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I was going to post this comment on the entry itself, but it's too goddamned long. Five comments-worth of response. I... wouldn't feel right cluttering up someone else's journal with THAT MUCH me.
The entry in question. Be warned, it's a doozy.
A Response to Dia.
Okie-day! I feel like I prompted this entry, so I at least ought to be a decent human being and respond. I promise I won't scream and swear at you, because that's just unprofessional.
I'm not going to address the parts about you personally or about ginmar personally. Quite frankly, that isn't my place and it would also be unprofessional. Ad hominem attacks suck, and there won't be any here.
I'm also going to organize my responses as I read, so that you know exactly what I'm saying and why.
Linguistics Class
Sociolinguistics is interesting stuff. I fully endorse overthinking and picking apart of all things, because I'm an anthropologist. If people stopped caring about these things, I'd be out a potential job.
Chapter 10: Gender and Language
It's not just words and the evolution of their meanings which reveal negative attitudes toward women, but also how women talk and are expected to talk, how men talk and are expected to talk, the power play in intergender conversations, and the continuing portrayal of such in culture (books, movies, advertisements, jokes, art, etc.).
I always enjoy discussions that include the participatory role women have in culture, even when that culture isn't always treating them favorably. I was pleased to see that this was included. I was also pleased to note that men are mentioned as being subject to similar social pressures as women.
Chaika writes: "the vocabulary of each language develops partly according to the priorities of its culture. The objects, relationships, activities, and ideas important to the culture get coded onto single words which are often highly specialized to express subtle nuances."
I'd like to see the other reasons Chaika believes language forms. I mean, the Sapir-Worf hypothesis is pretty well-regarded, and I certainly can see its value... but the word "partly" made me curious as to how that's qualified later on.
Importance V. Disvaluation
First note, and one that is totally useless for the purposes of this debate: Yay for Carmen Sandiego. Now, back to things that are relevant.
On the other hand, it is largely the same thing to--say for instance--say that a woman is chattering, gabbing, prattling, gossiping, or babbling.
This I take issue with. This is a bit of an oversimplification, and anyone with a casual interest in linguistics can take note of the importance of subtle differences. Why is babbling different from gossiping? Why do we use it in different places? The differences are important, and it seems to me that they're being smoothed over because they would problematize the point Chaika is trying to make.
Amongst the adjectives to describe such, none of them are exclusively female.
Again, we're dealing with generalities. How would Chaika deal with phrases like "meek," "modest," or "mild?" There is a difference, and I will point it out to save anyone else the trouble. These words attach a positive value judgment to women who stay quiet. They make these women seem desirable.
These were used more often in days when women were really supposed to shut up and stay pregnant. How would she account for their decrease in usage? Part of me is genuinely curious as to why such a possibility is ignored, and part of me thinks that, once again, Chaika is cooking her data.
No Honest I'm Not Feminist But
We cannot overlook the amount and quality of important research that has been done into these differences. Gender-biased language affects everyone, both males and females. (...)Yet, all male-centered accounts of society are woefully incomplete and inaccurate.
Uh.... I'm going to attribute the insane contradiction here to the fact that this was taken out of context and move on.
He defined feminism as 'wanting women to be paid as much as men get paid for the same quality and amount of work,' asked how many of us agreed with this--almost everyone--and then asked again, who was feminist--the same people raised their hands, and the same people who didn't, didn't.
Those people suck, because I think his definition is perfectly fucking reasonable and one of the more palatable I've heard. I wish I saw it in practice more, but that's an issue for another portion of my response. Suffice it to say, yay for your teacher.
We also saw a speech by someone who argued that social standards demand women look prepubescent (through shaving our armpits, legs, private parts, covering up the smells of such, keeping baby-smooth skin, idealizing 'small and short,' idealizing innocence).
I agree with this, and I'm glad to see that someone else has gone the route of the "nubile child bride" preference, because it's something I've considered as well. I would also like to mention that part of this is our culture's aversion to body odor. The sole purpose, biologically-speaking, of pit hair and pubic hair is to collect odor. Yes, to collect odor. How do you know if you should mate with someone if you can't tell what they smell like?
This is something we've largely moved beyond, for good or ill. I think that it's fair to take that into consideration when we look at why people think pit hair is gross. Obvious question to that is, "Why do we only want women to shave?" Well, I'd like men to shave too. I'd like everyone to shave. Lots of women don't want to stick their faces in a man's armpit hair any more than he'd want to do the same.
