So we should not stereotype people’s geneder based on the fact that they post on geeky websites (stereotypically male) but we should stereotype people based on their association with unicorns (stereotypically female, supposedly)?
(And why are unicorns supposed to be stereotypically girly? Horses are typically a symbol of strength and masculinity. So an horse with a large horn on its forehead, well...)
So do you maintain that it reasonably possible to infer Alicorn’s gender by her nickname?
To the extent that inferring that female gender is more likely from a feminine name is “stereotyping” then sure I endorse stereotyping.
To answer the question again:
So we should not stereotype people’s geneder based on the fact that they post on geeky websites (stereotypically male) but we should stereotype people based on their association with unicorns (stereotypically female, supposedly)?
You should “stereotype” (which you seem to be using to mean ‘update in response to information’) based on both. Social tact dictates that some care should be taken to avoid making mistakes. Getting pronouns wrong is embarrassing, particularly if someone is around to play offense. If you aren’t sure it is safer to rephrase the sentence such that it doesn’t rely on gendered pronouns.
If the nickname was obviously a femmine one, (e.g. ‘Jane’), or even something more exotic but still recognizably femmine (e.g. ‘Aerith’) I would agree.
But you could infer that ‘Alicorn’ was a femmine name only through the association between interest in unicorns and being female (which is specifict to some subcultures). That doesn’t seem to me any less stereotypical than inferring that somebody is male through the association between nerd interests and being male (which, on the other hand, is supported by statistical evidence and AFAIK occurs in any culture).
Social tact dictates that some care should be taken to avoid making mistakes. Getting pronouns wrong is embarrassing, particularly if someone is around to play offense.
Wei Dai argues that offense is a response to a perceived threat to one own status. He also cautions about oversensitivity.
It doesn’t seem to me that getting a pronoun wrong because you didn’t datamine the Internet for personal information just to get a pronoun right is an attack to someone status.
True, you could use gender-neutral constructions. I’m not a native English speaker, but I suspect that many native speakers find constructions such as ‘he or she’, the epicene ‘they’ or paraphrases like ‘this person’ excessively artificial and unidiomatic for informal speech.
After all, why should you assume that somebody over the Internet will be offended if you incorrectly guess the content of their pants? Isn’t equality feminism all about not caring about what kind of genital organs people have got, except on issues directly related to these organs?
If somebody posted a comment like: “Every woman knows that babies are cuter than rabbits. It’s in our maternal instinct. This guy doen’t know what he’s talking about.” then Alicorn could be reasonably offendend, since this comment would imply that she was defective as a woman and hence it would lower her status. But that’s not what was posted. The poster actually liked the article, she (*) just got one pronoun wrong.
(* the ‘Sharon’ signature and the remark about being a mother are definitely enough evidence to infer that the poster is a she)
Wei Dai argues that offense is a response to a perceived threat to one own status. He also cautions about oversensitivity.
Not being oversensitive yourself is a good practice, dismissing the possibility that another will be offended by something you do is called “insensitive”. Yes, sometimes you should take a stand and decide that a person getting offended about a particular thing is their problem, not yours (otherwise you give them complete control over you). However I don’t think someone being mildly (or occasionally significantly) offended when people get their sex wrong is really the place to draw the battle lines.
It doesn’t seem to me that getting a pronoun wrong because you didn’t datamine the Internet for personal information just to get a pronoun right is an attack to someone status.
Some people get offended if you call them a girl when they are a boy and vice versa. That is all. Either ignore this and be considered an ass by said people (and some observers) or take some degree of care to get it right.
I wasn’t really sure how to word that sentence to strike the right emotional note (I’ve changed it a little, hopefully for the better).
I think it’s legitimate to argue “you should not make assumptions about gender until you have some actual evidence to go on. ” I don’t think it’s legitimate to argue “my name relates to unicorns therefore you should assume I’m a girl.” Either people associate the word alicorn with femininity or they don’t. And since this issue has come up multiple times, apparently enough people don’t make that association that it’s an issue.
