Estereotipos

Stereotypes

Recently, Lifetime Movie Network premiered a movie entitled The Pregnancy Project. The movie is based on the true story of Gaby Rodriguez, an 18 year old from Washington State, whoduring most of her senior year chose to fake a pregnancy as part of her research on “Stereotypes, Rumors and Statistics”. This movie attempts the formidable task of confronting our culture with itsfixed ideas about teen pregnancy. The difficulty of this undertaking lies in that, although most people aren't always aware they are stereotyping, everyone does it because it is part of the individual’sthinking process.

The history of the word stereotype takes us back 200 years to the world of printing. It is conformed of two Greek words, stereos meaning, firm, solid, and typos meaning,impression. Its original use was to identify a duplicate impression of a solid printing plate. The more modern definition of the word is more easily recognized: a widely agreed upon, simplistic representationor idea, of a particular type of individual or object. Unlike prejudices, stereotypes are not usually hostile, but similar to prejudices, they are based on assumptions. With no effort, examples ofstereotyping come to our minds. “Men don’t cry because they are tough!” “Blondes are dumb!” “Mexicans have a bunch of kids!” Why does stereotyping come so effortlessly to us all?

Regardless ofour IQ levels, it is inconceivable for any of us to grasp all the subtleties, varieties or differences we encounter in our environment. We all attempt to simplify and make sense of our world by the useof categories. These groups – of people, places and things – are used to better comprehend our surroundings. For most of us, stereotyping is a psychological shortcut to classify information in ourminds and it can be said that, to categorize, makes us human.

However, it may be argued that stereotyping is an untamed form of categorizing. As seen in the examples above, stereotypes...