Understanding of Prejudice

Psychology Assignment
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Psychology Assignment
Prejudice refers to a negative perception about someone or a group that is founded on a prejudgment about the individual or group without any prior knowledge or experience. Gender prejudice, also known as sexism, is based on stereotypes (oversimplified prejudgments which can either be positive or weak) that gravitate towards the belief that one gender is intrinsically more valuable or superior to the other. Gender stereotypes refer to generalized presumptions about characteristics that are believed to be possessed by men and women or the specific roles that ought to be performed by each gender (Myers & Twenge, 2014). Although gender stereotypes can be both positive and negative, most societies tend to ascribe positive stereotypes to men, owing to their greater physical stamina, while giving less favorable ones to women.
Negative stereotypes are usually held by men, although women also have them owing to a lack of self-assurance imparted by societies’ prejudices. On the whole, sexism arises from cultural customs and often results in gender discrimination against women. The film Feminist: What Were They Thinking? Is a documentary by Johanna Demetrakas that is mainly built around a 1977 art photography book by Cynthia MacAdams (Demetrakas, 2018). In the film, she chronicles the experiences of various self-identified feminists, both famous and obscure, as they fought for the Equal Rights Amendment. More importantly, the film highlights the cost of sexism: many of the women who appeared in the book including Lily Tomlin, Michele Phillips, Laurie Anderson, Sally Kirkland, and Jane Fonda narrate how their entire lives were restricted by sexist gender expectations.
The film also underscores the tyranny of fashion, the push for abortions rights, along with the struggles of fighting a religious, cultural, and political patriarchy. Feminist: What Were They Thinking? highlights the personal stories of both white women and women of color who experienced untold cruelties in the hands of men as well as their demonization after shedding the cultural restrictions of their gender and embracing their full humanity. The film covers the second wave of feminism which started in the early 1960s and lasted two decades. Although the long struggle against entrenched gender prejudices is not over yet, the second wave of feminism, as highlighted in the film, is especially poignant because it reduced widespread public and private injustices against women. It focused on...