Sexism

Sexism usually refers to prejudice or discrimination based on sex or gender, especially against women and girls. Its origin is unclear, but it was first found in the Merriam Webster Dictionary in 1968 and is most likely modeled after the civil rights movement's term racism, which refers to prejudice or discrimination based on race. Having emerged from second-wave feminism that occurred in the 1960s to 1980s, sexism has a parallel function to racism, which describes ideological and material practices of individuals, collectives, and institutions that maintain white supremacy. Sexism is an ideology or practices that maintain patriarchy or male domination. This mode of oppression in society usually takes the forms of economic exploitation and social domination based on sex or gender. Often, it is conceived as behaviors, conditions, or attitudes that perpetuate stereotypes of social (gender) roles based on one's biological sex. Sexism can be a belief that one sex is superior to or more valuable than another sex. It imposes limits on what men and boys can and should do and what women and girls can and should do. Sometimes, sexism is also used to refer to misogyny or hatred of females and misandry or hatred of males. The ideology of sexism views intersexual and transgender people as abnormal for not following the traditional path of the binary sex-gender system, where there exist only two biological sexes—male or female—and whereby biological male subjects will acquire appropriate gender roles to become straight or heterosexual men and biological female subjects will acquire appropriate gender roles to become straight women. That is, one's biological sex determines one's social and psychological gender and one's sexual orientation, which is defaulted as heterosexual. Sexism, thus, overlaps with three other related concepts: homophobia, an aversion to homosexuality; an aversion to bisexuality; and heterosexism, the notion that heterosexuality is the only normal option of human sexual behavior. Simply put, one's gender role expectation is [Page 749]a specific heterosexual one. For example, when a boy or young man does not conform to the expected masculine gender role of being a “real man,” he might be teased and beaten up for being a “fag,” “sissy,” or “girl,” statuses that are less than being a man. These derogatory terms are to socialize him to become a real man who will be homophobic and misogynist. Sexism, originally conceived to raise consciousness about the oppression of girls and women, has evolved to refer to oppression of any sex, including men and boys, inter-sexual people, and transgender people. This entry describes issues relating to sexism.