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Sexist language
The arguments may prove too much

Sexist language

Incision
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Posted 07/14/08 - 12:59 PM: Subject: Sexist language	#1
Some arguments against so-called sexist language don't hold water: admitting that man (say) can mean all humans, some people seem to incoherently hold that it still means only males. A better argument is that generic man connotes gender unnecessarily; any such word is sexist and should not be used. Studies show that man suggests male images to its readers, so one could easily find this a good argument. But feminism also suggests gender: feminists are presumed feminine, and some people protest that men can be feminists too. So if the argument against man works, so does the argument against feminism. It suggests that there are people men can't be and opinions they can't hold. It makes men invisible. So, is it more reasonable to reject man and feminism, or the arguments against them?

klubbit
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Posted 07/14/08 - 02:14 PM:	#2
I suspect part of it is that one definition of "man" is "a male". There isn't a definition of "feminist" that means "a female". In my mind, it's fine to use "man" or "he" if it's clear which definition is being used. Also, linking that usage of "man" with males, where there is no relationship, is different than linking "feminism" with females, where there is an actual relationship -- feminism concerns itself with women's rights and probably is largely a female movement.

Pete
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Posted 07/14/08 - 02:39 PM:	#3
I'm not sure this is a relevant difference, but I'll throw it out there. "Man" is ambiguous between its generic and its non-generic use. It suggests masculinity even in its generic use because it has a non-generic use that refers only to males. Now I think that what may bother women is this. Why do men get to call us "men" but we don't get to call them "women"? Or, better, why don't we both have to call each other "humans"? It's a matter of convention of course, but it's worth asking why the convention arose and why it persists. The suspicion may be that the convention arose and persisted because it just wasn't that important to know whether a speaker was talking about everyone or just about men--speakers were almost always talking just about men. If speakers often had everyone in mind, then it would have been more important to disambiguate and "human" would have had greater currency than the generic "man." "Feminist," on the other hand, is not ambiguous. Its suggestiveness of femininity is not built into the language in the way the suggestiveness of "man" is. Rather, it is a product of our assumption that most feminists are female. Women do not complain that the use of the word "doctor" is sexist, even though it is suggestive of masculinity. The problem is with our attitudes (or, since most doctors are men and most feminists are women, with our culture), not our linguistic conventions.

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Posted 07/14/08 - 05:08 PM:	#4
I think it is a language problem. I know of many languages where it is impossible to say any word without implying gender. It is part of the grammar of the language. Because it is part of the grammar and so common, I think it is better understood that words that can be explicitly masculine are all-inclusive, and words that are explicitly feminine are specific to feminine characteristics. They seem to have less of a problem with confusion between grammatical gender and actual gender. I also speak a few languages in which gender is generally absent. I heard a teenage girl tell her parents about a trip with her friend, and at the end of the story, still being asked whether her friend was male or female. They don't have any problem with gender because they can avoid specifying gender without struggling with grammar. Then there is English. Its a mish-mash of ancient Germanic and French with a lot of borrowing from other languages. All of those languages have a grammatical gender, but English dropped the grammatical gender, so English speakers tend to be overly-sensitive toward grammatical gender, assuming that the gender is explicit. The dilemma is between ignoring implied gender as simply grammatical gender, or changing the language to introduce a new vocabulary with plenty of neutral words. There have actually been several efforts to introduce a gender-neutral third-person pronoun to avoid the awkward construct of using "one" or "they" to avoid "he" or "she".
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enkidu
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Posted 07/14/08 - 09:25 PM:	#5
Incision wrote: Some arguments against so-called sexist language don't hold water: admitting that man (say) can mean all humans, some people seem to incoherently hold that it still means only males. A better argument is that generic man connotes gender unnecessarily; any such word is sexist and should not be used. Studies show that man suggests male images to its readers, so one could easily find this a good argument. But feminism also suggests gender: feminists are presumed feminine, and some people protest that men can be feminists too. So if the argument against man works, so does the argument against feminism. It suggests that there are people men can't be and opinions they can't hold. It makes men invisible. So, is it more reasonable to reject man and feminism, or the arguments against them? I think the comparison and "equivalence" between man and feminism, is not quite fair here. The usage of "man" as meaning human is a linguistic convention that reflects an order, a patriarchal order, and if you look at the etymology of "woman", this order is even clearer: woman actually is an alteration of wifman, where the wif means wife, so the woman seems to only access to nomination (existence as a person) by marrying a man. On the other hand, feminism is a movement of resistance against this order, but "feminism" is obviously a word itself that becomes a part of the order the movement is resisting against, and therefore, one can't reproach the abuse of the term itself to the feminist movement, this abuse is also the responsibility of the original discrimination of the language. To link the two in a kind of relation of equivalence seems to me a bit like equating an aggressing movement to a resistance movement. For other languages, as for in french for instance, which has a very distinctive gender marker, the same problematic exists at a social level, and feminist movements are also very strong (cf. Simone de Beauvoir). For chinese, to which swstephe refers (I believe), it's true that there is no gender indicator (except in the written form), which may be linked to the fact that some scholars think that chinese society may have had a matriarchal origin (actually at least one still existing people have a definitely matriarchal structure in southern china).
"The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know." L. Wittgenstein - The Blue Book "Only a Sith Lord deals in absolutes" - you know who

