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.