Gender Argumentative Essay

“Yeah man…” I once said to a guy I was talking to. His reaction immediately was, “stop saying man and calling me man”. Why? Why was it inappropriate for me to call a guy a man? Men say it to one another all the time and labeling a boy a man is typically a sign of pride for that male. So why was I asked to stop saying ‘man’? As the years have gone by my friends have come to accept that I tend to ‘talk like a guy’. I never minded this notion that I talked like a guy rather than talking “girly”, but it left me wondering why it was that I wanted this label of talking like a guy versus talking like a girl. Was gendered language so engrained and stereotyped in people 's minds that a female like me would walk to ‘talk like a guy’ to seem cooler? Or was it that many girls talked this way but were asked to stop by men because it …show more content…
This question can also be applied to gender. too. Do men and women have languages of their own? If gay men and lesbian women have different languages from heterosexual individuals then do different genders also have different languages? As I looked at the interviews my group conducted with both men and women I found that I could pull out more ‘gendered language’ within the male interviews. I examined what was said within the interviews that I had flagged as male language and these are the phrases that grabbed my attention: “I am really close to my guy friends no homo”, “No, fuck that shit”. These comments raised a few topics in my mind including the concept of male and gendered language and the construct of slang language and curse words. Analyzing my own experiences coupled with our group interviews, I concluded that ‘gendered language’ is not a grounded construct such as gender or race but is rather a societal construct with which we perform that has loose restrictions but still present expectations that become a marker of group