Men Are More Meaningful Cows

As I began reading Chapter 2... my eyes immediately turned to the two lines on the second page.

"The baby cried. The mother picked it up."
"The baby cried. The mother ate a salami sandwich."

I read these two lines aloud to a friend and his response? "That's a woman for ya, eating a sandwich instead of picking up her crying baby."

After laughing, and then scolding him I began to think about his response a little more.

Lakoff says that the first response seems more natural than the second, a familiar cause and effect relationship. So why then did my friend hear the second statement and respond as if it were just as natural as the first? Perhaps like Lakoff says this is based on his own individual prior experience, that he knew someone who wasn't a very good mother or that he has his own set of stereotypes about women and their roles in society.

The section on The Markedness of the Femine (And the Female) was particularly interesting. I don't often analyze the way gender plays a role in language and how words reflect a woman's place in the world. When Lakoff gives the example of her youth when female physicians were referred to as a woman or lady doctor while the men were never referred to by their gender I am reminded of a riddle I once heard. I think it went something like, "A father and son are in a car accident and the father dies. The son goes to the hospital, and upon entering the room the doctor says, "I can't operate on him, that's my son." The point of it, is that the doctor is his mother, though most automatically assume that the doctor is male and are faced with confusion.

On a closing note to this somewhat random blog...
When we talk about animal species in general men get to be tigers and women get to be cows?!
There are just so many typical common cows out there that I guess they just have to be feminine.