Blog #7 Henley on Sex bias in Language: Making a mountain out of a molehill?

There was much to like about this paper because I felt that it provided more explanation in regards to sex bias in language that made it easier to understand. Sure Henley was one-sided in her explanation of sex bias but at least she made her arguments strong! Also, she covered each point very well and addressed any doubts that you might have had in regards to sex bias in language. If I were to explain sex bias in language to anyone, I would most likely refer to this paper. Then again, there were some areas where explanations of cited studies were rather weak.

So our language treat the sexes unequally? Yes it does. According to Henley it does so in the three following ways: it deprecates and ignores women. Also, it stereotypes women as well. Oh wait so how does it do this? One example given was masculine and feminine forms in language. I do have one question though. I still don't quite understand the concept of masculine and feminine in other languages and if it can really be thought of in terms of gender.

Because as far as I was concerned, gender in reference to inanimate objects was somewhat arbitrary. I could be wrong but I remember a class discussion on why certain objects were considered feminine when we thought they were more likely to be masculine. Does that mean we are going by a sex bias? The more I think about it, we probably are. Then again, couldn't it be simply a means of reference without anything else to it? Also, I do understand that when referring to a male or female in another language, there is usually a masculine or feminine form of the word so the context of the utterance can be understood. Is this so bad? I wish Henley could have explained it more so I could better understand this particular concept.

Another interesting part of the paper was when it discussed the term gay and whether or not it was inclusive of lesbians/ homosexual females. It's kind of interesting, but usually it depends. If at any point someone mentions "gay" or "the gays" most people usually think of men, not women. I recently wrote a paper on gay and lesbian hate crime victims and all throughout the paper I had to use gay and lesbian. Why did I have to? Gay is an encompassing term for homosexuality right? Yes but I had to make it clear I was talking about both genders. Of course now that I think about it, I should have tried it and seen what my professor said. So it's no wonder that during the height of the AIDS scare that everyone thought lesbians were at high risk at spreading it when they were the lowest. At that time, gay was inclusive of gender. Nowadays it is but there is still a need to refer to women separately.

Blog #6 Parks and Robertson reveal connections between attitudes towards women's and sexist language

So it seems that this article is investigation the idea presented by Benjamin Whorf's theory of linguistic relativity. I don't mean to give a linguistics lesson in this blog, but basically this theory postulates that there is a connection between language and culture. So in relation to sexist language and attitudes towards women, it would appear that someone's view of women will also influence their view towards women.

This study looked at four different areas and provided some interesting, if not predictable results. I had some difficulty understanding the statistics, as I always have when reading linguistics studies, so I'm more or less going off of what the discussion presented. So of course women are going to be more supportive of women's rights but it's sad to see that men appear as if they don't care about women's issues or not. Of course they wouldn't because in this society, they have more privileges than women, no matter what progressive steps we have made. This isn't right though because women deserve to have these rights, there really aren't any differences between men and women and their capabilities.

I can easily see how this blog can be turned into a rant, haha. Ok, ok I'll try to keep it on track.

I know I have mentioned sexist language here briefly and have made suggestions such as using their/they instead of he/him. It can be done, but whether everyone else wants to use it is another matter in itself. Do I think there is a connection between language and culture? There is somewhat but I need to read more articles to see that. So do I believe that sexism still exists, even in this day and age? Oh you know it. As advanced a society we may proclaim ourselves to be, there is still the presence of many archaic notions that don't benefit those who have been denied certain rights. Might there be a connection between attitudes towards women and attitudes towards sexist language? Yes I think so. I think the problem is that language is a very commonplace thing for native speakers. We just accept it as it is. Only if you study the intricacies of the language do you understand the concept of morphology, syntax, gender, etc. The average everyday person may not understand it so they might need to have it explained.

I do agree though, that having a sample that is 87% Caucasian doesn't help their study very much. I hope someone is conducting a similar study that is taking into consideration other ethnicities, social status and even socio-economic status. I think it would be interesting to see those results with different samples.