Onward
A person in who is gabby, talkative and gossipy, a nag, a shrew or a chatterbox must be a woman. What are the male equivalents? There are none. A woman is a nag when she asks for something too often. What is a man?
At the risk of a tangent, why do we have so many words for stupid men? I mean, if women have less to say and less to think, why is a bonehead or a meathead a man? Why isn't a dumbass a woman?
A man who bests another man or a woman is just being forceful. A woman who complains or criticizes is a shrew or bitch. What are men called who do the same? There is no single word for it.
We have lots of words for men who do these things, but offering examples won't disprove her point. I'm just stating for the record that Chaika uses way too many universal statements. As an anthropologist, I find that troubling. "There are no words for this. A man will tell you that," is about as accurate and faithful to reality as, "The Muslim believes this, and will do X if Y happens." People are people, and it's important never to fully rule out the idea of independent human action or response.
Chaika notes, as I do, that the hard-and-fastness of this is changing to a degree.
Agreed. At the risk of being nitpicky, if Chaika acknowledges the fluidity of these standards, why does she seem so comfortable making broad general statements about complex social behaviors? My point is that this still reads like a lot of old ethnography that claims to lay down the absolute truth about Culture X and their Barbaric Ways. Perhaps this is just a stylistic problem with her, and an unintentional one.
Degradation
It is probably not without significance that the surviving pronunciation for the abbreviated spelling, Mrs. hides the original derivation from mistress.
Perhaps it's because such a commonly-used term was abbreviated that its original meaning was allowed to diverge so strongly. Put another way, if we still pronounced "Mrs." as "Mistress," would mistress have ever taken on the meaning that it did?
Other than that bit of curiosity, I'm inclined to agree that the downward slide in merit attached to female forms of address is indeed notable. It's a good thing to point out, and Chaika addresses it well.
The difference is that, over time, terms for females in authority have taken on sexual meaning, but those for men have remained the same.
Setting aside sex, some terms of address for men have been "devalued" over time. The classic example is the Pulp Fiction "garcon means boy" scenario. it used to be perfectly permissible to refer to a young man as what he was... a garcon. But now it's a term for someone who serves you, hoping that you'll tip him enough that he gets to have a roof over his head. Kind of pathetic, certainly compared to its more "neutral" former meaning. Just a thought, because it was in my head.
Lady seems to have become a desexed term for woman. This, in itself, is noteworthy. Why do we need such a word for women. There isn't one for men. If gentleman ever was a candidate, it certainly is not now, as its usage is becoming more and more restricted.
Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding Chaika's point, but I'd expect her to be a little more hopeful about this. If part of her problem is that [+female] terminology attaches dirty dirty sex to women, I would think the situation with "lady" would be just the ray of hope she's looking for. She asks why we need such a word. I think it's a question she should have already answered for herself somewhere in the course of her argument.
Terms for degraded men aren't degradations of elevated terms. Rather, they are completely different: tramp, bum, stud, thief, pimp, jerk, dope, drip.
Let's go back to her initial statement. We have things in our language because we need them. We have them because they're important to us. Now why would we go to the trouble of constructing whole new words for men who suck in X or Y manner... if we didn't need them? If it were not linguistically possible for men to be degraded before, we made a point of including them. Does the fact that we apparently went to extra trouble problematize Chaika's argument at all?
...in some words denoting identical functions the feminine ending often carries the implications of less seriousness, as in poetess, sculptress, authoress. Apparently, for this reason, many of the older -ess words are rarely used today.
Once again, I'd like to see more optimism here. Isn't this what we want? Isn't it better for women to able to be authors, instead of being relegated to the status of authoress?
If a man is untrustworthy and adventurous, or if he takes sexual advantage of a woman, he is a dog; a woman who is a dog is sexually unattractive, unsuitable for dating.
Oh, gods. I'm about to argue semantics with a linguist. Wish me luck.
I have an issue with this, because it betrays Chaika's agenda once again. It would be just as fair to say, "If a man is a dog he is unsuitable for dating because he's untrustworthy; and a woman who is a dog is unsuitable for dating because of her appearance." If these are similar in meaning, why did Chaika choose the one that she did?
My answer lies in the fact that one impeaches the character of the man, and one denigrates the appearance of the woman. Which is a more serious offense? I'd say it's worse to be a dog if you're a man, because that has wider implications about who he is as a human being.
