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Posted by: Ektz in Blog, Memories

Je me crois en enfer,
done j’y suis.

Oct

SEXISM

Posted by: Ektz in Blog, Humor

Consider the implications of usages such as the following:

“Man is a mammal and suckles his young”Â - the human race is male by default; “Womankind” is a subset of “Mankind”.
“The reader is entitled to his opinion”Â - if you’re female, you have to pretend otherwise to read legal documents.
“Wizard” is praise; “witch” is an insult (abuse is the only field in which there are more words to describe women).
“The UK’s greatest living author” is ambiguous; does it rule out the possibility of authoresses who are greater?

This doctrine of Male-As-Default treats women as a negligible subgroup, and femaleness as abnormal but always noteworthy.

Sexism is (in principle) avoidable in English, via words like “human, people, he/she, they”, and sex-neutral jobtitles where sex is irrelevant.Â Things are different in languages with grammatical gender: eg in French, masculine plural is “ils”, feminine plural is “elles”, but mixed groups (even of 99 women and one grammatically-masculine hornet) are “ils”. ..

Makes you think, doesnt it?

4 Comments

Oct