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From: vident@rmii.com (Vident)
Subject: Re: sexist language in German, Chinese and English
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Date: Mon, 23 Sep 1996 04:30:47 GMT
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"Peter D. Zohrab" <zohrab@xtra.co.nz> writes:
> Every adult native speaker of English is probably by now
> aware of the standard Feminist line on "sexist language" -
> in names for occupations, in particular.

A Feminist is someone who thinks a gender-neutral version of "man's
inhumanity to man" is "man's inhumanity to woman and man". (Or "males'
inhumanity to wymmyn and others" ... don't laugh, I've heard it get this
blatant, seriously)

> and Feminine forms in the one word.  That seems like a good
> idea, in principle, but the reality is that the written
> versions end up looking much more similar to the Feminine
> forms than to the Masculine forms.

Much like "sie" and "hir" in Femspeak-English, which are pronounced
"she" and "her"... That's gender-neutrality, Feminist style.

Feminists, perpetual superficialists, may point and point at that "man"
in "fireman" and shriek and shriek as if there could be no possible
questioning of their outrage, but...

        "-man a combining form meaning man or person; specifically a) a
        member of a (specified) nation, as in Frenchman, b) a person
        engaged in a (specified) kind of work, as in laundryman c) a
        person operating a (specified) device, as in motorman"
        [Webster's New World Dictionary Of The English Language]

If we generally take fireman or firefighter to mean a male human being,
it's because that's 99% who does the job. One can speculate that in a
few decades, that "-fighter" will be considered outrageously sexist in
its turn...


Had Feminists wanted gender-neutral language, the simplest, most equal,
and least *controlling* solution would have been to simply insist that "
'man' includes women too". Silly? Not as silly as "s/he", "his/her",
"him/her", not to mention "sie" and "hir".

But Feminists wouldn't do that because their aim is not what they say it
is.

It's worth looking at another interpretation of all this: What Feminists
really accomplish by this is to erect a lot of signs of their power; to
command a lot of public kowtowing to their ideology. They know full
well, as the Nazis before them did, as many other tyrants have, that the
more that people are surrounded by signs of their (the tyrants') power,
be it swastikas or s/he, the less resistance they will offer.


--
"If men were as bad as feminists say there would *be* no feminists"
