Small things that make you angry and you feel you can't mention elsewhere

Eurgh, my latest one:

My reasonably new DP is vegetarian, I am not. If we go out to eat, the waiting staff always go to give the vegetarian meal to me and have to do what we've termed the 'vegetarian shuffle', where they kind of have to shuffle about so that they can give the plate to my DP and not me.

He finds it hilarious, I find it Why on Earth would you presume that the man isn't the vegetarian?!

Had a problem with the boiler and the landlord called out a heating engineer he knew. He spoke to me like I was a little girl and then when the boiler leaked water all over him and he used my cereal bowls to catch it (without asking), I asked him what did he think he was doing using my property as equipment. He started shouting at me saying "do you want your bloody boiler fixed or what love?". As soon as I got my stepdad on the phone and forced the guy to speak to him, (older gent, sounds his age), the mans demeanour changed completely and he started on about "residual leaking" and how he'd explained this to me but I hadnt understood. He hadn't explained anything to me, just screamed at me in my face. My stepdad told him off and told him to do his job properly and speak to me properly or leave. He couldn't fix it in the end and didnt look me in the eye or apologise when he left. Absolute dick and my first experience of blatant sexism.

About 10 years ago I was temping as a PA to 3 male senior executives. A fourth man joined the company and I was to be his PA too. After about a week I was crumbling trying to cope with the workload. The newly joined man saw I was stressed, made me a cup of tea and came and made pleasant conversation with me for a few minutes until I calmed down. Shortly afterwards I heard him being pulled into the next door office and told by one of the other three men I worked for that making tea and chit chat with the secretaries was not on and that he wasn't to do it again as it was my role to make the tea.

Interesting point upthread about cats and dogs.
My dog is small, white and fluffy and people mostly assume she's female (which she is). I always remember one woman who got talking to me about her, saying 'it's a good job she's not a boy', i.e. male dogs can't be small, white and fluffy!!
I'm not sure how I replied but I have always thought what a strange comment to make

I can believe five times as many women say no to the BBC. I think panel shows are really hostile.

Don't get me wrong, I love lots of BBC panel shows but I think they are absolutely perfect illustrations of that thing people do, where they mentally skew how much time women talk for compared to men. Women get shouted down a lot. I've noticed some women are successful at it (Jo Brand for example), but often because they are extremely self-deprecating.

I went to buy some scratch treatment when some branches scratched my car. The staff member sold me a great product so no problems there but when I said what I needed he said "my sisters always doing that to my car too, " as if to say, you dear little woman, look at you trying to drive a car! Doh! Of course you will end up getting it scratched being a woman and all."

Oh yes, conferences! I regularly attend academic conferences where the vast majority of attendees are women (at least 90%) and most of the research invovles women. The keynote speakers are more often than not men.

And another vaguely conference related thing ... Attending a pre-conference dinner a few years ago, the restaurant staff referred to all the women as 'miss' - almost all of them were doctors and professors.

I tried to get round the woman/lady/am I even sure they're female dilemma by referring to people as people or children in front of ds. Which was fine until a couple incidents recently where he's been in a playground, and then says to a playmate "Watch out for that person" or "Mind the little child"

Cue bloke going "OI! I'm a...oh ok you're just a kid I won't argue", and a woman hissing "she's a GIRL!"

Thing is, I think he's almost as bad as me at detecting gender - if someone doesn't have obvious breasts or facial hair, or isn't slathered in stereotypical clothers, I honestly have no clue.

Government legislation has adopted the convention that Ministers and other officials are referred to in legislation as the sex the relevant individual is at the time the law is made. I remember being chuffed to find a sentence reading "When the Chief XXX confirms yyy, the Secretary of State's role is zzz, so she needs to tell her..." and wondering when the first instance of two officials in a legal clause being female was. Since 2000, I'll bet.

Went to a conference last week - sort of field where half the attendees are female. During the only bad speech I counted the speakers - 11, and noted only one was female.

She did a great job though, coming on after lunch, introduced herself, 'apologised' for being more junior than the original invitee, and then also for being the only woman, and said she hoped that being on in the after-lunch slot when people would fall asleep wouldnt mean attendees assuming women shouldn't be invited to speak! Cue some very embarrassed organisers. Will see how many women are involved next year.

I've read that the BBC etc struggle to get women spokespeople and panellists as five times more women say no as men - I find that hard to believe, though.

Was it Libby Purves' book, Amanda?

I like (s)he.

I have had to be referred to in an anonymised profile as "they" because "she" would have been too identifying (I work in that kind of industry...)

Years ago I was working for a small publishing company, doing basically anything involved in turning manuscripts into camera-ready copy (I doubt they call it camera-ready copy now, I suppose it's all digital! ). The books were mostly to do with farming and farmers, vets etc were inevitably referred to as 'he'. I took great pleasure in changing 'he' to 'she' occasionally. Nobody noticed my little act of subversion until the books had been printed - and possibly not even then.

Bless.

That just reminds me of the bit in Life of Brian '... because he can't have babies, not having a womb, which is nobody's fault ...'. I'd thought you were going to say they referred to the mum in gender-neutral terms.

I once read a fairly feminist book on childbirth or some such. Can't remember exactly which one. It earnestly explained at the beginning that babies were referred to as 'he' throughout to avoid confusion with the mother. That did make me because as if most people would have noticed or cared. But I liked that she'd bothered!

