Language and Misogyny

[alexpolismum]

I have been thinking a lot about how language is used to express things implicitly or just to add a hint, a nuance, without explicitly saying something.

The more I think about it, the more it seems that misogyny is often expressed in this way. For example, saying "a nagging wife" or a "hysterical girl" etc.

This has also got me thinking about other points of language. Does it matter if we say for example 'actress' or should actor be used for both?

(I should perhaps mention that I am a professional translator, so I think carefully about the right choice of word all the time.)

Ooh, this has brought me on to another point. Do you think it belittles women to refer to them as 'girls' as adults, while males of the same age range are referred to as 'men'?

I haven't read all the posts but this is coming in useful. Apologies if it's been posted already:

Name it, change it

Wow, I didn't think I had been gone long, but have come back to find so much to read!

Regarding the rape of the earth - personally, I think that's an acceptable analogy, but I don't find other examples, such as EvilAnts' cash machine analogy, acceptable. That one seems to trivialise rape.

When people use 'emotional' in that way, I point out that everyone is emotional, as we all have emotions. It's part of being human.

I have been having an interesting conversation with an Armenian friend of mine. She tells me that in Armenian there is just one pronoun in the third person. No differentiation between he/ she/ it, in Armenian it's all the same pronoun. I can't help wondering how this would be in English, would it make language less sexist or would people just find other ways to express that. I suspect the latter.

Another anecdote to relate to the female words and male words for professions.

My great great grandfather was a tailor and had his own shop. When he died, his daughter, my great grandmother, took over the business. The local town hall was actually petitioned by a group of men to close the shop down on the grounds that it was supposed to be a tailor's shop and she was only a seamstress and not a proper tailor! (My grandmother used to find it very funny that one of their arguments had been that it wasn't 'seamly', as she used to say!)

My great grandmother got through this by simply relabelling the business "Dressmakers" and actually kept it going right up to the second world war when it was destroyed.

Btw, this is from way back in the thread but I finally remembered to ask DH: in Russian, country ('strana') doesn't have any etymological connection with 'father'. DH also wanted to know, alex, isn't the German 'Vaterland' rather an artificial term? He thought there's another word for country that's more usual. If so, then it'd be only the Romance languages that do it.

And my grandfather was a "ladies' tailor", a male dressmaker. Interesting that as a man, he felt that something with "tailor" in the name was more 'fitting' (as I don't know if he said or not).

Coincidentally, that shop was destroyed during the war too.

LittleRedPumpkin - there is also Heimatland in German. I confess I do not know which one is used more frequently, as German is not my normal area of expertise, it's just a minor subject for me.

I thought there was another word in Russian that meant home country. Please bear with me, as I am just spelling it roughly how I have heard it, and it's been a while, so this is just an approximation, something like "ateshestvo" although I'm not quite sure.

It's not just the Romance languages, Greek also has πατρίδα (patrida).

Interestingly though, in Czech it's apparently mateřská země, the motherland. (disclaimer - I don't actually speak Czech - this is what a Czech friend has informed me)

ooh, my Greek letters and Czech accents haven't come out properly. Never mind. It just says 'patrida' in the Greek alphabet and 'materska zeme' with Czech accents.

I have no issue whatsoever with "the finest actor" and "the finest actress". I don't think that actors and actresses are in competition with one another, and we therefore require a superlative for each category. Some professions (acting or sport come to mind) have the person's gender as an integral part of the skillset; other professions (neurosurgeon, barrister) don't.

rg german, "Vaterland" (father's country) and "Heimat(land)" there are also regional differences. in the north people would say just "Heimat". I think it comes from a time when the "country" changed frequently. e.g. from prussia to denmark and back.

Don't you think that looking on actors and actresses as two different categories is a product of the language though?
In the past we'd have used author/authoress,poet/poetess and it would have felt natural to consider those as different categories as well.
I don't think acting has gender as an integral part of the skill set any more than singing for example does,the fact that actors will be restricted in the roles that they can play by gender doesn't mean that the skills used in playing those roles aren't the same.

Pogles - I am not sure if it is a product of the language or if it is part of the general attitude towards women. Drawing on my own experience of a language where the word for actor/actress is the same, with only the article changing, there are still two distinct categories.

I agree that the skills used are the same and it would be nice to think this could change in future, along with the chance for women to play some decent roles rather than Token Woman or Sexy Sidekick

What I have never understood is how do we change the perception of certain words as being male or female?