However, liberated or not, a woman is never called a dog in the sexual sense of 'rogue' or 'rascal' although a man might be. Beast shows a similar split in meaning. Of a woman, it means 'even less sexually attractive than a dog.' Of a mean it means 'sadistic, brutally strong.' Interestingly, "He's a beast" can be "vaguely attractive" as a former student Nancy Mello remarked.
I'm glad she brings up the animal imagery. Attaching animals to sex is a concept so basic no one here needs an explanation. Why do men get assigned different animals than women? Why is a man a beast and a woman a wildcat? Why is a man a dog and a woman a minx or a vixen?
Mary Lizabeth Gatta (1993), in a phone survey of college students, found that 13 out of 16 either think of a female professional as a prostitute or "admitted to being aware of a semantic connection between a woman professional and being a prostitute."
Whoa, whoa, whoa. First rule of reading interviews. Did the interviewer ask leading questions? "Excuse me. Could you possibly see a link between the term "female professional" and "prostitute?" That's a leading question, and I'm inclined to discount any conclusions based on that study as a result.
Male 'Subsuming the Female'
British Parliament? British Parliament actually concerned itself with a matter of gender, one which would codify inequality of men and women? A history of scholarship, as well as of laws, shows that codification of social inequality has long been a prime mover of both scholarly and legal explanations.
Um. Yup. This is news? Also, *points you to every ethnography written before the time of Franz Boas* The same thing was applied to other cultures as well. You know anthropologists didn't stop using the terms savages, barbarians, and primitives until the fifties and sixties? People catch on slowly, but they do catch on to pejorative terms.
As Gilbert and Mulkay (1984) has so convincingly shown, the findings in even so apparently a value-free and objective area as biochemistry are slanted according to the views of the researchers.
Yesyes. YESYESYESYES. See my last couple of debates about the biological bases of acquired social traits. Rehashing them here would be an unforgivable tangent on my part.
Speaking of Value-Free and Objective
Real experts of the time, pulling shit out their ass to justify...well. (...) People want to be right, want to see something, and want others to see these things so desperately, they...will...make shit up.
To be fair, a lot of social analysis does this, even feminist critiques. Stretch your logic a little too far and you lose sight of whatever evidence you were initially working from. I think that Chaika is guilty of this in some cases, but I've pointed them out on an individual basis.
As recently as 1973, the respected scholar Beveniste stated that men do the marrying and women are just the objects of marriage. This, despite the fact that English has allowed both female and male subjects of marry ("Jane married" is as grammatical as "John married" since 1325!)
So what Chaika is really saying here is that Beneviste's statement is unfounded in the very kind of linguistic evidence she's been using all along. If her evidence contradicts his statement, I think that's a sign that he's in the minority and, what's more, that Chaika knows it and has ignored it.
Chaika the Ginmarette?
Why are there words for women who do not put themselves forth sexually, all of them uncomplimentary?
General statement, one for which I can think of plenty of counterexamples. If I can think of them, Chaika could and just ignored them. I take issue with that philosophy about evidence.
Speech Behaviors
If most women (who are not powerful) speak a certain way (to pander to the powerful), what happens when a woman doesn't? To gather from reading Ginmar and comments therein, I'd say: shock, offense, anger.
At the risk of unfairly criticizing Ginmar, I wouldn't allow any man to speak to me the way people address each other on that particular livejournal.
Are women taught we must speak a certain way--described by Robin Lakoff as "weak and ineffectual"--which is not a requirement likewise of men? A man who is a subordinate in a work setting is still a man in society.
Chaika seems to be speaking in total ignorance of all cultures but America. To compare, men in Japan and India are frequently debased and emasculated by other men through the magic of beaurocracy. That's all I have to say about that.
The Womenz They Talk More
Once more, ZOMG Carmen. Back to your relevant crap.
Significantly our language has no equivalent terms for masculine domination of women.
Misogynist? Sexist chauvinist pigs? Every other word I've hear applied to men arguing with self-proclaimed "feminists?"
The actual evidence in interactions which involve both genders gives quite a different picture. As we already have noted, people are quite blind to the way they really behave as opposed to the way they think they behave.
Ha! An excellent point, and concisely-put.
Zimmerman and West comment that the right of females to speak 'appears to be casually infringed upon by males.' What this means is that both men and women subconsciously concede that men have the right to control conversation, that women may speak only if men wish them to.