I also don’t think the world would be a better place if more people DID think Alicorn was a girly name. My favorite game is Robot Unicorn Attack. I’ve considered buying Invisible Pink Unicorn Merchandise. I don’t feel a need to associate my identity with it, but I think it’d be a better world if preference for unicorns didn’t signal gender or sexuality at all.
I don’t feel a need to associate my identity with it, but I think it’d be a better world if preference for unicorns didn’t signal gender or sexuality at all.
You’d better not move to Germany. Chairs have a masculine sexual identity.
Slavic languages also assign a grammatical gender to every noun, and there’s nothing sexual about it. (I certainly find nothing sexual about stars, books, rivers, or mathematics being feminine.) Even for nouns that denote humans and other living creatures with biological sex, the correlation between grammatical gender and biological sex is high but still not perfect.
The gender defaults are mostly masculine (though with some exceptions), and it would be impossible to change that without rewriting the grammar of the language altogether, which is why the entire business over gender-neutral language in English has always seemed absurd to me. On the upside, it’s almost impossible to speak without revealing whether you’re male or female, since you have to refer to your attributes and actions using adjectives and even verbs inflected for gender, so confusions of this sort are almost impossible (however this can make it impossible to translate literature where a character’s sex is supposed to be hidden).
IIRC, Germans, Italians, &c. will describe the same objects differently based on the grammatical gender of the word describing it; i.e., speakers of a language in which “bridge” is masculine will emphasize a bridge’s strength and stability vs beauty and grace, and visa versa, &c. So gender in the wider sense interacts with it somewhat.
On a lighter note, Mark Twain had a typically great passage which he claimed to be a literal translation of a German story, the main humor being that various inanimate objects are referred to as hes and shes while the hapless fishwife has to get by on its.
The “bridge” study was by Lera Boroditsky, as discussed here. Her papers are available here—it looks like the most relevant is:
Boroditsky, L., Schmidt, L., & Phillips, W. (2003). Sex, Syntax, and Semantics. In Gentner & Goldin-Meadow (Eds.,) Language in Mind: Advances in the study of Language and Cognition.
You may not count it but I dispute the ‘simple’ word.
So we should not stereotype people’s geneder based on the fact that they post on geeky websites (stereotypically male) but we should stereotype people based on their association with unicorns (stereotypically female, supposedly)?
(And why are unicorns supposed to be stereotypically girly? Horses are typically a symbol of strength and masculinity. So an horse with a large horn on its forehead, well...)
No, all people who stereotype are evil and probably also kill puppies.
(Alternately, “I said nothing in the grandparent that advocates stereotyping of anything by anything, you are being logically rude”.)
So do you maintain that it reasonably possible to infer Alicorn’s gender by her nickname?
If you do, please explain how this is not stereotyping. If you don’t, I apologize for misunderstanding your remark.
To the extent that inferring that female gender is more likely from a feminine name is “stereotyping” then sure I endorse stereotyping.
To answer the question again:
You should “stereotype” (which you seem to be using to mean ‘update in response to information’) based on both. Social tact dictates that some care should be taken to avoid making mistakes. Getting pronouns wrong is embarrassing, particularly if someone is around to play offense. If you aren’t sure it is safer to rephrase the sentence such that it doesn’t rely on gendered pronouns.
If the nickname was obviously a femmine one, (e.g. ‘Jane’), or even something more exotic but still recognizably femmine (e.g. ‘Aerith’) I would agree.
But you could infer that ‘Alicorn’ was a femmine name only through the association between interest in unicorns and being female (which is specifict to some subcultures). That doesn’t seem to me any less stereotypical than inferring that somebody is male through the association between nerd interests and being male (which, on the other hand, is supported by statistical evidence and AFAIK occurs in any culture).
Wei Dai argues that offense is a response to a perceived threat to one own status. He also cautions about oversensitivity.
It doesn’t seem to me that getting a pronoun wrong because you didn’t datamine the Internet for personal information just to get a pronoun right is an attack to someone status.
