A great victory for. . . something identity-related:
It took them 60 years but Kleenex is finally renaming their “Mansize” tissues after getting customer complaints. The facial-tissues-formerly-known-as-Mansize will now be branded “Extra Large.”
Whew, what a relief. We are truly free of oppression now.
Well, let’s just say a short dude, about 5-foot 3-inches tall, is shopping for facial tissues …
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…and then there’s the quintessential “skinny guy” …
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Too many people are overly fond of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
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…yet another factor in how dogma and stereotypes come about so easily.
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LOL!
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I believe the change was the right thing to do. I’m a big fan of non-sexist language (e.g.., using humankind instead of mankind, first-year student instead of freshman, letter carrier instead of mailman, etc.) when there’s an easy and good alternative to use. But the mistake would be to assume that this is a huge victory for women’s rights, because it simply is not that.
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Men do tend on average to be larger than women and have bigger hands and noses. I don’t think it’s sexist to point out that basic biological fact.
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Yes, it’s always a big progressive victory to replace a seven-letter word (“mankind”) with a longer nine-letter one, and a single-word term (“freshman”) with a new one that needs three words to make its point.
And isn’t the word “huMANkind” still sexist, just like those exclusionist terms “woMEN” and “perSON”?
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I’ve never heard the perSON one but yeah, let’s fucking ban it.
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Real, progressive change is not going to come from fighting over language. And if someone uses the word “freshman,” I’m not going to be offended. I don’t like the identity politics language police. What I am trying to say is that in terms of my own personal language choices, I like to be inclusive AND accurate. So I’m not going to refer to my former department head, a woman, as my department chairman when I can use the word “chair” instead. And I’m going to say “firefighters” instead of “firemen.” In the 1980s when I went to college, many feminists were experimenting with language, using “womyn” and “wimmin,” but nowadays the latter examples seem to me and to most people absurd. So I’m not advocating for the latter.
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Well, some realities about how people view certain words and symbols are never going to change, and raging feminists who insist on feeling victimized until the world transforms into a parallel universe where they get to set the rules are simply volunteering to spend a lifetime being miserable.
Take the example of stick-figure drawings representing people in a thousand symbol charts and pedestrian-crossing street signs worldwide. The symbols are asexual, of course: EVERYBODY who isn’t handicapped has a head, two arms, and two legs.
Yet bitter feminists like the mistress of the long-running (since 2003) website Echidne of the Snakes have repeatedly stated that their oppression will never send as long as those stick figures are considered MALE until drawn with added distinctive female features such as long hair or a skirt. Echidne has probably also noticed that famous cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck are simply drawn as asexual anthropomorphic animals, while their cartoon mouse and duck girlfriends have eyelashes and lipstick.
People who want to feel oppressed and victimized can always find a reason to feel that way. If they’re absolutely nothing that they can do about it, so much the better.
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I hardly see that pointing out female is the marked category and male is the unmarked category is being a victim.
Did any of these feminists you whinge about actually describe themselves as victims?
Many things can be sexist without victimising someone. It’s not the same thing.
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I don’t think anybody uses the word victim necessarily but it does seem quite risible to me when a person who spent an entire conference in complete silence gets up to deliver a talk on how women are silenced in academia.
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“a person who spent an entire conference in complete silence gets up to deliver a talk on how women are silenced”
She has to prove the principle somehow…. you were certainly no help whatsoever!
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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