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Is stereotyping really just branding for people who don't have an identity?
This could be applied to many situations, but I was travelling to Edinburgh for the festival. I spotted two people sporting football shirts, in this case Rangers, who were playing in Glasgow at the time. One was an adult sporting tattoos with the word 'Loyal' on them the other was a fourteen {approx} year old boy with a signet ring, and earring wearing shell suit bottoms and looking at the retail label of a new Adidas white hoodie. I probably saw a couple of hundred people around the train, statistically maybe a fifth of them claimed to support Rangers, one or two may actually have been to Ibrox, but none of the rest felt the need to claim their allegiance in this way.
Similarly you have the stereotype of the salesman with his BMW. How he enjoys the engineering while he hurtles round the M25, drinking a coffee, speaking to his boss on the phone while steering with his knees I don't know. He has really just bought a badge not a car.
Or the fact that while only a small percentage of Hip Hoppers/ Rappers
have been in shooting situations they seem the highest profile, mainly for hyping reasons and as a result a segment of society feels that they need to use violence for street cred.
Back to my question, rather than a fallacy used by the uninformed to pigeon hole strangers, is it really a marketing exercise to sell trashy products to the socially vulnerable and who should be ashamed the stereotypers or the 'celebrities' that have formed the brands?
2 Answers
- Ray GLv 71 decade agoFavorite Answer
Stereotyping is a good idea taken too far. The fact is that without the ability to stereotype, you would not be able to function in the world. For example, you always know when you are looking at a chair because it has a sitting surface, a back, usually arms, and three to five legs most of the time. This is your stereotype image of a chair. Without it, you would have to learn every new type of chair you ever encountered as a new object, separate from all the others. You wouldn't know what it was until you were told.
This is also how we know a human when we see one, without having to learn each one separately. We go further to stereotype the two basic human designs, male and female, then a little further to stereotype races and ages and body types. You can take this to even more steps to recognize people by their region, occupation and other factors. Eventually, you can take anything too far, and there comes a point at which you cross the line with stereotyping, using it to brand all of a certain demographic in a negative way.
Hollywood has used stereotypes to death mainly because they are an efficient way to get a complex message out in a very limited time frame. If you want to give the idea of a rapper, then you get a black guy and put him in colorfful clothes and too much gold around his neck, holding a radio and dancing down the street. To show an evangelist, put a white man in a powder blue suit with his hair slicked back and a Bible in his hand. To show a used car salesman, just remove the Bible. You see where I'm going with this? Is it evil? Not always, but it can be. Most of the time, it is just the way to communicate ideas without going too deep into it. Otherwise, a 30 minute sitcom would turn into the Lord of the Rings trilogy trying to explain all of the details.
- 5 years ago
(I hear Freaky One could use a little "supplemental income...") But here are some more suggestions... 1. Mrs. Butterworth's younger sister 2. Janine Garafalo 3. A smiling, scantily clad Eskimo maiden 4. You, dressed in drag 5. Rock Hudson Hope This Helped...and...God Bless Strong Feminine Icons.