Very interesting. I think this is too-often used as an excuse for discourtesy on the part of many women. The solution is for people who interrupt to fucking quit doing it, not for women who are tired of being interrupted to exascerbate the problem. Politeness should apply to everyone, regardless of sex. I don't care if "the men started it," is a good enough excuse for some women. It is my hope that a slightly more mature approach will dominate on the exalted Path to Solutions.
Who's Sexist? Ooh, I Am, I am!
As I have discovered personally, trying to separate the actions from the person--to, say, tell the person that they say and do sexist things, therefore attaching the qualities of bad and unacceptable to the actions rather than the person--is often heard as "You are a sexist person, bad and unacceptable."
Agreed. There are few things I hate more in a discussion than people who can't discuss their views without overpersonalizing. Why would you bother hearing someone else speak if you couldn't acknowledge that their words MAY be relevant to you? Cripes.
...they can dismiss the person trying to call them out on their actions as--well, anything they want. Crazy, feminazi, instable due to having been raped, needing to get fucked sense into anally.
I hate that shit. There is a big fucking difference between making a social critique and shitting on anything with a Y chromosome. Women making these critiques are often unfairly grouped in with those who are more interested in hate than solutions.
Creating an environment where it's safe and comfortable for people to express opinions counter to the status quo--counter to sexism and disvaluation of women--is also important.
Agreed. This is one reason I think it's so important for feminist critics to tread carefully. It's easy to be seen as a manhating feminazi, and there need to be more examples out there of level-headed, logical, and courteous discussions on the topic. That's what I'm hoping we see here, because this entry in your journal has set a good precedent. Here's to hoping people who comment on this entry follow your good example.
My last comment is one that may cause a bit of a ruckus. I know what kind of a ruckus. I can even describe the ruckus.
We can't fix this on our own. That's much like asking women to vote themselves into the supreme court.
If we define "we" as women, and "our own" as being "without men," doesn't that very statement reinforce and advocate the idea of men as active and women as the helpless victims men rescue?
This touches on something that upsets me pretty consistently.
Painting women as the innocent victims of a patriarchal oppressive Establishment is just as much a perpetuation of these "traditional" ideas as treating women like helpless victims. This doesn't empower women. It teaches that women are not participants in American culture, that women are blameless, that women are victims.
Until women stop swallowing this shit, they will be victims. And I don't think that's what anybody here wants.
The entry in question. Be warned, it's a doozy.
A Response to Dia.
Okie-day! I feel like I prompted this entry, so I at least ought to be a decent human being and respond. I promise I won't scream and swear at you, because that's just unprofessional.
I'm not going to address the parts about you personally or about ginmar personally. Quite frankly, that isn't my place and it would also be unprofessional. Ad hominem attacks suck, and there won't be any here.
I'm also going to organize my responses as I read, so that you know exactly what I'm saying and why.
Linguistics Class
Sociolinguistics is interesting stuff. I fully endorse overthinking and picking apart of all things, because I'm an anthropologist. If people stopped caring about these things, I'd be out a potential job.
Chapter 10: Gender and Language
It's not just words and the evolution of their meanings which reveal negative attitudes toward women, but also how women talk and are expected to talk, how men talk and are expected to talk, the power play in intergender conversations, and the continuing portrayal of such in culture (books, movies, advertisements, jokes, art, etc.).
I always enjoy discussions that include the participatory role women have in culture, even when that culture isn't always treating them favorably. I was pleased to see that this was included. I was also pleased to note that men are mentioned as being subject to similar social pressures as women.
Chaika writes: "the vocabulary of each language develops partly according to the priorities of its culture. The objects, relationships, activities, and ideas important to the culture get coded onto single words which are often highly specialized to express subtle nuances."
I'd like to see the other reasons Chaika believes language forms. I mean, the Sapir-Worf hypothesis is pretty well-regarded, and I certainly can see its value... but the word "partly" made me curious as to how that's qualified later on.
Importance V. Disvaluation
First note, and one that is totally useless for the purposes of this debate: Yay for Carmen Sandiego. Now, back to things that are relevant.
On the other hand, it is largely the same thing to--say for instance--say that a woman is chattering, gabbing, prattling, gossiping, or babbling.
This I take issue with. This is a bit of an oversimplification, and anyone with a casual interest in linguistics can take note of the importance of subtle differences. Why is babbling different from gossiping? Why do we use it in different places? The differences are important, and it seems to me that they're being smoothed over because they would problematize the point Chaika is trying to make.
