Welcome back to your daily, weekly, well dose of Aijuswanarite :D Today we will be discussing sexism.

I started thinking about this again when one of my friends inflicted a bbm forward on me. The forward was the old riddle about the man and his son in an accident. The father dies and the son is brought to the hospital. When he gets to the operating table, the doctor takes one look at him and says "I cannot operate this is my son". The riddle then asks you who the doctor is.

When I received this, I immediately lambasted my friend for picking such a stale riddle to present to the world. I was sure that everyone who read it would know the answer even if they had never seen the riddle before. 10 mins later a few of the responses received were:

a) Gaylord couple
b) A spirit
c) can't be surgeon's son
d) surgeon played away
e) Its impossible
f) I don't know
g) its too hard

I was stunned. However it did put me in mind of the Implicit Harvard tests that I blogged about a long while ago. In that the question kind of acts as an implicit test of sexism because it plays on preconceived notions of gender roles.

As a result of this, anybody that reads/hears that riddle and doesn't know the answer demonstrably finds it hard to think of the mother as the surgeon. To my mind, not being able to do this means that on some level you are sexist. Though it is possible to argue that the "gaylord couple" answer is correct as it is a valid answer to the question.

Though I would argue that the gay answer even though correct is even more sexist, because the person would have to think that it is more likely that a gay man is the father of the boy rather than a woman. Though I suppose the person gets some bonus points for a lack of homophobia.

So can you guys think of any other thing that can be used as barometers of sexism in addition to its regular? I was going to mention trying to defend 1 Timothy 2:12 as an example but that is too obvious even for me. So what you guys & gals got?