The other sex

Today I was learning the new words in a chapter of Al-Kitaab with my teacher and one of the words was "to be equal". My teacher gave me the example sentence "in Islam men and women are equal". I asked her about the example of inheritance, for example a man with no wife and two children - a son and a daughter, dies. Is their inheritance equal? She told me no, the son gets twice what the woman gets but that's ok because the man has to look after a wife and a family so he should get more money. That doesn't seem equal to me but apparently it's better than pre-Islamic times so I thought that was a good thing.

Then a few new words later we came across the word for sex - jins جنس, which is used as a verb "to have sex" but just like in English, it is also used for the sex of a person ie. male or female. In this case we were talking about the sex of a person type rather than the verb. So when my teacher gave me the example - "the other sex" I knew from the context she wasn't talking about alternative sexual practices, she was talking about "the other sex" ie. female! I found that totally hilarious. How sexist!! Men are the main sex, women are the other sex. It reminded me of "the other white meat" advertising campaign and Fat Bastard from Austin Powers 2 --- Baby, the other white meat. I probably shouldn't have explained the latter part of why I was laughing because my teacher didn't find it funny at all.



http://www.videocaffe.com/video/dYOinpV2REQ/Austin-Powers--Chicken-In-Bed