Waiter, There’s A Stereotype In My Soup.
Understanding just how deep prejudice can go.
Let’s play a game, shall we? No one wins, but let’s play anyway.
A man and a woman are drinking at the bar.
Now quickly read these lists.
Beer, Whisky, Old fashioned
Prosecco, Rosé, Cosmopolitan
So, what does the person from line 1 look like?
And line 2?
Told you no one wins.
This template is taken from the Implicit Association Test, which I initially learned about in Malcolm Gladwell’s book ‘Blink’. The test is designed to measure the “strengths of associations between concepts and evaluations” e.g. minorities, sexes, or sexualities, the aim being to show that a faster response is linked to more deeply held preconceptions about certain groups. However, in order to gain the most reliable results from this, it is best to take the test multiple times to form an aggregate score.
The foundation of this test is stereotypes. It is the belief that a group of people will behave in a certain way or have a particular characteristic. They are often widely held, resistant to change, and can be categorised into explicit and implicit. Explicit refers to those that we are consciously aware of and easy to report whereas implicit stereotypes or attitudes are harder to access and difficult to pick apart.
They form as a result of our predisposition to create cognitive shortcuts. In order for us to navigate a complicated world full of complex people, events, and concepts, we tend to categorise these things into oversimplified systems of ideas that allow us to make rapid evaluations.
These are the causes of stereotypes. However, equally important are the drivers of stereotypes. Acting as sources of information that constantly affirm and reinforce either positive or negative ideas, the drivers can be parents, peers, teachers as well as mass or social media. The latter two have elbowed their way into the conversation in more recent years but are no less important.
Even though stereotypes can sometimes come across as harmless such as the French liking cheese, they are, by definition, reductionist. They take the relentless complexity of the human experience and slap a one-size-fits-all sticker on it. Over the years they have been the foundation stones of countless oppressive isms that serve to reinforce the status quo and inevitably lead to the pernicious truism — “that’s just the way it is”.
Definition
Stereotype
/ˈstɛrɪə(ʊ)tʌɪp,ˈstɪərɪə(ʊ)tʌɪp/
Noun
- a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing.
— “the stereotype of the woman as the carer”
Even the dictionary’s example provides us with a reinforcement of the stereotype of the role of women. The problem with stereotypes, among many, is that they perpetuate themselves. They are memetic in this way. Like a snowball collecting more and more snow while rolling down a hill, before we know it, we are part of a belief system that seems impossible not just to stop, but to reverse.
There are hundreds of books on the abundance and consequences of stereotypes. They cover race, gender, politics, age, sexuality, ability, and many more. But what they all emphasise is just how insidious stereotypes can be. While we are making progress in deconstructing damaging stereotypes, we must understand that there are layers of prejudices in places no one even thinks about.
Let’ expand on the Dictionary’s tactless example to illustrate the reach that stereotypes can have.
Men are strong, women are weak. So goes the age-old adage that has infected so much of modern society. I do also acknowledge that even the attempt to dismantle this false construction is unwittingly reinforcing it just by talking about it, but hear me out.
These negative categorisations are reflected in and have been replicated in countless forms such as film, music, products, or language, but let’s use a product as an example here.
Razors. Seemingly harmless, right? At least conceptually.
But just by searching online for men’s or women’s razors, the stereotypes come flooding in.
To align with the ‘men are strong’ stereotype, men are offered razors akin to weapons of war —
Fusion, skinguard, power, proshield, ergonomic handles.
This adjectival line-up would not look out of place in the manual of a fighter jet.
Whereas, if we take another five (somewhat) randomly selected phrases from the women’s equivalent search, we find it brimming with fragility, softness, and pandering —
Satin-shave, diamond-coated, Sugarberry, Soleil, Spa Breeze.
All of these reinforce the idea that women are soft, sweet, materialistic beings.
This example shows that even the most infamous and fixed stereotypes can filter down to seemingly innocuous objects, things that we see every day that we don’t realise are strengthening the biases we have on gender in this particular case, but potentially anything.
This is not new, and yet we often don’t see it staring right at us.
Another example of this is the idea that men drink some things, women drink others.
At its core, this stereotype is another way to bolster the idea that men are strong, women are weak. This can be expressed in either the aesthetic of the drink, the taste of it, or even the glassware it’s served in.
The glassware it’s served in.
I’ve seen many men refuse to drink a cocktail because it’s served in a coupe or something they deem to be emasculating. With decades of advertising geared towards showing whisky being drunk from a rocks glass and the blatant glorification of ‘old school sexism’ on shows like Mad Men, it has become synonymous with manliness to drink from a rocks glass.
We see here the manifestation of life imitating art, and back again. Men see men drinking whisky in a popular TV show, so there is a spike in whisky orders at the bar. Advertisers jump on the bandwagon to make sure to exploit this new trend. More TV shows pick up on this potential cash cow and the cycle repeats. Each step of this process is a nail hammered into the opinions of the public and shows once again how stereotypes, especially of gender, can be sacralised in superficially inoffensive and universal concepts like drinks.
Or, for example, imagine you’re out eating at a restaurant with someone and you’ve ordered two soups. The waiter comes over and sets down your delicious-looking soup only to be disheartened and downright puzzled by the complaint made by your male dinner date.
“I cannot eat from this. This is a bowl. Bowls are for women. Put it on a plate at once.”
This example really is not that far from what happens all around us every day. The unfair, uncorroborated assigning of gender to objects is just one of the many sinister methods sexism uses to keep its stranglehold on society.
Every hour of every day, we are told either directly or more subtly that we should behave in a certain way, that if we want to be like Don Draper then we have to drink what he drinks, in the glass he drinks it in. Willfully ignorant of the rampant sexism of the time and the deafening echoes that fill today’s discourse, we gloss over any detail that may hinder our journey to fulfilling the role of whatever stereotype we are currently adopting.
So the question remains, how do we fix this?
And the problematic answer is, you can’t.
But we can.
Stereotypes are capillary, they poison from within. We often don’t know or don’t want to know that we reinforce their corruption.
To fix this, we must be active agents in celebrating diversity and deconstructing unfounded mythologies in our cultures.
The widely held belief that people are set in their ways is false. With the power of social media and a commitment to a better future, we can effect enormous change and disseminate tolerance faster than ever before.
As I said, no one wins this never-ending game of deconstructing stereotypes. There is no start or finish point. There is only ever the struggle for better.
So choose love, and drink whisky like a girl.
Cheers to that.
