Against “Against the Theory of ‘Sexist Language’”

The word “sex” — clearly evocative of an unequivocal demarcation between men and women — has been replaced by the pale and neutral “gender,” and the words “man” and “he” — now avoided as if they were worse than obscenities — have been replaced by the neuter “person” and by grammatically confusing, cumbersome, or offensive variants of “he/she” or “she” alone as the pronoun of general reference.

Since it was never even remotely in doubt that when used as a general referent, the male pronoun included females, this change was never designed to prevent confusion. The change has, on the contrary, often created confusion. Its purpose is solely ideological.

–F. Carolyn Graglia, Domestic Tranquility, A Brief Against Feminism, Spence Publishing Company, Dallas, 1998, p.154

I, for one, want to be free to refer to “the brotherhood of man” without being corrected by the language police. I want to decide for myself whether I should be called a chairman, a chairwoman, or a chairperson (I am not a chair). I want to see My Fair Lady and laugh when Professor Higgins sings, “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” As a writer, I want to know that I am free to use the words and images of my choosing.

Diane Ravitch, The Language Police, Alfred A. Knopf, 2003, p.169

These two quotations open Kelley Ross’s essay “Against the Theory of Sexist Language.” She then goes on to make her argument, which is essentially this:

• feminists say that language is sexist because men are more “marked,” that is, men are treated as if they have real qualities and women are treated as if they lack those qualities
• but really languages – Chinese, Spanish, English, what-have-you – treat women as more “marked.”
• Therefore language is not sexist.

Not to be unintellectual, but – what a dumb argument. It’s like the woman has never heard of logic. If she had, she would have known that the correct conclusion to her major and minor premises is that some feminists are wrong. Some. The idea that there’s no such of thing as sexism in language is not actually tackled in this essay, except in its conclusions, in part because there’s no acknowledgement of the possibility that treating women as “markedly” Other could be sexist. It’s not surprising, then, that Rogers is a fan of Christina Hoff Sommers, who “encouraged” this essay; Sommersian “argument,” too, relies heavily on cherry-picking, straw men, and patter.

Let’s go back to those quotations for a second. Graglia is ignorant; if she knew her history, she would know that the generic he was deliberately chosen over the previously-used “they,” which was both singular and plural just as “sheep” still is, and that the generic he was officially chosen by Parliament in the mid-19th century for legal documents precisely because its referent was not clear without a bill to spell out its referent. Go read a book, Graglia, instead of making history up.

Ravitch, as you in your ingenuousness goddam well know, you’re “free” to do whatever dumbass thing you want to. As the late, great Richard Mitchell once said, “You can grab a football and run to Oshkosh any time you please; you just won’t be playing football.” Don’t pretend that freedom of expression equals intelligence of expression, or that your views should be treated, a priori, as unassailable.

It is in these unintelligent quotations that the real thrust of Ross’s argument lies, despite the razzle-dazzle of Chinese characters. The essay is designed to seem learned and calm and rational in contrast to the forceful git’er done tone of the quotations, but the very choice of those quotations reveals Ross’s emotional base for the rationalizations she trots out.

Speaking of Chinese characters, Ross forgot to mention a few: the character for discord is two women (you know chicks; always catty and squabbling). The character for good is a woman with a child (get thee to a pregnant state!). The character for peace is a woman under a roof (just stay in your place; women outside the home = trouble).

But I think we can all agree that despite these minor little flaws Ross has really made a valid, impressive, learned contribution: there’s totally no sexism in any language, ever, until those ugly, shrieky, ignorant feminists dreamed it up.

Ms.

“I can’t wait to be Mrs. X!!!”

“Of course I am PROUD to be Mrs.!!!!”

Honestly, don’t any of these people realize that by their prancing little logic their husbands/husbands-to-be don’t give a rat’s ass about being married?

Also, what is with people who think, or purport to think, that Ms. is a title for divorcees? Or – even worse – who think that it’s for unmarried women (as opposed to unmarried little girls, who are “Miss”)? More and more, it seems, online forms give only two options: “Mrs” or “Ms,” thus encouraging this idea. A 2003 study finds that younger people are more likely to think this way, and no wonder.

Look, everybody; you don’t like not trumpeting your marital status, fine – trumpet away. Don’t muddy everyone else’s water.

One final note: New Feminist dares anyone to find one example of a person who insisted on calling a woman Ms. Birth Name when s/he knew that that woman preferred Mrs. Husband’s Name. Our editor can, however, show you a stack of mail and cards addressed to Mrs. Husband’s Name by people who know that she prefers – and is – Ms. Birth Name.

They is Singular!

As an English teacher, I’m frustrated…

this isn’t going where you think…

by all the people who use “he” to mean “people,” and then justify it by recourse to The White God of Grammar. For them, New Feminist offers the following excerpt from Steven Pinker’s Language Instinct, which just can’t get enough exposure:

The next time you get corrected for this sin, ask Mr. Smartypants how you should fix the following:

Mary saw everyone before John noticed them.

Now watch him squirm as he mulls over the downright unintelligible “improvement,” Mary saw everyone before John noticed him.