Amongst the adjectives to describe such, none of them are exclusively female.
Again, we're dealing with generalities. How would Chaika deal with phrases like "meek," "modest," or "mild?" There is a difference, and I will point it out to save anyone else the trouble. These words attach a positive value judgment to women who stay quiet. They make these women seem desirable.
These were used more often in days when women were really supposed to shut up and stay pregnant. How would she account for their decrease in usage? Part of me is genuinely curious as to why such a possibility is ignored, and part of me thinks that, once again, Chaika is cooking her data.
No Honest I'm Not Feminist But
We cannot overlook the amount and quality of important research that has been done into these differences. Gender-biased language affects everyone, both males and females. (...)Yet, all male-centered accounts of society are woefully incomplete and inaccurate.
Uh.... I'm going to attribute the insane contradiction here to the fact that this was taken out of context and move on.
He defined feminism as 'wanting women to be paid as much as men get paid for the same quality and amount of work,' asked how many of us agreed with this--almost everyone--and then asked again, who was feminist--the same people raised their hands, and the same people who didn't, didn't.
Those people suck, because I think his definition is perfectly fucking reasonable and one of the more palatable I've heard. I wish I saw it in practice more, but that's an issue for another portion of my response. Suffice it to say, yay for your teacher.
We also saw a speech by someone who argued that social standards demand women look prepubescent (through shaving our armpits, legs, private parts, covering up the smells of such, keeping baby-smooth skin, idealizing 'small and short,' idealizing innocence).
I agree with this, and I'm glad to see that someone else has gone the route of the "nubile child bride" preference, because it's something I've considered as well. I would also like to mention that part of this is our culture's aversion to body odor. The sole purpose, biologically-speaking, of pit hair and pubic hair is to collect odor. Yes, to collect odor. How do you know if you should mate with someone if you can't tell what they smell like?
This is something we've largely moved beyond, for good or ill. I think that it's fair to take that into consideration when we look at why people think pit hair is gross. Obvious question to that is, "Why do we only want women to shave?" Well, I'd like men to shave too. I'd like everyone to shave. Lots of women don't want to stick their faces in a man's armpit hair any more than he'd want to do the same.
Onward
A person in who is gabby, talkative and gossipy, a nag, a shrew or a chatterbox must be a woman. What are the male equivalents? There are none. A woman is a nag when she asks for something too often. What is a man?
At the risk of a tangent, why do we have so many words for stupid men? I mean, if women have less to say and less to think, why is a bonehead or a meathead a man? Why isn't a dumbass a woman?
A man who bests another man or a woman is just being forceful. A woman who complains or criticizes is a shrew or bitch. What are men called who do the same? There is no single word for it.
We have lots of words for men who do these things, but offering examples won't disprove her point. I'm just stating for the record that Chaika uses way too many universal statements. As an anthropologist, I find that troubling. "There are no words for this. A man will tell you that," is about as accurate and faithful to reality as, "The Muslim believes this, and will do X if Y happens." People are people, and it's important never to fully rule out the idea of independent human action or response.
Chaika notes, as I do, that the hard-and-fastness of this is changing to a degree.
Agreed. At the risk of being nitpicky, if Chaika acknowledges the fluidity of these standards, why does she seem so comfortable making broad general statements about complex social behaviors? My point is that this still reads like a lot of old ethnography that claims to lay down the absolute truth about Culture X and their Barbaric Ways. Perhaps this is just a stylistic problem with her, and an unintentional one.
Degradation
It is probably not without significance that the surviving pronunciation for the abbreviated spelling, Mrs. hides the original derivation from mistress.
Perhaps it's because such a commonly-used term was abbreviated that its original meaning was allowed to diverge so strongly. Put another way, if we still pronounced "Mrs." as "Mistress," would mistress have ever taken on the meaning that it did?
Other than that bit of curiosity, I'm inclined to agree that the downward slide in merit attached to female forms of address is indeed notable. It's a good thing to point out, and Chaika addresses it well.
The difference is that, over time, terms for females in authority have taken on sexual meaning, but those for men have remained the same.
Setting aside sex, some terms of address for men have been "devalued" over time. The classic example is the Pulp Fiction "garcon means boy" scenario. it used to be perfectly permissible to refer to a young man as what he was... a garcon. But now it's a term for someone who serves you, hoping that you'll tip him enough that he gets to have a roof over his head. Kind of pathetic, certainly compared to its more "neutral" former meaning. Just a thought, because it was in my head.
