Consider the implications of usages such as the following:
- “Man is a mammal and suckles his young” - the human race is male by default; “Womankind” is a subset of “Mankind”.
- “The reader is entitled to his opinion” - if you’re female, you have to pretend otherwise to read legal documents.
- “Wizard” is praise; “witch” is an insult (abuse is the only field in which there are more words to describe women).
- “The UK’s greatest living author” is ambiguous; does it rule out the possibility of authoresses who are greater?
This doctrine of Male-As-Default treats women as a negligible subgroup, and femaleness as abnormal but always noteworthy.
Sexism is (in principle) avoidable in English, via words like “human, people, he/she, they”, and sex-neutral jobtitles where sex is irrelevant. Things are different in languages with grammatical gender: eg in French, masculine plural is “ils”, feminine plural is “elles”, but mixed groups (even of 99 women and one grammatically-masculine hornet) are “ils”. ..
Makes you think, doesnt it?
4 Comments
Although the things you mention obviously have sexist roots but arent they really harmless today? I mean i would refer to both – JK Rowling and a Jonathan Stroud as authors with no bias to the gender of either. Perhaps I would be grammatically wrong but hey its just like the ubiquitous “Xerox”!
Perhaps more dangerous would be the Ekta Kapoors of the world!
Hey.. Howz u? new template…coming here after long.. c y around
Posting a link to my old hindi article which has same theme but in different direction……
http://www.tarakash.com/ravi/2006/02/blog-post.html
hmm, true, how ever off late, i have noticed that every other actress is being referred to as ‘Actor’ on most of the media, I guess this is for the same reason, seems the word actress has disappeared from english in an effort of being non sexist.