The sexist language of jokes column in Hello magazine

Since language is viewed as a tool to establish and to maintain a social relationship, it will become a very crucial thing to convey and to share ideas in certain communities, and it will also be a medium to strengthen and to defense their social relationship each other. Therefore, today’s language is not only a mean of communication and social interaction but also a tool for sharing the information of what is going on in the world. As the fact goes broadly, the society tends to rely on their language share on media, and media needs the language as the most effective medium to transfer the information to the people.

Recently, the media often creates and constructs the domination of men toward women which only can be reflected through the presence of the language. The sexist language is the fact which promotes the women discrimination and the word division in the media. Those discriminations in term of language usage bring a negative stereotype and labeling on women. For instance the belief those women are responsible for all the duties of household and they do not a high position in the society. Finally, those claims make women as a passive, exclusive, introvert, and narrow minded person.

This research uses a descriptive qualitative research because the researcher efforts in discussing, analyzing and finding the social phenomena which are running naturally; it is not a controlled or based on laboratory research. In this case, the researcher attempts to arrive at a rich description of the people, objects, events or conversations of the language usage that differentiate men and women or which insult women. After classifying the sexist languages, the data are presented and analyzed by explaining briefly in terms of the morphological process, the reason of using it, and the alternative words which are gender neutral to substitute the sexist languages. The description of the sexist words is directly linked and is described with the social realities.

The sexist languages which are found in jokes column of Hello magazine can be classified into three general types, they are sexism in words, sexism in proverbs, and sexism in swear words. Sexisms in words are the words which are morphologically identified by the use of man as generic noun that is noun referring to men and women, the use of he/him/his as generic pronouns that are pronouns referring to both men and women, the use of suffixes –man, –ette -ess and trix in occupational nouns and job titles, the use of pairs of words showing non parallel term between men and women. Sexism in swear word is mean taboo words or the words that have negative connotation, but they could be more understandable and more acceptable, for instance the word bitch and bastard. Indeed, sexism on the use of he/him/his as generic pronouns that are pronouns referring to both men and women is the most dominant findings in the jokes column of Hello magazine.