I have seen people write whole books using 'she' as default pronoun. I rather like it. It's just difficult in a situation where I am 99% sure any reader of mine (all three of them, so I know who they are!) will get the wrong end of the stick.

We do need a neutral pronoun. According to a mate of mine (and this is ironic in context of my writing), there used to be one in Middle English but it died out.

It is fascinating how much language shapes how we can think, though. I've noticed how much more willing I am to use 'she' a lot since on MN it is the default.

Ha ha. No solution. However, legal documents often have a clause at the end saying references to one gender also include all other genders (yes, I know it probably shouldn't be gender it should be sex, but we can't have the s word in legal documents). I used to wonder how the men would still feel if I turned all the he's to she's.

The lack of a gender neutral third person singular pronoun that you can use about people, or indeed about animals without sounding dismissive annoys the hell out of me on a regular basis. When talking about dogs/cats/etc with DD1 I try and use both he and she. But then I get the third degree on how I know it is a girl dog, and then the owner hears and I get corrected, and it just goes on and on. Similarly, I hate the fact that I very quickly have to refer to gender when talking about another child - "Calm down DD2. It is this boy's turn on the slide first and then I am sure he will move out of the way and let you have a go.."

I don't know if I could fit MalenkayaRusskayaDrakonchika onto a MN name.

When I picked it, I could only work out the masculine on my own because the dictionary I have didn't tell me you could have a girl dragon. I don't really speak Russian, I'm just learning.

But it's as good a reason as any to have namechanged.

I do really notice grammatical gender, actually - if anyone has a view on this minor irritation, can you let me know? I'm writing about medieval scribes, who are usually men. It is reasonable enough to assume a scribe is a man unless you know otherwise, I suppose, except obviously this gets a bit circular, as everyone assumes scribes are all men because everyone refers to scribes as men, etc. etc.

So do I keep on writing 'he or she', which get clumsy fast, or do I do the slightly 90s thing of writing 'she' 50% of the time, which I find massively confusing as it sounds as if you're talking about two different people, or what?

I am inclined towards the first version but it makes me angry I can't simply write 'she' all the way through without risking being accused of having an agenda (as if that's a bad thing).

Irrelevant to this thread (or should feminists find a lot to say about linguistic gender, and we aren't attuned to it?) but "MalenkyRussky" has masculine endings, and I was wondering if that was deliberate or not. The feminine would be "MalenkayaRusskaya".

That is approximately the limit of how much Russian I know.

It has been hot here today. I am an average mid-30s woman. Today I was wearing shorts and a sleeveless top. Plus very ugly but very comfortable old lady sandals. For various reasons I was walking with the buggy (sometimes plus DD1) for about an hour and a half today. As in striding along the road because I was going somewhere.

I have been honked at/had things yelled out of vans on three separate occasions.

I have no idea if what was yelled was positive or negative - busy roads, not listening, and they are rubbish at enunciating .

I told a friend how annoyed I was and her response was 'Oh, were they horrid?' I don't know and I don't fucking care. I bet rarely if ever in his life (except perhaps if wearing a rugby shirt for his team) has DH been yelled at in the street by sober people in the middle of the day.

What gives them the bloody right? And why have women accepted it so?

Oh I can't bear the 'little boyfriend/girlfriend' thing either. I had problems with this as a teenager too - I've had good male friends all my life and it took till I was about 20odd for this to be seen as in any way normal.

Other things that do my head in:
The division in children's clothing. BOYS RULE!! GIRLS ARE BEST!! Why force the gender issue?
The fact I can't eat anything in public without someone commenting on it. I'm sure men don't get the 'ooh, you're being good/ being naughty today!' because they decided to bring a salad or a cheese sandwich for lunch.
The way that music which is fairly questionable in terms of the message it sends out about women is bloody everywhere, and objecting to it is seen as 'prudish'. No, I just don't want to hear about some talentless rapper 'putting the bitch in her place' in the middle of an aerobics class or shopping centre.

Yes, it's good that I stopped myself, but it shocked me that my first instinct was to tell her to disregard her own feelings so her friend could have his own way. It's just so ingrained that so many people don't even think about it.

I hate the "little boyfriend" thing with small children too, they're children, they're just friends, you don't have to make it something it's not. And yet, I was guilty of doing it with dd1 when she was younger . I cringe when I look back now.

Good luck!

Thank you.

The plan is to keep updating with new Russian words every week or so, as I discover my useless MN habit does help me memorise trivia. 'Dom' means 'home' (yeah, ok, could probably manage that), so I'll go on from there.

You're back as LRD LRD. Welcome back!

But you did remind yourself! I mean, that's good. I was sitting right on my hands the other day with a FB conversation about 'aww, but he's so cute he keeps wanting to kiss her'. Erm, no. If she doesn't want to be slobbered on she doens't want it.

And he's not her 'little boyfriend' FFS.

(Reading in too much? Me? Never!)

Yesterday I was out with dd2 (3) and her little friend kept wanting a cuddle but dd2 didn't. My first instinct was to say "go on dd2, it's only a cuddle, he's being friendly". I really had to check myself and remind myself that that's a bad message to be sending to both of them. If she doesn't want a cuddle it's perfectly ok to say no, and he needs to learn to accept that not everybody wants to be cuddled on his terms.