With all due respect, Angua, but most educated Indian women are doctors. My family perpetuate the stereotype by screeching “But you’re Indian!” at me when I tell them I want to be a journalist. I don’t want to be a doctor. I hate people and I hate biology. But I’m Indian and I’m female, so apparently those little hang-ups don’t matter.
Another stereotype - people who spend time on the internet and know something of how to deal with recalcitrant computers are necessarily geeks with no social lives. I wear glasses, too, so I’m screwed. Apparently I have no “real” friends.
Oh yeah… I love calling tech support… we lost sync the other day… and I’m no computer genius but my husband certainly knows his stuff and he explained everything to me that I needed to know… so since this is the third time in a week that we’ve lost sync I call and she tells me to powercycle the modem… we did that… then we go through the rest of the script with her. She tells us the modem is broken since her board doesn’t show an outage in our area. miraculously the broken modem fixed itself 20 minutes later.
What cracked me up totally was the tech support person who explained to me when we had DSL that I didn’t have enough memory and that is why my DSL connection was slow.
All musicians/ artists are scatterbrains with their heads in the clouds who couldn’t possibly do a ‘real’ job that involves responsibilty and organisation. - That one annoys me.
Also - All Irish drink Guinness and are practically alcoholics. OK I can see where the stereotype comes from seeing as some Irish people seem so eager to live up to it, but we’re not all like that by any means. I drink but I don’t drink eccessively and I despise Guinness - and I’m not the only one.
All people with OCD are control freaks, all people with tourette syndrome cuss like a sailor and bark like a dog, all Democrats favor taxes and unions, and the one that peeves me the most:
All home schoolers are ultra right wing, conservative Christians who want to shelter their kids from the “real world” and eventually drown them in a bathtub.
It amazes me how many people are unable to wrap their heads around the concept of a liberal home schooler.
Actually, YoudNeverGuess, the one I’ve heard is that all musicians are using drugs. Because it’s the only way they can maintain their creativity and the hectic touring schedules.
I have this conversation with my mother at least once a year (by now it’s more like a skit). She starts out by asking if a good (professional musician) friend of mine (whom I’ve known since high school) is using drugs.
I tell her, honestly, that I have no idea.
“Yes you do,” she says, giving me that “Omniscient Mother” look.
Argument ensues.
Furthermore, the ensuing argument ends up turning into an argument about whether or not my friend’s husband (who is also a professional musician) sleeps around. He DOES, of course, because they’re in different bands and so often go weeks without seeing each other when they’re both on tour. :rolleyes:
It’s a no-win, that one.
(Funny, though, how my mother never figures that SHE (my friend) sleeps around, only that HE does–but they’re BOTH, of course, on drugs.)
I guess I’m on the opposite end of the spectrum–I think of homeschoolers as largely liberal, with the rule-exception Christian Fundie thrown in here and there.
I guess I think of homeschoolers in general as those who are dissatisfied by the current system and, as one with liberal leanings myself, I see that dissatisfaction resulting from the rigid/conservative atmosphere of a lot of public schools.
I also see homeschoolers as people who are smart enough to be teachers . . . and as we all know, liberals are far smarter than conservatives.
Oy! Hey! I’m conservative, thankyouverymuch! And interestingly enough, we’re planning on homeschooling when we have kids.
*UnwrittenNocturne, of course goths have better fashion sense than everyone else. Also very good music.
Oh, I don’t like that all pro-lifers are automatically assumed to be deranged clinic-bombing Bible-thumping middle-class evil people. It’s possible to be pro-life without desiring to blow pro-choicers up. It really is.
:smack:, LoneRaven, I have a large number of educated female Indian freinds, and there’s roughly a 50:50 split between doctors and solicitors. That could, however, simply be a quirk within my community.
I hate the sterotype that men can’t care for kids or are inept in the house.
A recent commercial I hate shows a child that spilled something all over the kitchen floor. The father arrives to gape open-mounted at the child for a three-count, then says, “Where’s your Mother?”. Mom is, of course, shopping at the big weekend sale.