Kurt_Godel
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Posted 07/15/08 - 08:03 AM:	#6
swstephe wrote: I think it is a language problem. I know of many languages where it is impossible to say any word without implying gender. It is part of the grammar of the language. Because it is part of the grammar and so common, I think it is better understood that words that can be explicitly masculine are all-inclusive, and words that are explicitly feminine are specific to feminine characteristics. They seem to have less of a problem with confusion between grammatical gender and actual gender. I also speak a few languages in which gender is generally absent. I heard a teenage girl tell her parents about a trip with her friend, and at the end of the story, still being asked whether her friend was male or female. They don't have any problem with gender because they can avoid specifying gender without struggling with grammar. Then there is English. Its a mish-mash of ancient Germanic and French with a lot of borrowing from other languages. All of those languages have a grammatical gender, but English dropped the grammatical gender, so English speakers tend to be overly-sensitive toward grammatical gender, assuming that the gender is explicit. The dilemma is between ignoring implied gender as simply grammatical gender, or changing the language to introduce a new vocabulary with plenty of neutral words. There have actually been several efforts to introduce a gender-neutral third-person pronoun to avoid the awkward construct of using "one" or "they" to avoid "he" or "she". English is annoying. 'Quite a few' = 'Quite a lot'. The letters Q and X are redundant. Why spell it 'leopard' instead of 'leppard', or 'machine' instead of 'masheen'? And what the heck is up with the spelling of 'queue'?? Consider: http://users.tinyonline.co.uk/gswithenbank/funnyeng.htm

Incision
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Posted 07/15/08 - 05:21 PM:	#7
"Man" didn't originally mean "adult male," it had the generic sense first; a male was a "wer." For some reason, "wer" vanished and males were just called "men." And "wif" didn't just mean "wife" (although that is where we get our word), it meant "woman"; so "wifman" is like "womenfolk." So I disagree with Enkidu's premise: a woman isn't etymologically a "wifeman," she's a "womanperson." I don't see anything worse with this than redundancy. As for Pete's argument, I may not have followed it, so let me give my understanding. Once upon a time, "man" meant "male." Since people thought that only males mattered, you could conveniently refer to everyone (relevant) with just "man." Eventually people started using "man" to mean women also, but the word's history is tainted. If I've correctly represented him, I disagree with this argument also, because the generic sense is actually the original. Since these arguments are based on mistaken premises, are there any others that work?

Incision
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Posted 07/15/08 - 05:23 PM:	#8
Oh, by the way, Godel, that linked cracked me up. (Especially the "sauce unknown.")

Pete
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Posted 07/15/08 - 06:15 PM:	#9
Incision wrote: If I've correctly represented him, I disagree with this argument also, because the generic sense is actually the original. That is a problem for the armchair argument I gave--I didn't know this about "man."

SIR2U
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Posted 07/15/08 - 06:37 PM:	#10
The Adventure of English is an 8 part television series that gives a wonderful insight into the history of the English language. I won't post where to get it but if anybody is interested they can PM me.
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swstephe
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Posted 07/15/08 - 06:53 PM:	#11
I've dabbled with a few "conlangs", (constructed languages), in my youth. If a language gets accused of being sexist, there is a very easy fix, but very difficult to get implemented and accepted. The accusations imply that English would be much more egalitarian if there simply existed a vocabulary term for "groups of any gender", that was separate from "groups of exclusively male gender". We already have several words, "people", "humanity", etc, which are widely understood and accepted as proper English. Perhaps the complaint is against the general psychological feeling of "man" being more "classical", although that may be falling away. I don't find any difference between "All men are created equal" and "All people are created equal" or "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" and "One small step for a man, one giant leap for humanity". I would have thought that words having a dual role of male-specific and gender-inclusive words would diminish the role of the male to something "of no greater significance due to gender", while having gender-specific words would be some kind of anarchistic chivalry. But I guess, in modern times, being aware of something automatically makes it restrictive somehow. If that is true, then why isn't a reference to being "human" more restrictive than preferring the term "mammal", and why isn't being a "mammal" restricting our freedom to be treated as an "animal"? If we feel somehow superior for being "human", compared to a woodchuck, then why wouldn't having a gender-specific grouping word make that group feel unique and special compared to genders without a word.
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Mech
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Posted 08/05/08 - 12:03 AM:	#12
Apparently 'chick flick' is a sexist term to a certain person I know.. I find it humorous at how people so quickly accuse other people of things.
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Cuthbert
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Posted 08/05/08 - 12:38 AM:	#13
Incision wrote: Some arguments against so-called sexist language don't hold water: admitting that man (say) can mean all humans, some people seem to incoherently hold that it still means only males. If that is so, then women may enter a public toilet labelled 'Men', because the word can mean all humans, and it's incoherent to hold that it still means only males. But of course 'men' means only males in that context. And there are probably plenty of other contexts where it means only males. A better argument is that generic man connotes gender unnecessarily; any such word is sexist and should not be used. Studies show that man suggests male images to its readers, so one could easily find this a good argument. Yes, if you don't want to talk about men, then 'men' is probably not a good word to use. On the other hand, if you want to talk about men, then 'men' is the word of choice. But feminism also suggests gender: feminists are presumed feminine, and some people protest that men can be feminists too. So if the argument against man works, so does the argument against feminism. It suggests that there are people men can't be and opinions they can't hold. It makes men invisible. There's one wheel off that analogy. Feminism is so-called because it's about women's rights. The subject matter and aim of feminism is equality for women. So, because we are talking about women, the words 'women' and words with a 'fem-' stem are probably the words of choice. In the same way, if we were talking about men, then 'men' and 'masc-' stem words would be appropriate. So, is it more reasonable to reject man and feminism, or the arguments against them? I think it's more reasonable to reject the analogy and take the bus. If you're not talking about men, then don't use 'men', e.g. don't say 'the first men to tread the soil of Europe' when you mean 'the first people to tread the soil of Europe'. If you are talking about women, then use 'women' or some appropriate 'fem-' word, e.g. 'Feminism is a political movement, involving people of both sexes or none, to support women's rights.'

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