There’s nothing so insidious as the concept of a benign stereotype. It may seem harmless to say something relatively positive about a bunch of people sharing some superficial characteristic, but it does indeed cause harm in several ways. First, it has the effect of binding those persons up with a neat little bow so that other stereotypes (most negative) will more easily stick to them. Secondly, it places an unrealistic expectations on members of that group to uphold that positive stereotype when it may not be in their nature to (which opens them to more insults than they otherwise would be exposed to). Thirdly, most all “positive” statements about one group imply the reverse about other groups, therefore throwing an implicit negative stereotype coupled with the “positive” stereotype.
For example: gay men are snazzy dressers, women are sensitive, black people are good dancers. The implications being that straight men are bad dressers, men are insensitive and that white people cannot dance well. You may even know some people who meet these stereotypes, however, as sweeping generalizations, they are simply not true. It’s not even that there are only a few exceptions – there are lots and you’re doing a disservice to everyone by keeping these alive.
One of my least favorite “benign stereotypes” are those of astrological signs (a la pop astrology). Being categorically judged by your birth month, i.e., sifting billions of people into 12 groups, is asinine. Supposedly, it’s linked to the stars, but pop astrology is not at all linked to the stars because the exact time, date and year of your birth is significant to the position of the stars (a little astronomy could tell you this) and in fact, starwise, there’s little similarity between a single month across different years – the rest of the universe is not synchronized with the orbit of the earth around the sun. And since there are 13 lunar phases in a given year, but only 12 months, the date itself shifts slightly in terms of the regular lunar phases (the closest and likely the most influential of the celestial bodies).
I’m not sure why this lowbrow astrology is so popular these days, except maybe that it gives people something easy to believe in (like lottery gambling) without having to think too much. I’ve heard arguments that astrology is a very complex science which takes years of study, but that’s certainly not the kind of astrology filling up the newspapers, fashion magazines or the people’s heads who pay attention to those things, with their little charts of compatibility among star signs and ultra-vague “predictions.” Haven’t these people ever met someone with their same birth month who has a totally different personality archetype? Of course, critical thinking is a lesson that most culture does its best to avoid (owing that some traditions don’t hold up well to intelligent critique, neither does advertising, for that matter).
I have to admit that even the idea of my exact birth time/date determining my life’s destiny is disturbing (ironic, considering that I have give some credit to chaos theory [i.e., “random” events being deterministic in large, nonlinear systems], though I think it has to do with more than the alignment of the stars), but the idea of my birth month, irrespective of time or year having some strong influence over my personality is simply maddening. I understand that life is complicated and it’s difficult to navigate the world, especially social interactions with those bewildering homo sapiens, but do we have to oversimplify things so much? Does one characteristic ever completely define any single person? No, it doesn’t. Wake up and smell the complexity, people – let go of these stereotypes.