Lady seems to have become a desexed term for woman. This, in itself, is noteworthy. Why do we need such a word for women. There isn't one for men. If gentleman ever was a candidate, it certainly is not now, as its usage is becoming more and more restricted.
Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding Chaika's point, but I'd expect her to be a little more hopeful about this. If part of her problem is that [+female] terminology attaches dirty dirty sex to women, I would think the situation with "lady" would be just the ray of hope she's looking for. She asks why we need such a word. I think it's a question she should have already answered for herself somewhere in the course of her argument.
Terms for degraded men aren't degradations of elevated terms. Rather, they are completely different: tramp, bum, stud, thief, pimp, jerk, dope, drip.
Let's go back to her initial statement. We have things in our language because we need them. We have them because they're important to us. Now why would we go to the trouble of constructing whole new words for men who suck in X or Y manner... if we didn't need them? If it were not linguistically possible for men to be degraded before, we made a point of including them. Does the fact that we apparently went to extra trouble problematize Chaika's argument at all?
...in some words denoting identical functions the feminine ending often carries the implications of less seriousness, as in poetess, sculptress, authoress. Apparently, for this reason, many of the older -ess words are rarely used today.
Once again, I'd like to see more optimism here. Isn't this what we want? Isn't it better for women to able to be authors, instead of being relegated to the status of authoress?
If a man is untrustworthy and adventurous, or if he takes sexual advantage of a woman, he is a dog; a woman who is a dog is sexually unattractive, unsuitable for dating.
Oh, gods. I'm about to argue semantics with a linguist. Wish me luck.
I have an issue with this, because it betrays Chaika's agenda once again. It would be just as fair to say, "If a man is a dog he is unsuitable for dating because he's untrustworthy; and a woman who is a dog is unsuitable for dating because of her appearance." If these are similar in meaning, why did Chaika choose the one that she did?
My answer lies in the fact that one impeaches the character of the man, and one denigrates the appearance of the woman. Which is a more serious offense? I'd say it's worse to be a dog if you're a man, because that has wider implications about who he is as a human being.
However, liberated or not, a woman is never called a dog in the sexual sense of 'rogue' or 'rascal' although a man might be. Beast shows a similar split in meaning. Of a woman, it means 'even less sexually attractive than a dog.' Of a mean it means 'sadistic, brutally strong.' Interestingly, "He's a beast" can be "vaguely attractive" as a former student Nancy Mello remarked.
I'm glad she brings up the animal imagery. Attaching animals to sex is a concept so basic no one here needs an explanation. Why do men get assigned different animals than women? Why is a man a beast and a woman a wildcat? Why is a man a dog and a woman a minx or a vixen?
Mary Lizabeth Gatta (1993), in a phone survey of college students, found that 13 out of 16 either think of a female professional as a prostitute or "admitted to being aware of a semantic connection between a woman professional and being a prostitute."
Whoa, whoa, whoa. First rule of reading interviews. Did the interviewer ask leading questions? "Excuse me. Could you possibly see a link between the term "female professional" and "prostitute?" That's a leading question, and I'm inclined to discount any conclusions based on that study as a result.
Male 'Subsuming the Female'
British Parliament? British Parliament actually concerned itself with a matter of gender, one which would codify inequality of men and women? A history of scholarship, as well as of laws, shows that codification of social inequality has long been a prime mover of both scholarly and legal explanations.
Um. Yup. This is news? Also, *points you to every ethnography written before the time of Franz Boas* The same thing was applied to other cultures as well. You know anthropologists didn't stop using the terms savages, barbarians, and primitives until the fifties and sixties? People catch on slowly, but they do catch on to pejorative terms.
As Gilbert and Mulkay (1984) has so convincingly shown, the findings in even so apparently a value-free and objective area as biochemistry are slanted according to the views of the researchers.
Yesyes. YESYESYESYES. See my last couple of debates about the biological bases of acquired social traits. Rehashing them here would be an unforgivable tangent on my part.
Speaking of Value-Free and Objective
Real experts of the time, pulling shit out their ass to justify...well. (...) People want to be right, want to see something, and want others to see these things so desperately, they...will...make shit up.
To be fair, a lot of social analysis does this, even feminist critiques. Stretch your logic a little too far and you lose sight of whatever evidence you were initially working from. I think that Chaika is guilty of this in some cases, but I've pointed them out on an individual basis.
