I thought that the extension from “implicitly excluding women” to “making women feel unwelcome” was evident. Likewise (often) from “drawing unjustified generalizations about a class of persons” to “making a class of persons uncomfortable”. If it wasn’t, I apologize—consider it hereby explicitly stated.
As for Hofstadter’s essay, it explores a world in which linguistic genders do not exist and linguistic colors exist instead. The author isn’t racist, not in any strong sense of the word—the author is just following the standard convention of their hypothetical world by using “white” both as a race-specific and a race-neutral term. It’s obvious that you have a visceral distaste for calling black people white “in reality”, but given that—and this is the point of the damn essay—why do you consider calling womenmen acceptable?
I recently read Jaquez Barzun’s “From Dawn to Decadence”, which includes a digression on the word “man”. He notes that in its origins it actually is a gender-neutral word indicating person, with “woman” deriving from “wife-man” (man who is a wife). To use racial terms, this is not like appending “white” to words, because “white” means a color rather than person. It is like deeming non-whites “colored”, however nonsensical the practice may be (as illustrated in the poem “White Fella”).
I can’t recommend the book as a whole, when I hear the word “culture” I reach for my gun.
I used to mention that derivation whenever the subject came up IRL (with the rather unfortunate gloss that therefore “man” really was gender-neutral and women should not feel left out by its exclusive use), until I realized that usage 800+ years ago has little to no influence on the current meaning of the word.
No one ever noticed the fallacy, which is depressing now that I think about it. Don’t count on others to fix your thinking is the lesson, I guess.
The etymology of the word “man” is completely irrelevant to its present use. This isn’t some obscure term like “ironic” for which it would be reasonable to claim that common usage is mistaken—this is one of the ten most common nouns in the English language. The common usage is as the only formal term for male human beings.
Were this thread a discussion of the evolution of gendered terms in English, your remarks would be apt. Were it a novel argument in the dialectic of gender in English, your remarks would be apt. It is neither.
It’s obvious that you have a visceral distaste for calling black people white “in reality”, but given that—and this is the point of the damn essay—why do you consider calling women men acceptable?
Because it’s obvious from the context that by ‘men’ I mean human beings. If you put aside the chance that it will trigger certain biases in the reader, there is no reason to feel offended by the use of words like mailman… no reason except the unthinking reflex of political correctness that drives certain people to get hysterical when they read the word ‘nigger’, or to get offended when they hear Neil Armstrong’s legendary phrase (even the version with an ‘a’).
And yes, if we lived in a world where ‘mailwhite’ had the same (widely agreed-upon) meaning that mailman has in our world, it would be silly to be offended by it.
I thought that the extension from “implicitly excluding women” to “making women feel unwelcome” was evident.
If there are women who are made to feel unwelcome by my use of ‘him’ instead of ‘them’, and similar conventions, they’re hypersensitive, because it doesn’t implicitly exclude them: I don’t mean to exclude them, and anyone who reads my posts will understand what I mean; anyone who wants to understand and isn’t looking for an excuse to be offended, that is.
drawing unjustified generalizations about a class of persons
… is wrong because if we value truth (and we do), holding a false belief when it’s in our power to do otherwise is wrong. This being the website that it is, we don’t need additional justification to avoid such generalizations; there’s no need to bring offensiveness into it.
I thought that the extension from “implicitly excluding women” to “making women feel unwelcome” was evident. Likewise (often) from “drawing unjustified generalizations about a class of persons” to “making a class of persons uncomfortable”. If it wasn’t, I apologize—consider it hereby explicitly stated.
As for Hofstadter’s essay, it explores a world in which linguistic genders do not exist and linguistic colors exist instead. The author isn’t racist, not in any strong sense of the word—the author is just following the standard convention of their hypothetical world by using “white” both as a race-specific and a race-neutral term. It’s obvious that you have a visceral distaste for calling black people white “in reality”, but given that—and this is the point of the damn essay—why do you consider calling women men acceptable?
I recently read Jaquez Barzun’s “From Dawn to Decadence”, which includes a digression on the word “man”. He notes that in its origins it actually is a gender-neutral word indicating person, with “woman” deriving from “wife-man” (man who is a wife). To use racial terms, this is not like appending “white” to words, because “white” means a color rather than person. It is like deeming non-whites “colored”, however nonsensical the practice may be (as illustrated in the poem “White Fella”).
I can’t recommend the book as a whole, when I hear the word “culture” I reach for my gun.
I used to mention that derivation whenever the subject came up IRL (with the rather unfortunate gloss that therefore “man” really was gender-neutral and women should not feel left out by its exclusive use), until I realized that usage 800+ years ago has little to no influence on the current meaning of the word.
No one ever noticed the fallacy, which is depressing now that I think about it. Don’t count on others to fix your thinking is the lesson, I guess.
The etymology of the word “man” is completely irrelevant to its present use. This isn’t some obscure term like “ironic” for which it would be reasonable to claim that common usage is mistaken—this is one of the ten most common nouns in the English language. The common usage is as the only formal term for male human beings.
Were this thread a discussion of the evolution of gendered terms in English, your remarks would be apt. Were it a novel argument in the dialectic of gender in English, your remarks would be apt. It is neither.
Because it’s obvious from the context that by ‘men’ I mean human beings. If you put aside the chance that it will trigger certain biases in the reader, there is no reason to feel offended by the use of words like mailman… no reason except the unthinking reflex of political correctness that drives certain people to get hysterical when they read the word ‘nigger’, or to get offended when they hear Neil Armstrong’s legendary phrase (even the version with an ‘a’).
And yes, if we lived in a world where ‘mailwhite’ had the same (widely agreed-upon) meaning that mailman has in our world, it would be silly to be offended by it.
If there are women who are made to feel unwelcome by my use of ‘him’ instead of ‘them’, and similar conventions, they’re hypersensitive, because it doesn’t implicitly exclude them: I don’t mean to exclude them, and anyone who reads my posts will understand what I mean; anyone who wants to understand and isn’t looking for an excuse to be offended, that is.
… is wrong because if we value truth (and we do), holding a false belief when it’s in our power to do otherwise is wrong. This being the website that it is, we don’t need additional justification to avoid such generalizations; there’s no need to bring offensiveness into it.
It is evident that further conversation would be tiring and mostly ineffective for the both of us.