Sigh. I've been deleted and blocked by yet another feminist page on Facebook....

Yes, I do take your points, PQ, and am giving you a thumbs-up for 'truefacts'!

I've wore out me brain for today! Need a rest. Truefact

I don't feel offended GN. I think it's an important topic that you've raised. I would object to people describing women as a minority in contexts where it was misleading, assumed or factually incorrect.

I do agree with you both above, btw, Freya & PQ.

Oh dear, it seems I offended people after all.

I think it's rather a shame that I've managed to cause great offence by expressing my own feelings and views about a nuanced aspect of feminism (in English; I don't know how it goes in other languages.) To me, that kind of proves my point although I understand why others were offended.

Freya, your shoe size example would be logically accurate! Your population is 'women in the shop' so your statement is correct.

If feminist thinkers/speakers/writers want to say "minority" when they really mean "economic minority", who am I to stop them? I'm suggesting they shouldn't be too surprised when people who use normal speech misinterpret them and think they're talking bollocks. As I said upthread, I've had to learn how to interpret specialised terminology in feminist discussion, because I want to be able to join in. And I don't blame others for deciding not to bother with that.

I've just looked up the meaning of concretise and it has two different meanings. So it would still have the same problem that you would have to work out which meaning was being used from the context just as you would with objectify. It is a common problem in English that one word can have more than one specific meaning.

I'm not criticising you for using objectify in that way PQW. I think that it makes sense in the sentence and people can work out which meaning of the word is being used. I have never heard anybody use the word concretise.

I agree with your point though that jargon can be used to exclude people and that is a huge problem. I just don't think the examples you've given are that.

If I went to a sale and most women purchasing shoes has size 3 feet, I would say to DS that women with size 4-7 feet were the sale shoe buying minority despite being an absolute majority of women, and he would understand that from maths and everyday speech despite having no sociological knowledge.

Also, the example you give of the meaning of objectify is one particular meaning of the word that is used in philosophy and the arts. I'm not sure why the social sciences should be expected to use the language of the arts anymore than the arts should be expected to use the language of the social sciences.

People don't generally use the word objectify in everyday speech in the philosophical sense you've given unless they're doing something very specific like visiting an art gallery.

GN, minority is still being used in a mathematical numerical sense in the example you gave. Women are an economic minority in that they hold a minority of wealth compared to the absolute number of women that exist as a proportion of the population. They are a political minority in that they hold a minority of political positions compared to the absolute number of women that exist as a proportion of the population. I don't think that is twisting language and it has to be supported by statistics. If half of politicians and influential civil servants were women then women would not form a political minority. Hence we can say that women are an absolute majority but a political and economic minority and this makes numerical and logical sense.

It has always been the case that words have a different meaning in different contexts. The word theory has a different meaning in Science than it does in everyday speech. The word labour has a different meaning in a maternity ward than it does in an economics class.

What matters is whether or not a word has a meaning that is clear and shared within a context, that it has been defined. What is a problem is if a word has no clear meaning in a context and becomes so vague or disputed as to become meaningless. An example of that would be racism, which had a specific legal internationally defined meaning but which various groups are attempting to destabilise the meaning of in the same context (human rights, social justice). This seems to me to be unethical.

Why are people so quick in wanting to hide the gendered aspect of violence?

Because that isn't gendered and rape is most definitely gendered.

How about "Rapists rape"

YY. How many times must this be said??

Argh. I keep running into a wall, in feminist discussions, that seems to have "SOCIOLOGY" written on it! I bet this post will offend loads of folks I have no wish to offend. If so - well, I really don't wish to offend; I am musing on why I find some linguistic aspects of feminism so irritating.

Sociology, I seem to find, has an unpleasant habit of perverting the significance of language. It imbues commonplace words & concepts with specific meanings of its own. This is no better than 'businessballs' and more dangerous, since sociology deals with human essence. I first careened into this wall with the discovery that a sociological "minority" is not a mathematical or logical minority, but an oppressed group (eg women), regardless of numerical prevalence. Every time I read that women are a minority in some general population, I understand - because it's been explained to me - but I lose a little bit of respect for feminism.

You just used "objectify", PQW, to mean concretise: a perfectly good word, whose form explains its meaning, which has apparently been rejected by sociology in favour of subverting an existing term for something else.

Twisted language has long been used by elite groups to alienate, "other" () and suppress the excluded masses. No wonder it arouses mistrust. When I hear that women are a minority, or men are rapists, I wonder about the speaker's intelligence - do they not understand the basic rules of proportion? Then I remember it's a linguistic convention among sociologists, which calls to mind the others I've learned such as - now - "objectify" to mean "make real", ie concretise. And I wonder why feminists feel the need to twist language.

Seriously, I think this is a real block to feminism's credibility. I happen to be a language and statistics geek, so discrete examples leap out at me, but I think very many people must be put off by linguistic obfuscation and logical falsehoods such as these.

garlicnutty may I refer you to www.pinkstinks.org.uk/ if you haven't seen it.

PromQueenWithin How about "Rapists rape". See also (I believe I am meant to say possible triggers) Feminists don't think all men are rapists. Rapists do. and Don't be That Guy

Leith, forgot to thank you for the Scots language lesson

... thinking about this a bit more, I'd say "Girls love pink" has the power to create the phenomenon it describes. Is that what you meant by language as a constitutive force? In that case, we should be very careful about the negative generalisations we employ ...

You're talking about restrictive rule-setting, PQW, where it is known that a generality won't be 100% appropriate although a threshold is deemed necessary. The statement "People aged under 16 are too immature for sex" leads to the law, "You may not have sex with anyone under 16". It serves a useful purpose and 16 was the agreed, good-enough, threshold. Another statement, "Young black men are violent thugs", serves no such useful purpose. Neither, in my opinion, do "Men rape" or "Girls love pink".