Just a Few More Words About Gender and Language

I certainly did not mean to suggest with my recent etymological reflections on 'seminal' that I  am at all interested in restarting the political-correctness wars of the early 1990s. That is an old and boring topic, and by now it is only the most dithering and out-of-the-loop callers on AM talk-radio, along with the very most impotent and alienated of bloggers, who continue to find menacing the basic proposals for language reform that came out of these wars. I am a strong advocate of a prescriptive approach to language that actively molds it to better fit the ideas we wish to express, and if we are committed to the idea of gender equality then we should certainly try to speak in a way that does not, e.g., presuppose that all doctors are male. But what I do not like is when we, on the side of gender equality, help the talk-radio callers to make their inarticulate point for them by being stupid ourselves, and I take the mistaken belief that 'seminal' refers only to male semen to be one such instance of stupidity.

There are numerous other ones, and most of them seem to arise from the belief that we can identify, isolate, and eliminate a definite set of lexical items, rather than recognizing that different words and expressions might be appropriate at different registers. Yes, we should signal our commitment to gender equality in the way we use direct, declarative speech, but we should not presume that the new rules of direct declarative speech excuse us from mastering all the different ways of speaking and writing of fellow language users who do not or did not share our sensibilities. At the very least, this mastery will require a passive ability to understand what they are saying, but also, occasionally, to be able to reproduce their way of speaking through indirect speech, through translation, through ironic appropriation, through the creation of fictional characters who are not as sensitive as their creators are (consider Amelia Gray's creation of a Texan trailer-park dweller, who complains to his lover: "[H]onest to God, you got big tits but you make a real shitty muse," in her fine short story, "These Are the Fables"), and so on.

I recall reading a manual of non-sexist writing, published circa 1994 (I forget the title), in which there was a special section on 'animal metaphors'. The section was very short, and consisted mostly in the following advice (to paraphrase): people should not be compared to animals, since even when not sexist such comparisons are almost always derogatory. But what if I'm just trying to make sense of a double entendre intended by a Latin author, e.g., when Horace writes of the 'breaking in' of a woman (Carm. 2.5.1)? Would it not help to be familiar with the various respects in which humans do in fact see each other as animals, or have in fact seen them as animals in our long and rich literary history? What now if I want to make a point by writing a satirical line that borrows some of Horace's own imagery? What if I were Horace's translator? Would I myself, willy-nilly, be comparing humans to animals? The manual from the early 1990s seems to presuppose that direct, declarative claims of fact --e.g., "that woman is (literally) a mare"-- are the only thing language is good for.

I recognize, here, that a difficult balance needs to be struck: at the heart of the move for language reform is a commitment to overcoming old ways of thinking, and only with difficulty can this commitment be made compatible with a commitment to not forgetting the past altogether. This is why Leftist students from Catholic countries have fought so eagerly over the past several decades for the removal of Latin from the mandatory university curriculum: Latin is associated with the old oppressive system, and they would rather cut themselves off from, lose access to, the wealth of Latin learning than have their university years complicated by a requirement that is both hard to fulfill and tainted by its association with the institution they to which they are politically opposed. One can understand their demand, but one also must regret the loss. For a bit of perspective, it is worth noting that revolutionary movements almost by definition include some program of language reform that makes it hard for those after the revolution to understand those who were writing and speaking before it. In extreme cases, such as the Kemalist revolution that brought the modern, secular Turkish republic into existence, the rupture is absolute: no modern Turk who is not an Ottoman scholar has direct access to thoughts expressed in writing by her or his 19th-century predecessors. At the same time, some revolutionaries (who were perhaps, deep in their hearts, conservatives) have cautioned against this sort of rupture: thus Stalin argued that to scrap the language and literature of the tsarist era would be as wasteful as blowing up the tsar's railroad system. Ideally, I think, we should seek to find a way to overcome old ways of thinking, without in the process losing our ability to understand these old ways. Revolutionaries, including the more myopic and unimaginative Left academics of recent decades, seem to have presumed that there is no overcoming short of forgetting.

We should also, of course, retain a healthy amount of skepticism as to the usefulness of language reform for bringing about thought reform. It is interesting in this connection to note that many communities that are hardly renowned for their commitment to gender equality happen to organize their social lives around languages that have no gender at all, not only no gender distinction between common nouns, but also no gender distinctions between third-person singular pronouns: instead, there is only one single pronoun for 'she', 'he', and 'it'. Other communities, such as the Swedes, are known for their commitment to gender equality, while nonetheless speaking a language that requires its users to register the gender of both those spoken about and those addressed. What, then, can we really hope to achieve by replacing 'he' with 'they'? How is this, by itself, going to ensure that we perceive gender difference in any more enlightened a way than do the Iranian judges who, by use of a gender-neutral pronoun, nonetheless find the linguistic resources needed to hand down a sentence condemning a teenage girl to death for the crime of premarital sex?

Comments

[Cathy]

Regret the loss, indeed. After an early upbringing of devout Catholicism, renounced by my family in my last year of primary school, Rome some years later banned mass in Latin. A priest in my town started underground Latin masses and it became the only church we went to! Awesome (if I may use the word in a non-trivial way) even without knowing the language.