The logical point that you, Holden Caulfield, and everyone but the language mavens intuitively grasp is that everyone and they are not an “antecedent” and a “pronoun” referring to the same person in the world, which would force them to agree in number. They are a “quantifier” and a “bound variable,” a different logical relationship. Everyone returned to their seats means “For all X, X returned to X’s seat.” The “X” does not refer to any particular person or group of people; it is simply a placeholder that keeps track of the roles that players play across different relationships. In this case, the X that comes back to a seat is the same X that owns the seat that X comes back to. The their there does not, in fact, have plural number, because it refers neither to one thing nor to many things; it does not refer at all. The same goes for the hypothetical caller: there may be one, there may be none, or the phone might ring off the hook with would-be suitors; all that matters is that every time there is a caller, if there is a caller, that caller, and not someone else, should be put off.

On logical grounds, then, variables are not the same thing as the more familiar “referential” pronouns that trigger number agreement (he meaning some particular guy, they meaning some particular bunch of guys). Some languages are considerate and offer their speakers different words for referential pronouns and for variables. But English is stingy: a referential pronoun must be drafted into service to lend its name when a speaker needs to use a variable. Since these are not real referential pronouns but only homonyms of them, there is no reason that the vernacular decision to borrow they, their, them for the task is any worse than the prescriptivists’ recommendation of he, him, his. Indeed, they has the advantage of embracing both sexes and feeling right in a wider variety of sentences.

Words can be both singular and plural without changing form – witness sheep and fish. “They” was once indisputably one of those words, until the first grammar book writers decided to make “he” the pronoun of choice for explicitly political reasons.

If only people who – rightly – respected grammar also respected the history of grammar.

There’ll Be Some Changes Made

It may be that brides today are actually embracing all they’ve learned from the feminists who blazed the trail before, and are, in fact, carrying a different kind of feminist torch, whereby a woman’s identity is what she chooses it to be, including whether to be a wife and what married name she’ll carry if she does say “I do.”

–Shelley Fralic, “More Women Happy to Put On a New Name Along With the Ring,” Vancouver Sun

So from now on there’ll be in change in me
My walk will be different, my talk and my name
Nothin’ about me is going to be the same
I’m goin’ to change my way of livin’
If that ain’t enough
Then I’ll change the way that I strut my stuff
‘Cause nobody wants you when you’re old and gray
There’ll be some changes made today
There’ll be some changes made

–”There’ll Be Some Changes Made,” sung by Billie Holiday, Peggy Lee, and others

More women are changing their name when they marry than in the past decades. Is this a return to traditional values? Or – more excitingly – a new kind of feminism?

The keyword to making the latter argument is “choice.” Women today have moved past the, admittedly commendable, efforts of 70s feminists and are living a new kind of feminism, one where every woman gets to make a choice.

And makes the same one.

Because, in the end, “some things aren’t about politics or movements. Just the freedom to make a choice that makes you happy” (Damsels in Success). Like happy families, happy women are all alike.

In fact, as much as conservatives would like to adopt the rhetoric of choice to differentiate one thing from – itself, the real choice that is being made is between marriage and co-habitation. Fewer women are marrying at all. Those who do marry are a self-selecting pool of women who lean towards the traditional anyway, and so follow tradition in changing their names. Flatly looked at in terms of facts, there is no return to traditionalism (whether for good or ill), and there is no feminism, new or otherwise, in traditional women making traditional choices for traditional reasons.

There are, of course, those who would argue that women are making this traditional choice for untraditional reasons – or rather, women now have reasons for making the change. These are:

• “For the first time in my life I could choose my name. That felt empowering” (Damsels in Success)
• “the maiden name is no longer a fraught political issue” (The State of the Maiden Name)
• “giving in to bureaucratic pressures is easier than clinging to their old identity” (The State of the Maiden Name)
• “Any woman whose self-esteem is so precarious that it hinges on which surname she attaches to herself has bigger problems to worry about” (And They Lived Happily Ever After)

In other words, all women should make the same choice. Those who don’t are “clinging” to the past (that self without a husband – shudder), have precarious self-esteem, are fighting yesterday’s already-won battle, and are downright rejecting choice. From such ungrateful fancy, Good Lord, deliver us!

In fact, nearly every “reason” advanced, above or below, for changing one’s name is a canard.

• “It’s easier to go abroad with children” — as if it were easier to deal with the DMV, Social Security, banks, credit card companies, the post office, voter registration, the passport office, and so on, than to slide the child’s birth certificate in along with the passports!

• “You’re just switching one man’s name for another” – the reasoning behind this statement being that it both makes no difference (so why not?) and that it does (so you should pick the husband’s name). Further, few men probably like to think that their new wife is identifying with her father-in-law. Nor do they reflect that surnames such as Baxter and Webster originally were matrilineal – not all names are “men’s names.” And one’s name is not only an ancestor’s name – if it is part of the linguistic symbol of you, then it is your name.

• “I hated not having the same last name as my mom and siblings growing up” – indeed; does it never occur to any of these complainants that their problem would have been solved had their mother kept her name and passed it on to her children?

Some women, of course, do have real and unimpeachable reasons for changing their names – to shed the symbol of an abusive past, for example. And some women choose their husband’s name after considering other options, and make their choice as freely, perhaps, as any choice can be made.

The problem is that no choice is really a choice when it is one-sided. Men refuse to change their names, and they refuse to allow their children to take the mother’s name. Period. Women are then -  and the keyword is “then” – “free” to “choose” how to deal with the man’s choice.

Enjoy your freedom, girls!