Doctor - male
Nurse - female
Teacher - female (probably)
School head - male (probably)

These are technically, gender neutral words and yet like with the tailor example above, they have male/female connotations which I find frustrating.

Bling - I think it's mainly just a matter of time. And removing the stereotypes from kids play etc. I mean, there are lots of famous female doctors, female doctor characters on TV etc, and loads of female doctors working day to day. But the doctor=male thing is either a hangover from previous generations (I am sure female doctors were quite rare in my parents' youth for instance), or a result of the boys play doctors/girls play nurses thing that many still seem to find acceptable.

Also:

doctor = well paid/authority figure and doing interventiony things to other people's bodies

Nurse = not v well paid and mainly "looking after" role (in people's minds at least)

Teacher = educating/caring for children

Headteacher = bossing people around/authority figure

So the wider stereotypes of what men and women are/do may feed into the stereotype of who does what job.

alex - sorry, we are having this conversation at snail's pace! DH says: 'Otechestvo - отечество. Does come from father, but not commonly used and doesn't mean father land or country per se. It's more of stand-in for home or placeof birth. This is comparable to 'rodina - родина' which literally place of origin/birth... homeland which is what you use for wherever you came from, whether that is country or area or town.'

So it looks as if there's the same association of 'father' with 'home' there too!

Ants - about teaching, I find it depressing that teaching children to read becomes a woman's job exactly as literacy becomes more widespread - once literacy stops being something special that only a few people do, then it's ok for women to teach the beginners.

Ok, that didn't work, sorry alex! The random strings of numbers were cyrillic, but he's sounded them out anyway.

I am, btw, not making the best case to my DH that I do just as much work as he does while he's at work, am I?

Evilants - that's exactly it. Responsible, authoritarian jobs = men. Drives me mad.

On the plus side, it really annoys DH when people (normally older men) ask him what he does and ignore me. He always pointedly references that he's trying to start a new career and then says something like, "Luckily, Bling is successful and is able to support both of us".

Which mostly I feel is unnecessary, but I do appreciate the gesture!

I have to say, I don't read or hear 'doctor' or 'teacher' and think one gender or the other. A 'primary teacher' I would automatically assume was female, but that's more down to likelihood, I think.

Arrgh when will this die out? My mum runs her own business and is plagued even now by people coming in and demanding to know where "the boss" is. Er, she's that woman standing in front of you with her eyes flashing in a threatening manner.

I just thought it would be interesting to do a google image search on certain words.

Google image 'doctor' and the first page of results mostly (but not exclusively) show men (including, er, David Tennant).

Google 'secretary' and the first page of results probably skewed by the film, but all women or underwear. You have to go to the second page to get people like Hilary Clinton whose job title has 'secretary'. In fact, the first page is a huge contrast to the second.

Google 'teacher' and the gender split loks about even to me.

Sorry, this is very boring and we've gone way beyond it, but I only see my husband after work hours so feel the need to update:

According to him (he may be right): Greek 'patrida' is later and less-used that 'metropolis' which he thinks is from 'mother-city'. He also says that although Russian has a word for country that means 'fatherland', the more-used term, 'rodina' is usually said as 'rodina matr' (meaning 'mother country').

Fascinating, I love etymology. Just looked up metropolis (and its meaning is mother city). It was used by Greek colonies to refer to the original city from which they came, i.e. from which they had sprung or been born. Another interesting term used very often in America is "alma mater" for the university from which you graduate.

I can't speak for ancient Greek, but in modern Greek, patrida is definitely the most commonly used term. Mteropolis does indeed mean mother-city, but these days tends to be used to refer to the seat of the Greek Orthodox Church in a particular diocese.

Thanks for the other words from Russian (I can't get Greek letters to come out properly on mumsnet either, no idea why, they work fine elsewhere on the internet!). Anyway, it was very interesting to read. I also love etymology (in case anyone reading this far hadn't already guessed!)

Re teachers and secretaries, my mother is a teacher. She once went to an interview at a seconday school, where they happened to be interviewing for a secretarial position on the same day. When my mum went in to notify the receptionist that she was there, without even asking her, the receptionist immediately said "Oh, I'm afraid you're too late, we've already got a new secretary!" She pointed out that she was there for the position of maths teacher only to be told "You should have contacted us earlier to be given an interview, we can't fit you in just like that. We're waiting for Mr XYZ now!" "I am Mrs XYZ, do you think I might do?" replied my mum... They had just assumed she would be a man.

a german one just came to my mind when playing with the dc.
small people like lego figurines (sp) are call "männchen" in german, which means "little man". as far as I know there is no female version.