As recently as 1973, the respected scholar Beveniste stated that men do the marrying and women are just the objects of marriage. This, despite the fact that English has allowed both female and male subjects of marry ("Jane married" is as grammatical as "John married" since 1325!)
So what Chaika is really saying here is that Beneviste's statement is unfounded in the very kind of linguistic evidence she's been using all along. If her evidence contradicts his statement, I think that's a sign that he's in the minority and, what's more, that Chaika knows it and has ignored it.
Chaika the Ginmarette?
Why are there words for women who do not put themselves forth sexually, all of them uncomplimentary?
General statement, one for which I can think of plenty of counterexamples. If I can think of them, Chaika could and just ignored them. I take issue with that philosophy about evidence.
Speech Behaviors
If most women (who are not powerful) speak a certain way (to pander to the powerful), what happens when a woman doesn't? To gather from reading Ginmar and comments therein, I'd say: shock, offense, anger.
At the risk of unfairly criticizing Ginmar, I wouldn't allow any man to speak to me the way people address each other on that particular livejournal.
Are women taught we must speak a certain way--described by Robin Lakoff as "weak and ineffectual"--which is not a requirement likewise of men? A man who is a subordinate in a work setting is still a man in society.
Chaika seems to be speaking in total ignorance of all cultures but America. To compare, men in Japan and India are frequently debased and emasculated by other men through the magic of beaurocracy. That's all I have to say about that.
The Womenz They Talk More
Once more, ZOMG Carmen. Back to your relevant crap.
Significantly our language has no equivalent terms for masculine domination of women.
Misogynist? Sexist chauvinist pigs? Every other word I've hear applied to men arguing with self-proclaimed "feminists?"
The actual evidence in interactions which involve both genders gives quite a different picture. As we already have noted, people are quite blind to the way they really behave as opposed to the way they think they behave.
Ha! An excellent point, and concisely-put.
Zimmerman and West comment that the right of females to speak 'appears to be casually infringed upon by males.' What this means is that both men and women subconsciously concede that men have the right to control conversation, that women may speak only if men wish them to.
Very interesting. I think this is too-often used as an excuse for discourtesy on the part of many women. The solution is for people who interrupt to fucking quit doing it, not for women who are tired of being interrupted to exascerbate the problem. Politeness should apply to everyone, regardless of sex. I don't care if "the men started it," is a good enough excuse for some women. It is my hope that a slightly more mature approach will dominate on the exalted Path to Solutions.
Who's Sexist? Ooh, I Am, I am!
As I have discovered personally, trying to separate the actions from the person--to, say, tell the person that they say and do sexist things, therefore attaching the qualities of bad and unacceptable to the actions rather than the person--is often heard as "You are a sexist person, bad and unacceptable."
Agreed. There are few things I hate more in a discussion than people who can't discuss their views without overpersonalizing. Why would you bother hearing someone else speak if you couldn't acknowledge that their words MAY be relevant to you? Cripes.
...they can dismiss the person trying to call them out on their actions as--well, anything they want. Crazy, feminazi, instable due to having been raped, needing to get fucked sense into anally.
I hate that shit. There is a big fucking difference between making a social critique and shitting on anything with a Y chromosome. Women making these critiques are often unfairly grouped in with those who are more interested in hate than solutions.
Creating an environment where it's safe and comfortable for people to express opinions counter to the status quo--counter to sexism and disvaluation of women--is also important.
Agreed. This is one reason I think it's so important for feminist critics to tread carefully. It's easy to be seen as a manhating feminazi, and there need to be more examples out there of level-headed, logical, and courteous discussions on the topic. That's what I'm hoping we see here, because this entry in your journal has set a good precedent. Here's to hoping people who comment on this entry follow your good example.
My last comment is one that may cause a bit of a ruckus. I know what kind of a ruckus. I can even describe the ruckus.
We can't fix this on our own. That's much like asking women to vote themselves into the supreme court.
If we define "we" as women, and "our own" as being "without men," doesn't that very statement reinforce and advocate the idea of men as active and women as the helpless victims men rescue?
This touches on something that upsets me pretty consistently.
Painting women as the innocent victims of a patriarchal oppressive Establishment is just as much a perpetuation of these "traditional" ideas as treating women like helpless victims. This doesn't empower women. It teaches that women are not participants in American culture, that women are blameless, that women are victims.
Until women stop swallowing this shit, they will be victims. And I don't think that's what anybody here wants.
