Gender neutrality and language

Thu Feb 28 22:17:35 UTC 2008

Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Gender Neutrality and Language

I'm politically liberal. I'd probably even go so far as to classify
myself as very liberal--I'm a registered member of the Green Party, I
give money to the ACLU, and support a whole slew of liberal social
causes (e.g. gay marriage, drug policy reform, gun regulation, etc.).
I do, however, consider my identity as a philosopher to supersede my
identity as a liberal, so I'm careful to critically examine even the
issues I support, and never blindly endorse a position just because
it's the "liberal" thing to do; this often results in shock and/or
outrage from friends and acquaintances when I refuse to support
traditionally liberal causes that make no logical sense--affirmative
action and militant feminism being two that come to mind. It's the
latter that I want to talk about today.

A good friend of mine linked me (indirectly) to a story on Feministing
(a feminist blog, in case you can't tell) criticizing another article
published by a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. AEI is a
very well known conservative think-tank specializing in policy papers
decrying all sorts of progressive ideas; I'm loath to agree with an
AEI fellow on anything, but this guy is correct, at least in part.

His position, basically, is that the huge feminist campaign to remove
'he' and 'him' as gender-neutral pronouns is, not to put too fine a
point on it, idiotic. His reasoning is that it breaks down the
elegance of the English language, making it difficult to teach
students to write without sounding hopelessly awkward, which including
'one' or 'he/she' in a sentence almost invariably does. See--even that
sentence was awkward. Most of his argument revolves around the
historical roots of the language and, in typical conservative fashion,
his desire that things stay Just The Way They Are; I don't agree with
that part, but I think his point is valid nontheless. Here's why.

The crux of the feminist argument is that words like 'mankind' (which
apparently conveys the idea that male is the "default" human) and
'woman' (which apparently conveys the idea that women are just
afterthoughts to men) perpetuate "The Patriarchy" (which presumably is
some kind of ruling cabal of giant penises ruling the world from a
smoke filled bunker somewhere) by...well, somehow. They're not too
clear on that, but they are clear on the fact that The Patriarchy is a
very bad thing, and that it's responsible for most (if not all) of the
trouble in the world. This irritates me for much the same reason that
Communism irritates me--it blames incredibly complex social problems
on a single issue, which is disturbingly myopic--but that's a post for
another day.

Several comments on the original Femisting post point to the fact that
'werman' and 'wifman' were the original words for 'woman' and 'man,'
and that the suffix -man simply meant 'human.' Eventually, as the
language evolved, the prefix was dropped from one and changed on the
other; nothing more insidious than that, and only a paranoid mind
could think that there was some kind of male conspiracy behind it. As
I said, though, I find these historical arguments more or less
irrelevant, as language certainly is alive and constantly evolving;
it's a symbolic means of expression, and the symbols have meanings
only because we, as speakers of the language, think they do. There's
nothing inherent to 'man' that means 'male,' and we can only
legitimately say that it means (and only means) 'male' if most of the
English speakers think it does.

Suppose I say 'The citizen approached the monarch with a deep bow.'
You understand just what I mean--that is, that the supplicant bent
over at the waist when approaching the monarch. There's no confusion
about whether I was talking about the bending action (a bow), the
weapon used to fire an arrow (a bow), or the front of a sailing ship
(a bow). Why is this? Clearly, it's because English is a
context-dependent language; the meaning of words is determined (in
part) by the other words around them. That's why we can have so many
referents represented by the symbol 'bow' without being confused; when
you add in spoken English, things can get even more complicated (as in
the bough of a tree). We call these sorts of words (the first set
anyway) homonyms--words that are spelled (and often pronounced) the
same, but have different meanings in different contexts--and I'd like
to submit that words like 'man,' 'his,' and 'he' function similarly in
our language.

I can say 'men have beards' and you will understand that I am using
'men' in such a way as to refer specifically to males--you get it
based on context. However, I can also say 'all men are created equal,'
and you similarly understand that I'm using 'men' in such a way that I
mean 'all people.' The two words function differently in different
contexts in just the same way that 'bow' functions differently when I
say 'Bow before me, mortals!' and 'Hand me my bow so that I might
shoot the apple from his head.' Homonyms. The idea that there's some
kind of latent sexism in this seems absolutely ludicrous to me; no
matter how the language evolved, the most pertinent fact of the matter
is how words are used now, and most people don't think for a minute
that I'm talking about the males in the group only when I say 'I'll
see you guys at 6 for dinner.'

My friend pointed out that, as a philosopher, I should be concerned
with getting the most precision in language that I possibly can. I
agree that absolute precision is needed when talking about complex
philosophical issues, which is why the specialized philosophical
vocabulary has evolved (just ask a philosopher of action what
'freedom' means sometime to see what I'm talking about). However, I
don't think that every day conversation requires this level of
precision, simply because absolutely crystal-clear definitions with NO
ambiguity at all aren't necessary for day-to-day communication; I can
rely on your knowledge of English grammatical and linguistic
conventions and your ability to deduce what I'm talking about from
context to get my meaning across without a specialized vocabulary.

For any academic inquiry, we should ask ourselves "what does it add?"
See my Pithy Mission Statement over to the right side of your screen
for more on this. One of the reasons many academics in other fields
(myself included) have difficulty taking disciplines like "Women and
Gender Studies" seriously, I think, is that so many of the issues
championed by those fields are utterly specious--this is a prime
example. The struggle to rid the English language of 'gendered' words
(which, if I'm right, aren't gendered at all) doesn't seem to add
anything to the academic discourse, and doesn't seem to advance human
(oh no! even 'human' has the word 'man' in it!) knowledge at all.
Instead, it seems that the only thing it does accomplish is the
creation of a problem that wasn't there in the fist place: no one was
thinking about 'mankind' in terms of gender until feminist 'academics'
made it an issue.

For the record, I'm all in favor of gender equality. I know it's a
virtual certainty that if this post gets seen by the right people,
I'll be called a "chauvinist pig" and/or an "agent of Patriarchal
oppression." I'm not. There are lots of great women, and there are
lots of sucky women, just like there are lots of great men and lots of
sucky men. We're all people. Get over it. If that's not feminism, I
don't know what is.

http://re-ap.blogspot.com/2008/02/gender-neutrality-and-language.html

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