# Ageism and Sexism

> Thoughts on ageism and sexism

Thoughts on ageism and sexism

## Notes

When someone who is not familiar with stock trading calls themselves a "jurini" (a stock-market newbie, literally a "stock child"), at first glance it may seem unobjectionable because it is a self-deprecating expression, but insofar as it uses a particular group (children) as a symbol of immaturity, it is an <ageist> expression. In contemporary Korean, "being young" no longer directly means "immaturity." Asking a clueless person, "Are you an elementary schooler?" is the same.

Just as "disabled friend" is a discriminatory expression, "young friend" or "younger friend" is also a discriminatory expression. Tied up with [sexism](https://wiki.g15e.com/pages/Sexism.txt), people also often say things like, "How impressive, for a young woman." If you think about it, that kind of expression contains intentions like these.

1. Calling a young person "friend" is an expression of goodwill. Because they are younger, they are not actually equal to oneself, but one has bestowed the favor of treating them as an equal.
2. Young people are generally not impressive.
3. Women are generally not impressive.

There is discrimination not only against people who are younger than the proper age(?) but also against people who are older than the proper age(??). "Don't indulge the desires of old age," "age gracefully," "old people should not vote," and so on. In that sense, power according to age looks something like a unimodal distribution. There is a "normal" range, and once you depart from it, whether to the left or to the right, you become an "exception" or "abnormal."

Meanwhile, since all forms of discrimination are interconnected, and ageism is naturally entangled with sexism, the proper age(???) for men continues across a broad span, whereas the proper-age range for women is narrow. Expressions like "Men improve with age like wine, but women decline once they pass thirty" reflect this discrimination.