True, you could use gender-neutral constructions. I’m not a native English speaker, but I suspect that many native speakers find constructions such as ‘he or she’, the epicene ‘they’ or paraphrases like ‘this person’ excessively artificial and unidiomatic for informal speech.
After all, why should you assume that somebody over the Internet will be offended if you incorrectly guess the content of their pants? Isn’t equality feminism all about not caring about what kind of genital organs people have got, except on issues directly related to these organs?
If somebody posted a comment like: “Every woman knows that babies are cuter than rabbits. It’s in our maternal instinct. This guy doen’t know what he’s talking about.” then Alicorn could be reasonably offendend, since this comment would imply that she was defective as a woman and hence it would lower her status. But that’s not what was posted. The poster actually liked the article, she (*) just got one pronoun wrong.
(* the ‘Sharon’ signature and the remark about being a mother are definitely enough evidence to infer that the poster is a she)
Not being oversensitive yourself is a good practice, dismissing the possibility that another will be offended by something you do is called “insensitive”. Yes, sometimes you should take a stand and decide that a person getting offended about a particular thing is their problem, not yours (otherwise you give them complete control over you). However I don’t think someone being mildly (or occasionally significantly) offended when people get their sex wrong is really the place to draw the battle lines.
Some people get offended if you call them a girl when they are a boy and vice versa. That is all. Either ignore this and be considered an ass by said people (and some observers) or take some degree of care to get it right.
I wasn’t really sure how to word that sentence to strike the right emotional note (I’ve changed it a little, hopefully for the better).
I think it’s legitimate to argue “you should not make assumptions about gender until you have some actual evidence to go on. ” I don’t think it’s legitimate to argue “my name relates to unicorns therefore you should assume I’m a girl.” Either people associate the word alicorn with femininity or they don’t. And since this issue has come up multiple times, apparently enough people don’t make that association that it’s an issue.
I also don’t think the world would be a better place if more people DID think Alicorn was a girly name. My favorite game is Robot Unicorn Attack. I’ve considered buying Invisible Pink Unicorn Merchandise. I don’t feel a need to associate my identity with it, but I think it’d be a better world if preference for unicorns didn’t signal gender or sexuality at all.
You’d better not move to Germany. Chairs have a masculine sexual identity.
Slavic languages also assign a grammatical gender to every noun, and there’s nothing sexual about it. (I certainly find nothing sexual about stars, books, rivers, or mathematics being feminine.) Even for nouns that denote humans and other living creatures with biological sex, the correlation between grammatical gender and biological sex is high but still not perfect.
The gender defaults are mostly masculine (though with some exceptions), and it would be impossible to change that without rewriting the grammar of the language altogether, which is why the entire business over gender-neutral language in English has always seemed absurd to me. On the upside, it’s almost impossible to speak without revealing whether you’re male or female, since you have to refer to your attributes and actions using adjectives and even verbs inflected for gender, so confusions of this sort are almost impossible (however this can make it impossible to translate literature where a character’s sex is supposed to be hidden).
And maidens are neutral. Which suggests to me that grammatical gender in German has much less to do with personal gender than it does in English.
IIRC, Germans, Italians, &c. will describe the same objects differently based on the grammatical gender of the word describing it; i.e., speakers of a language in which “bridge” is masculine will emphasize a bridge’s strength and stability vs beauty and grace, and visa versa, &c. So gender in the wider sense interacts with it somewhat.
On a lighter note, Mark Twain had a typically great passage which he claimed to be a literal translation of a German story, the main humor being that various inanimate objects are referred to as hes and shes while the hapless fishwife has to get by on its.
The “bridge” study was by Lera Boroditsky, as discussed here. Her papers are available here—it looks like the most relevant is:
Boroditsky, L., Schmidt, L., & Phillips, W. (2003). Sex, Syntax, and Semantics. In Gentner & Goldin-Meadow (Eds.,) Language in Mind: Advances in the study of Language and Cognition.