In my house, I grab the broom and the kid and I clean it up.
Men also order out for all meals or must have an easy-to-do packaged dinner. “So simple to prepare, a Man could do it.”
When my wife is out of the house for the day, I’m not “babysitting” for the day, as many friends would claim. I’m “parenting”, thankyouverymuch, and I’m pretty good at it.
Here in the US, most of the Indian women I’ve met have been doctors too, but I’ve always chalked that up to just not having much contact with the Indian community so the doctors are the only ones I happen to run into. The only other time I ever hear about Indian women is in news stories where they’re always very well educated and all in different, terribly interesting careers - so you may both be pleased to hear that at least one white person has a stereotype of Indian women as being intelligent people breaking ground in all sorts of exciting fields. I realize that can’t be true of all of them either, but at least it seems more positive than what you’re used to hearing.
Besides the usual gender/race biases, the one that affects and therefore peeves me most is the one about tattooed people, particularly women. As I brought up in another thread, I once had a doctor insist I had hepatitis, and she was gonna test me for hepatitis every day until I tested positive, dammit! Once I went to another doctor and had my gallbladder removed, oddly enough, my ‘hepatitis’ went away. Similar thing happened once when, without thinking, I took Sudafed with a prescription med when I shouldn’t have. I ended up in the hospital having a panic attack. They checked me in, and as I was getting ready for bed, I looked through my bag to find an elastic to tie back my hair. The nurse saw my tattoos and assumed I wanted an elastic so I could shoot up right there! Along the same lines, I once read an article headlined something like “Tattooed Women Have More Trouble Giving Birth.” The story was actually that tattooed women are more likely to smoke, drink, and use drugs, and therefore more likely to have trouble giving birth. I have 12 tattoos, but have never smoked or used recreational drugs - which people just never want to believe, but it’s a fact - and rarely drink, so how does this apply to me?
I hear you on that one. OK, so I am not a woman. But I do have a number of tattoos, and piercings, and I am, and have been since the early 80’s, what is commonly described a gothic.
hence: I must be an idiot.
I am a target for every redneck to attack
in a physical fashion.
I eat babies.
I could not possibly have graduated at the head of my philosophy class at university.
Well you are in Australia right? They probably think you’re a dingo. :eek:
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
Actually I was amused by your story in the celebrity Doper thread about the kid saying you were the devil. My ex’s mother used to say the same about me… she told him his soul was in mortal peril, based entirely on my tattoos and the fact that I was brazen enough to kiss him in the backyard where any neighbor looking over the six food fence could see. Funny thing was, she never knew that he’s an atheist, I have a pretty strong belief in God despite my lack of participation in organized religion, and the only reason he called her once we lived together was because I made him.
Yup, everyone knows tattoos are evil, probably inked by Nyarlahotep or something :rolleyes:
I have gotten to the point where I play up the stereotypes a bit, its easier sometimes, and I am always amused by a statement from a movie (the name of which eludes me) “Its amazing how interesting people become when they think you are really really stupid”.
Amen! This is also a peeve of mine. I do a damn good job looking after my kids, and it bugs me to see this kind of “Dad’s an idiot” stereotype. I too do not “babysit” my own kids. I look after them because I’m their parent, not because my wife “made me”.
I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate stereotypes about Los Angeles. People have all these images of rich, convertiable driving blondes who surf every weekend, have perfect tans, act in their spare time, then come home to mansions with palm trees in their front lawns. Are they kidding? Have any of the people who hold these bizarre images ever been to LA? Roughly half of LA’s population is homeless. I wish I were kidding. These tanned wannabe actors with the breast implants don’t even live in LA. They live near it, but since everyone seems to call everything south of Bakersfield Los Angeles, real Los Angelinos got branded with the images of people in surrounding cities such as Beverly Hills, Hollywood, even OC. For Og’s sake, anyone who can afford saline and salon tans doesn’t live in LA proper. That’s for damn sure.
