Weekly Standard article again

Tue Oct 7 21:34:32 UTC 2003

If you're having trouble with the URL that I sent regarding antifeminist
linguistics, make sure that the link ends in .asp. The URL may be too long
to fit on a single line in your email client window. You may need to type
it into your browser manually.

Once again, the URL is:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/content/public/articles/000/000/003/113vubjh.
asp

Just in case, here's the text of the article. If you want to respond to it
by email, you need to register at the Weekly Standard website.

Mary
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When Linguists Attack
Fed up with the PC domination of the academic linguistics, one professor
fights back against the establishment.
by David Skinner
09/12/2003 12:00:00 AM

THE PERSECUTION OF SCHOLARS for gender bias, on even the flimsiest
evidence, has long been a fact of life in academe. Should one professor
write, "Mary entered the kitchen," another boils over with feminist
indignation, convenes a panel to investigate, and soon the whole campus is
sucked into a tedious speakathon on the evils of sexism. But more than just
the hobbyhorse of a few discontented radicals, heightened scrutiny for
potential offense to preferred political groups has become policy within
most disciplines. So it comes as an unexpected pleasure to see the practice
of telling scholars what to write and say receive the kind of treatment it
deserves.

Along these lines, in 1992, the Linguist Society of America began urging
scholars to use androgynous names when writing example sentences. The aim,
set in the Linguist Society of America Guideline for Nonsexist Usage, was
to get linguists to forgo stereotypes and to "avoid peopling . . .
sentences with just one sex." If anything, argued University of Wisconsin
linguist Monica Macauley and co-author Colleen Brice five years later in
Language, the official journal of the LSA, efforts to steer linguists away
from unsavory example sentences needed to be expanded. For a taste of
political correctness from its true vintage years, we'll examine their
article, "Don't Touch My Projectile." The title is a disingenuous play on
the kind of suggestive humor sometimes found in example sentences, which
the authors argue needs to be stricken from textbooks.

MACAULEY AND BRICE'S case starts from the illogical premise that much can
be learned about present-day bias in example sentences by studying grammar
texts from over the last 25 years. Thus do Macauley and Brice construct a
sample using texts that had been written before feminism rose to its
current commanding heights in academe. And a good deal of their criticism
proceeds from this historically skewed sample. For instance, after
complaining that women don't appear nearly as often in subject sentences,
they try to score an additional complaint from the fact that men appear in
a greater variety of jobs in example sentences. Obviously the latter is at
least partly a function of the former and not prima facie evidence that
textbook writers have narrow views of what jobs women can and cannot hold.

Throughout their piece, Macauley and Brice do much to call their own
reasonableness into question. At one point, they complain that men appear
more often than women as causal agents in their sample of example
sentences. And "in the relatively small number of cases where males are
depicted as experiencing emotion, they almost always experience
heterosexual affection." In a footnote, the authors write, "Thanks to
Siobhan Somerville for pointing out to us that such examples show
heterosexist bias as well." Indeed, these textbooks, which go back as far
as 1969, should have shown more sensitivity when it comes to the
recognition of gay feelings.

When not complaining about women's relations to the means of causality in
example sentences, Brice and Macauley complain about the actions associated
with women in example sentences, especially those that make women seem
bitchy. Verbs like "call, scold, yell, get angry, and shop" are all given
the sideways glance, even if they appear in a surprising and empowering
sentence like this one: "The woman scolding the policeman is my mother."
(Unlike Macauley and Brice, Mom here clearly isn't one to get over-worried
about the presence of masculine authority figures.)

Sometimes the efforts to ward off stereotypes become just nonsensical, as
when the authors complain that men appear too often with cars and that they
are always the ones fixing them. "No females fix cars in any of the ten
textbooks, while 53 males do so." According to the Department of Labor,
this is not only true of language textbooks: Less than two percent of
automobile mechanics are women. Also laughable is the authors' complaint
that "males far outnumber females (by a 6-to-1 ratio) as the perpetrators
of violence." Indeed, this is another stereotype that happens to be true.
Men are responsible for several times more violent felonies than women are.
It really is no wonder they should be responsible for more violence in
example sentences.

