Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ora!ora!daemon
From: travis@houston.cs.columbia.edu (Travis Lee Winfrey)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: Girls, girls, girls
Message-ID: <9009122207.AA10780@houston.cs.columbia.edu>
Date: 12 Sep 90 22:07:55 GMT
Sender: ambar@ora.com (Jean Marie Diaz)
Organization: O'Reilly and Associates Inc., Cambridge MA
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Approved: ambar@ora.com
In-Reply-To: wilber%aludra.usc.edu@usc.EDU's message of 12 Sep 90 15:51:41 GMT

In article <11927@chaph.usc.edu> wilber%aludra.usc.edu@usc.EDU (John Wilber) writes:
>
>   In article <6290@emory.mathcs.emory.edu> colm@mathcs.emory.EDU writes:
>   > [ about the use of girls, women, ladies ]
> 
>   Perhaps it is the fact that the ideas of equal rights for women have been
>   so universally accepted that the only thing left for the activists to
>   get outraged over is petty word games.

Universally accepted?  The universe I live in contains countries than the
United States, where such a right is by no means accepted or acted on.
Even in this enlightened district it was recently unacceptable to amend our
constitution to describe men and women as equal, and popular comedians can
tell jokes that consist of nothing more than shrieking "Suck my cock,
bitch!" to random women in the audience.  Other issues, such as the lack of
national child care, sexual discrimination and harassment, and the
omnipresent violence against women, loom a great deal larger than the
"petty word games" that you describe.

Although you apparently feel feminist activists are solely concerned with
"women's issues," perhaps you should not be so sanguine about a system that
gives men gender roles that cannot be sustained without an early death from
"natural causes," e.g., higher rates of violent death, alcoholism, heart
disease, among other things.  Don't be so quick to defend a system that is
killing you and your male friends and relatives.

In any case, the use of words like "girl" or "women" signals an attitude of
respect or the lack of one.  You entirely miss the point by claiming that
they are all words describing the same concept, when _every_ word is rich
with connotations and secondary meanings.  If that were not so, I could
equivalently call your mother a bitch without insult, since a bitch
describes "the female of a dog or some other carnivorous mammal," a
category to which most female humans belong.  We're not computers exchanging
bits of information; we each speak a language thick with layers of meaning.
The choice of words and names is very important.

>   P.S. I have heard a few times that folks of asian ancestry cannot now
>   be referred to as "oriental" by _Politically Correct(tm)_ speakers.
>   They are not "orientals", but "asians".  Can anyone explain what the
>   deal here is?  Is being called "occidental" derogatory too?  I guess
>   I'm just not "racially sensitive".

The feeling is that names like this are geographically relative and
mediated by outmoded attitudes of racial superiority.  France and England,
the primary colonizers of the Middle and Far East, chose names for these
regions indicating their distance from the "center of civilization", which
the colonizers felt themselves to be.  "Occidental" is not usually
considered derogatory, but that is due to its occasional use.  If US
citizens were routinely referred to as "the Westerners" by those on the
European continent, I suspect we would all be a little touchy about
relative names.  

No, I don't care deeply about this issue, but out of habit and politeness,
I try to call people or regions by the names they choose.

t