Isn’t the culture of oppression funny? It goes both ways, too - women feel cheated in many ways because of sexism, but so do men. Many people automatically view a man with suspicion or even hostility where a woman wouldn’t have earned a second glance - for instance, having the police called on you while taking a walk with your daughter. (Oh my gosh, a man without a wife attached holding hands with a young girl! He must be a child molester!)
No, it didn’t happen to me…but it has happened.
Or take me and my father, who have gender-nuetral names. People (mostly telemarketers and others of that ilk) often automatically assume I’m a woman. It doesn’t offend me, though…I have to much to worry about already than getting offended over little things like that.
Well, people often call me Alex which is usually a man’s name. And I have short hair. So I often get people thinking I’m a man until they look at my face or hear my voice. I don’t care about that one bit. It’s unintentional and they are usually more put-out by it than I am (i.e., they get all apologetic about it).
I never said I get ‘offended,’ I spoke to something that goes a bit deeper. But that’s okay. I’m sorry you seem to take this issue so lightly and seem to find it trivial. But, oh well. That’s the way it goes. I agree–life is too short to worry about such things. People are willing to take another’s experiences seriously as something worthy of consideration or they aren’t. Life goes on.
[foot-in-mouth mode]
I apologize for the miscommunication; I was not reponding to your post directly, and did not intent to imply that you’re too easily offended or that the situation was trivial. I have a bad habit of coming across wrong, which is why it’s generally not safe to let me out-of-doors…
I was only saying that I find it silly how people automatically assume things about other people based solely on completely inconclusive evidence - such as their names, or their being male, female, black, white, etc.
As for the Monty Python bit…couldn’t help it. That line always pops into my head when discussions like this come along.
[/foot-in-mouth mode]
Ah, so sorry. This is the not first time I thought someone was responding to me and they weren’t! Many apologies for misunderstanding. I should check these things out first. I will from now on to be sure.
I read your message to Alex (which is a short form for the female version in Germany as well), so I am in good mood .
The fact that people assume that you are a woman tells a lot about the American society, something good I would say. I have quite a female name, and I have a doctoral degree and work at university. This makes me Dr. Maria (Surname). But people who do not know me do not accept that. As a university person I get many letters addressed to either “Herr Dr. Maria —” or they realise that it is a female name and say it cannot be true and change it to “Herr Dr. Mario —” These are letters personnaly to me, myself.
As a woman I sometimes publish and realise that it is better to publish as M. (surname) rather than Maria (surname). Particularly if publishing in a male field like computers. It easier to be taken serious.
I made different experiences as well, and I had wonderful colleagues in a physics department in a German university. But my experiences are half this half that. No man would ever experience things like that.
And now, I would like to meet you in your foot-in-mouth-mode on the street, I could introduce you to my husband who stresses every morning that he has to go to work because his role as man supresses him, he cannot realise his deepest wish: to clean the house and wash the underwear.
And why does the fact, that some americans assume him to be a woman, tell you “something good” about the society he’s living in? Assuming you’re a man is bad, sexist and biased, but assuming a man is a woman is good?
The fact that people who grow up in a certain culture assume that someone is male if sex is not mentioned shows that the culture is biased towards male sex. I do not value that cultural trait. So, if in another culture people can think at first that someone they do not know, could be a woman (i.e. not assuming at first that it must be a man), is a good thing. Because it shows that the culture or society does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that default is male.
Secondly, being male is being of higher value (at least in the academic world), which you can infer from the same post of mine. The letters and emails that address me as “Mr.” (Herr) from Germany have increased significantly since I got my doctoral degree. This means that people in Germany still assume that a doctor working at university must be male. It cannot be a woman, even if he has the most female name you can think of, a name that is understood all over the world.
Actually, Im all in favour of this move. Yes, I know, “they” is generally the plural, so technically this is grammatically incorrect, but I think it is moving towards grammatically correct.
The trouble is that, in English, the third person impersonal (uh, or whatever it’s called) is somewhat out of fashion. Historically, it would be “one”, as in:
One can decide how many windows one wishes to have open at any one time.
But nowadays we associate such archaic language with period drama. We need an alternative. When you do a degree in England, you get handed a manual laying down the law about what is acceptable language in an essay or dissertation. One rule is always that you must use “his or her” - which, whilst politically correct, is somewhat exhausting. At the same time, “his” really jars in modern contexts. So, I think we do need something to replace “one”. And “they” is what we all use in the vernacular (well, except for Eats Shoots and Leaves snobs, I guess), so it makes sense to start making it official. Language changes, and that’s a good thing, methinks.
