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From: debray@sbcs.UUCP (Saumya Debray)
Newsgroups: net.women
Subject: Re: sexist language/bad attitudes
Message-ID: <250@sbcs.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 25-Apr-85 14:32:14 EST
Article-I.D.: sbcs.250
Posted: Thu Apr 25 14:32:14 1985
Date-Received: Sat, 27-Apr-85 03:18:11 EST
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Organization: Computer Science Dept, SUNY@Stony Brook
Lines: 78

Tom West:

>   There are those who claim that 'he' is the gender neutral pronoun in the
> English language.  They are, in a grammatical sense, correct.  The problem
> comes with the people.  When the term 'he' is used, a *male* image is 
> thought of, regardless of the fact that the term was supposed to be neutral.

> [...]  Specifically, the language is pushing forward the idea that women 
> play an almost totally insignificant part in our society outside of a few
> restricted roles.  More importantly, the language re-inforces the idea
> that this set of roles is expected and accepted by society at large.  

This is an example of the fairly sloppy post hoc egro propter hoc reasoning
that seems to be becoming increasingly prevalent these days.  As Tom points
out, studies have shown that "when the term 'he' is used, a *male* image
is thought of".  So far, this merely establishes a correlation between the
two events.  How one can infer, from this correlation, that there's some
sort of causal connection between the two isn't clear to me.  It reminds me
of an article in net.flame a while back, suggesting that portable
radios should be banned because of the correlation between high incidence
of ghetto blasters and high crime rates in big cities.

Let me give a few examples.  The chances are that if I mention "fireman" to
you, you'll think of a male; let me suggest that this is due _not_ to the
fact that there's a "-man" suffix, but because practically all the firemen
you've ever seen have been males.  Similarly, when I say "cheerleader", the
chances are you'll think of a young female ... let me suggest, again, that
this is because almost all the cheerleaders you've seen have been young
females.  Note that there's nothing in the word that suggests that a
cheerleader couldn't be a middle-aged male: it's your experience of the
world that biases your perception of the word.  What's going on is some sort
of inductive inference ... if you saw enough middle-aged male cheerleaders,
I dare say this bias would change.

Similarly, not having known of very many young black female presidents of
the USA, when I say "President of the United States", you'll probably think
of a middle-aged white male.  On the other hand, if I say "Prime Minister",
I would suspect you wouldn't have a pronounced bias towards either sex,
since there have been quite a few female prime ministers (Golda Meir, Indira
Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher come to mind).  Again, take the word "chef":
most people I know associate this with males wearing funny white hats. It's
not obvious to me how gender-specificity might have been built into this
word.

The point I'm trying to make is that even when some sort of correlation has
been established between a word and some sort of mental image conjured up by
that word, it _does not_ follow that there's a causal link between them.
I've tried to show, using a few examples, that a strong case can be made for
experiential generalization being the cause of the particular mental image -
I'm sure you can find many other such examples.

Now until you can demonstrate a convincing causal relationship between the
use of "he" and the conjuring up of a mental "male" image, I'll view your
attempts to change my world-view by changing my language as an attempt to
treat the symptom rather than the disease (Sapir-Whorf and George Orwell
notwithstanding!).  And if you can't demonstrate such a causal relationship,
well, that's a pretty serious flaw in your argument, isn't it?  I'd suggest
that you try to get more women into the work force, fighting fires and
delivering mail: that, I think, would be more effective in changing the
"male" image associated with "fireman" and "postman" than any amount of
linguistic twiddling.

The reason for this long article is that I resent being labelled as one who
is "just whining in the face of facts about how we actually use the
language" when it's not at all clear what these so-called "facts about
how we actually use the language", and the causal relationships between
them, actually are.  Maybe this comes as a surprise, but correct grammar
_is_ important to some of us - not because of some esoteric dogma, but
because sloppy grammar makes for awkward language.

The defence rests.
-- 
Saumya Debray
SUNY at Stony Brook

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