Gender Stereotypes

While flipping through the channels one day I happened to stumble across a documentary on the sex industry within America that really intrigued me. It did not fascinate me because it was a film on pornstars, but because it focused heavily on attempting to answer the question of “why” those women decided on that career path. Similar to all of the other documentaries I have watched in the past, it showed a lot of data and had personal interviews with some of the ladies, asking the very question of “why”. As expected, many of the women argued, that it was due to the fact that they had no father figure, others said it was a power issue, and one of the ladies shocked me with her response. She blamed her mother; growing up she said, her mother would

For years, the woman explained, that she would try (extremely hard) to ignore her mother's comments. Until, one day she just got tired of being accused, and became what her mother labeled her. Her exact words, if I remember correctly were, “I said to myself one day, I will show her a whore”. Although, there may be outside factors that led that young lady to a life of porn besides her mother's harsh words, those words never left her mind, each word left a permanent scar. Verbal abuse as defined by Ketterman (1992), “is any statement to a victim that results in emotional damage”; Ketterman (1992) goes on to say, “Such damage limits his or her happiness and productivity for a lifetime” (p.14). In the case of this particular young lady verbal abuse acted as her push into a lifestyle of

Within their study Saewyc et al. (2010) surveyed two groups of children; a group of eighth graders and a group of ninth graders. Each student within the group was asked questions about how often they felt they were being bullied, or sexual harassed. In later experiments held by Saewyc et al. (2011) specific comments were said to the student and each student was asked to answer whether or not they had heard that statement before. After taking the original survey that regraded to the act of verbal abuse, students were given another survey that asked if they had ever drunk alcohol and if so how often. The survey also asked the students if they had ever smoked a cigarette, and if so how often, lastly the survey asked students how often they got into trouble with authority figures. After gathering all of this information Saewyc et al. (2010) discovered some shocking results. Between the two age groups there was a similar correlation of frequent experiences with verbal abuse by peers, and a high exhibit of reckless