Feminist Thread - pro feminist discussion

[MarginallyNarkyPuffin]

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"Ballerina" doesn't have a common male equivalent, but I find that dancers themselves use the terms artist or dancer, principal dancer and so on.
I don't understand why some people get so het-up about gender neutral job titles. English is not a gendered language like French, and the vast majority of job titles ARE gender-neutral anyway. It's just simplifying things.

That's another one for the list. Any words that would never be used to describe exactly the same behaviour by a man.

It probably links in to the thread about men holding a disproportionate % of top jobs in female dominated professions. Person A makes comments about a situation. If A is male the comments are likely to be labelled as strong, positive, decisive. If person A is female the same comments are likely to be labelled as 'overbearing', 'strident' and 'pushy'.

I think that if we accept that this is a patriarcal society, then we grew up in it too! So we along with all men and women have had decades of being conditioned to believe women should behave in a certain way. And it just so happens that the the things we see as 'leadership qualities' are those that are mainly celebrated when we see them in a man and criticised when we see them in a woman.

I'd go for ballet dancer. It's what they are doing.

I think people get het up because some of the terms are, when you reflect on it, rather odd and IMO childish ways to refer to jobs like policeman and fireman. What's with the joining of an object and 'man'. So then they try and create a gender neutral version following this model that is contrived. Hence why I go for a different route of talking about what they do, rather than joining two words in a rather arbitrary way, if you get me.

I also think they get het up cos they don't want to be labeled one of those feminists.

I agree that it actually makes more sense to say eg police officer.

There's been research done into the use of 'male' language to describe entrepreneurs and how that puts women off seeing themselves as such, which has implications when much training/coaching aimed generically at young people uses this term.

Also re language, I swear a lot of more since being more of a feminist. A fuck of a lot more .

When I was talking about "gender neutral" titles, I meant the ones Alys mentioned: police officer, paramedic etc.
Does anyone actually say policeperson? Thinking about it, I usually say "copper", to be honest.

Oh I saw a wonderful conversation where people who would usually have said policeman all changed it to policeperson when they spotted I was in the room . So yes they do. Where they usually just used policeman to generally denote the police, and then catch themselves.

What do most people playing with kids call the little characters they are playing with? IME firemen, policemen etc.

I don't have a problem with gender neutral titles because the majority of jobs are gender neutral in english. Doctor, dentist, cleaner, solicitor, plumber, electrician, engineer, accountant etc

It would depend what gender the little figures seemed to be, probably.

I tend to say police. Which I'd imagine the police might not like.

You'd say police, for an individual wooden figure you were moving around a pretend town, for example? Like 'who's this in the car?' 'Oh look it's a police officer'.

I thought men who did ballet dancing as their job were ballerinas, didn't realise it was gendered.

Would happily have said, for example, Billy Elliot grows up to be a ballerina.

Well yes it is in Latin or French or whatever but in English? Ballerina = person who does ballet dancing.

Marking place (in a non entitled kinda way).

I am suggesting that ballerina has become a genderless description for any person who does that job.

Like we use author and not authoress any more, author has become the word for any person (of any gender) who writes for a living.

It's just more unusual that the feminine form becomes the generic, most often we take the male form.