oh the isms!

While working on this weeks homework, I couldn't believe how much insensitive language I found! Here are a few:
Sexism
I subscribe to the Writer’s Digest magazine, and it’s interesting that in it, there’s a lot of sexist writing. Whenever they refer to “the writer” they almost always use the pronoun ‘she.’ It’s probably true that there are more female writers and aspiring writers than men, but to always use the pronoun ‘she’ would mean that they’re assuming all writers (or at least all subscribers) are female. To fix this problem they could either use ‘he or she’ or they could rewrite the sentence so that the pronoun doesn’t appear, or so that it’s plural and becomes ‘they.’
Heterosexism
I was listening to one of my friend’s songs the other day called ‘Emo Kid.’ Although the song isn’t really meant to be taken seriously, there’s a lot of insensitive language in it that I could see offending people. One line reads, “Our guys look like girls our girls look like dykes.” The term dyke is demeaning, and could be offensive to some people.
Racism
For this one, I was watching the show Castle when one of the characters said a comment that could be considered racist. They were watching a basketball game and one of the characters commented saying, “What do you know, I guess white boys can jump.” This could be considered racist because the term “white boy” sets them apart from others, and the comment implies that the speaker doesn’t believe that white people can jump and is surprised when one can.
Ageism
I saw an example of this in one of the other blogs that I read. In it the author was talking about her daughter and said that, “Even though she’s a teenager, Becca is always so mature.” Even though this statement isn’t demeaning to Becca, it implies that most teenagers aren’t mature, and that Becca is seen as an exception, when really there are lots of teenagers that are mature.

And here's a funny spelling error: