Museum forced to stop calling ships "she"

[FairfaxAikman]

Vandals have been scratching out female pronouns

www.scotsman.com/news/people/scottish-maritime-museum-forced-by-vandals-to-stop-calling-ships-she-1-4913370?fbclid=IwAR3b44WFsOp-UJ-tmOmyS73EYy8MaO5j4Skb2g5xW1Qfm8CwxvL1F-UBGDE

FFS.

Why have they been identified as female?
I always got the impression it was because historically it was a bunch of men controlling ‘her’. Happy to be educated though!

It’s like cars. It’s sexualising something which is important to men.

I’ve never particularly liked them being called ‘she’ because it felt like it had those connotations, but this is ridiculous - the museum basically saying we are going to change what we do because of vandals.

Googling suggests it’s because of woman = mother = protector, which is a reassuring way to think about your ship. Still reductive!

No one go to Bristol then. All sorts of things are female - cars, houses, radios, shops.

Googling suggests it’s because of woman = mother = protector,

They (and figureheads) were once the only women allowed at sea.

Will they now lobby for gender neutral storms too?

Quietly wondering up myself how this mentality would manifest in a language with masculine and feminine pronouns. .. French and German for example.

The French have only recently adopted feminine nouns for male professions..

La voiture is not a sexualisation of the car.

Why have they been identified as female?

It’s a geographical thing.

North America, Australia, Western Europe = She

Eastern Europe Middle East and Russia =He

Rest of the world =it

I heard many a French commentator talking about the 'firemen' at Notre Dame being hastily corrected by the interviewer repeating 'So you say that there were 500 fireFIGHTERS at the blaze then...?'

I thought Lloyds of London stopped referring to them as "she" a few years ago.

I was told when was a child by my mum's friend that all cars and ships are she because the carry people inside them and only females can do that.

HMS Victory is a she. She has a figurehead:

My dad was a sailor, and I always had the feeling that ship's were not "it" because they were seen as having a sort of personality of their own.

Ffs that's just ridiculous.

I'm.curious now, if everywhere has to start using gender neutral language fir everything and everyone then what's the point of any of the transition.

English is one of the least gendered languages. I suspect this is linguistic relic like the fact that cooked meats have French names.

IIRC, submarines are male.

I was told when was a child by my mum's friend that all cars and ships are she because the carry people inside them and only females can do that.

I’d never heard that, but I like it.

My first car, a Peugeot 205 was male. Every car I have had since has been female. I have no idea why.

IIRC, submarines are male.

How phallic.

It’s not the pettiness of ending this practice now that concerns me so much as extending into the past.

This is a museum for Christ’s sake. Even if we stopped doing this now those ships were referred to as ‘she’ in the past.

It takes a monumental ego to think that the time you are born into is more important than any other.

It’s bad enough they are transing the dead, now they are doing it to inanimate objects.

Submarines are not 'she' because they are boats, not ships.

Subs are just known by their names, no pronoun required.

How phallic.

Long and thin and full of seamen.

(I’ll get me coat.)

Presentism is a menace of our age. Sometimes it is justified, such as renaming the Colston Hall. (It was never his in the first place.) Sometimes it is arguable, such as renaming Agatha Chistie's And Then There Were None, as it is now known.

Even in museums, it might be the right thing, such as removing the stuffed Eskimos from the New York Museum of Natural History. (Brught to the city by Admiral Pearey as a reword for guiding him to the North Pole, they caught the flu and got taxidermed.)

Sometimes it creates new confusion in place of old, such as the Battle of Britian Memorials who can't make up their mind if one of 'The Few,' Flying Officer George Goodman was from Israel, Palestine or Turkey. The current view is that he was British.

I'm really confused as to what the objection is for calling a ship she?

I'm really confused as to what the objection is for calling a ship she?

Me too. I refer to my car as “she” because she is awesome and powerful (gets me out of those snowdrifts with her AWD, too).

Well I can’t see the Queen saying “God bless it and all who sail in it”. (Possibly because she may not name ships any more, or we don’t build them.)