All the best,
Keith
P.S. Welcome to Fehnman - I haven’t really been following this thread until now, but I’m happy to see you in the discussion. 1.5 looks great.
And there I was thinking it had developed in my lifetime!
In the 1970s, a friend and I wrote a “Speaking Skills” textbook – I suspect it was one of the first – which was published by a very well known publisher of paperbacks. All short dialogues and exercises on them. When the editors got their hands on it, we were horrified to find that all the 'they’s of this type had been changed to ‘he or she’ with a three-line whip that that was the publisher’s house-style. We couldn’t convince them that our book was for foreign learners of English, not a book on history, culture, science … nor was it intended as a masterpiece of fiction … so we had to re-write all the dialogues in question so as to avoid teaching foreign learners that they had to say thing’s like “There’s someone at the door … see what he or she wants.”
Mark
I don’t doubt at all the above mentioned use of “they” is very old; but … … is it elegant? Does it sound well? Would Gibbon ever have written a sentence like “The reader can open as many books as they wish”? Would Macaulay have? And they are the masters of English prose, then and now.
My “Websters Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language” registers the above mentioned use of “they”, but explicitly as “Nonstandard”. And so it is, I believe.
Anyway, to my non native ears a sentence like “The reader can open as many books as they wish” sounds absolutely horrible.
And is it allowed to say “We should all be brothers”? Or should we all be “brothers and sisters”?
But this is not true. If you were named “Sybille”, you’d never ever get “Mr. Sybille Whatever”-mails. Neither so if you were named “Eva” or “Marilyn”. Maria is by no means woman-only, as has been evidenced a hundred times, not least by Klaus Maria Brandauer and Christoph Maria Herbst.
I do agree though, that people most certainly assume Drs. to be male, but this has absolutely nothing to do with the term itself, but instead with experience. E.g., I don’t see “Dr” as male-only (helps to live with a physician…ess, hehe), but I still think of “soldiers” as a lot of men with guns, and it still strikes me to see women in the army. It’s just not common over here to have femal soldiers, but once it is, we don’t need a term to differentiate the sexes within an otherwise perfectly neutral group.
Hope you know what I mean.
PS: Thanks, Keith, for having me. Hope you can find some time to do actual writing, as I know from my own experience, that this dev-stuff can get quite time-comsuming (fun as it is), leaving little space for anything else. I’d also like to congratulate on Scriv’s success. Believe it or not, but your app has probably been the best thing that has happened to us, because now all the dissatisfied… men and women have found a home, and we have less apologizing to to.
This is funny. You are in the position to judge what women experience? By declaring that all these letters that are adressed to me, addressing me as a man just do not exist?
There are already men who accept that women do have experiences, humiliating experiences, that men will never make. These men have no problems of speaking a modern language that includes women as equals, and they are fortunately not few.
The problem are those men that claim that “what women experience is not what women experience” because they, the men, just know what happens really. There are still too many of this kind in German society, but I am sure they will look back with a feeling of embarrassment in a few years.
The times have gone that people called me with a belittling touch “Fräulein” and my male colleagues respectfully “Herr”, as it was still common 25 years ago. When I was young and stupid I did not mind and even smiled about those who insisted to be called “Frau”. Now I say, they were right, I was wrong, and I owe their struggle a lot. Now I do struggle, and there are men who share these opinions.
Nowadays young women get their qualifications as “Kauffrau”, while I still have my qualification as “Bankkaufmann”. All this has gone astonishingly easily although people laughed in the beginning, and despite the problems of grammar we will find a way to a less sexist German grammar as well…
I got all the other arguments you made. I am not a radical who does not see the other side. I even can make fun about me using a “women’s computer” (a Mac, not Linux) with some of my friends, just because I know they would never exclude me with the words the choose, and they respect my life being different from theirs. This is the difference compared to man who laugh about the weak and declare they are just talking fairy tails. Why do you not accept that others made experiences, have feelings about these experiences that should be accepted in a way like “OK, I cannot know that, but if it is like that, I will respect that.” Alexandrias first post in this thread said it all.
Better now? My criticsm of your attitude works without quoting your “not true”. Maria is certainly the most female name, nobody anywhere in the world (I know some countries) would think of a person called “Maria” as a man. There is the case of combination with male names, which is rare. Assuming that I am a man because there is the possibility of 1:1000 that I could have an additional male name is just as prejudiced as changing my name delibarately into “Mario” in order to qualifiy for an academic career.
O o oo, I think there are two Germans fighting a German war on an international forum that has no interest in the problem. I apologize to all. And I hope you do not take it too serious (well, it is a serious problem in my eyes, but I am not at all shouting at the moment) …
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