Furthermore, making a practice of having women fixing cars and committing
assault in example sentences would only single an author out as
tendentious. (Ex: "Ms. Macauley hotwired the car and ran over her
assailant, screaming 'Take that you linguistic chauvinist! Who's getting
tenure now?'") With academics like Macauley and Brice making the case for
expanded vigilance regarding gender bias and sexual stereotypes in example
sentences, no wonder this fantastical policy has come in for a beating. Now
the beating--the real beating, from a fellow linguist.

WRITING IN THE Spring 2003 issue of Language, Paul Postal of New York
University questions every possible rationale for the LSA's policy and
visits many an argument offered by Macauley and Brice. Stating the obvious,
Postal begins by noting that political considerations are not central to
the mission of LSA or to that of linguists generally.

Then with the most withering sarcasm, Postal attacks the LSA policy for its
exclusive focus on one type of offense. "There are many possible sources of
offense, for example, those involving personal hygiene or dress habits
(both potentially relevant to LSA meetings). Military organization and
children's summer camps have codes about such matters. Should the LSA
develop recommended lists of soaps and suggestions about how often to use
them? Should shorts be banned or ties and brassieres required?"

Next the respected linguist asks why the guidelines don't address
obscenity, racial epithets, "characterizations of people in drastically
unkind ways," and so on. Good question. "As a consequence of the
limitations, for no stated or justified reason, it accords perfectly with
LSA policy to fill one's examples with . . . the most vicious hate-spewing,
racially, ethnically, religiously, etc., demeaning remarks, but use of
'waitress,' 'chairman,' or generic 'man' puts one beyond the pale."

Almost as troubling to Postal is the threat to free speech represented by
the guidelines on nonsexist language. He compares the policy to the law
under which former French general Paul Aussaresses was prosecuted for
"trying to justify war." The law and its supporters, writes Postal, are
"incapable of distinguishing the content of views from the right to express
them." But here's the good professor's jaw-breaking punch: "Underlying that
incapacity is a dogmatic, total assurance of knowing exactly what things
other people should be allowed to say. I believe the same impulse underlies
the LSA guideline."

Furthermore, Postal points out, any standard that prohibits certain
language because of its' being "offensive to" a certain group or person is
necessarily subjective. This opens the door to a ban on words that merely
seem offensive. Postal cites the case of a fourth-grade teacher in Hanover
County, North Carolina who got in trouble last year for teaching the word
"niggardly" during a vocabulary lesson. When a parent protested the
racist-sounding word (which of course has nothing to do with African
Americans), the teacher was pressured to apologize, received a formal
reprimand, and was sent to sensitivity training.

Finally, Postal makes the rather daring argument that even if it were the
case that women readers were harmed by female under-representation in
example sentences, it still wouldn't justify the LSA's code. Pay special
attention to his brilliant argument by analogy: "If some research showed
that visually handicapped people are harmed by hearing or reading (in
Braille) references to sight, would that justify a code banning 'look,'
'see,' and 'stare'? . . . At best, it would create a potential clash of
distinct desirables (avoiding harm vs. freedom of speech; avoiding harm vs.
reliance on individual responsibility)."

Rarely does one see an academic go postal like this (sorry, you were
probably waiting for some more inventive play on this man's name), but the
LSA policy and its defenders are more than deserving of such extraordinary
orneriness. During the '90s, intellectual life on college campuses suffered
profound harm from the advances of grievance-committee scholarship.
Students who should have been arguing the relative merits of great
literature and philosophy got caught up in late-night bull sessions about
whether to call their female classmates womyn. Such victim-status politics
has given scholarship a bad name and detracted from the higher pursuits
that are supposed to the mission of higher education. Let's hope Postal's
attack spawns many imitators.

David Skinner is an assistant managing editor at The Weekly Standard.

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Mary Bucholtz
Department of Linguistics
3607 South Hall
University of California
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3100
phone: (805) 893-5415
fax: (805) 893-7769
http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/bucholtz/
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