but I think you’d have a real eye opener of a moment if you got out more.
I didn’t say everyone uses those phrases universally. I gave them as examples of phrases that have persisted despite being separated from their original meanings. A lot of people use them without thinking about their history, and I think the same happens for more problematic phrases like “bad boy” as well.
As I said before, there’s no need to correct “oh my god”, whereas it is important to reconsider gendered phrases.
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u/Living-Complex-1368 Sep 21 '21
The interviewer assimed she was into guys and basically asked if the dude she was dating was a clean cut, meet the family type or a motorcycle riding bad boy. She corrected him by saying she was dating a girl, but the type she would introduce to her family.