Sometime ago, I asked Aya if she knew exactly what kind of work we do. Turned out that she didn’t. So I told her: “We’re scientists. You know, I do experiments everyday, just like the experiments we do at home. Tatay does stuffs on the computer. We’re both hakase.” Hakase (??) refers to someone who holds a doctorate. Aya knows this word because she watches Powerpuff Girls on TV, so I thought I’d use the word to give her an idea. In the cartoon series, the girls refer to Prof. Utonium as “hakase.”
Aya laughed out loud and said: “Eh? Hakase si Tatay? Ikaw rin? Pano ka naging hakase eh babae ka?” (What? Dad is a PhD? And you too? How could you be one when you’re a woman?)
Thanks a lot to the people who created Powerpuff Girls. You’ve inadvertently given my daughter the erroneous idea that for someone to be called Dr. or hakase, that someone has to be a man. But for now, I’ll reserve my rants about gender issues in another blog entry.
I couldn’t forget that incident, because it illustrated perfectly how many of our misconceptions could start early on in our lives, no thanks to the crap that we are inevitably fed by the media, friends and families, the very environment we grow up in. The images we see on TV or movies are very powerful in influencing our perception of so many things. (Image taken from www.tv.com)