Straight talking sexism

‘Straight talking Sexism’ from a language obsessed culture, oh women stop moaning’

Straight talking politics is deemed to exist but does straight talking sexism? Since socialisation women have been ‘taught’ the proper ways of speaking according to a leading feminist linguistic Deborah Cameron. She noted that ‘this’ ingrained acceptance of a ‘proper’ speech style which she coined ‘verbal hygiene’ ( 1995 book ‘verbal hygiene’) plays a vast part in the contribution to the sexism that exists within Language. Not only have women been segregated in the slave parlour (kitchen) but through history women have been deemed to ‘cleanse up their grammar’ or is it just because women are naturally wonderful at embedding ‘empty adjectives’ in their unconventional declarative sentences.  

Historically language has seemed to always favour the male gender, through gender-specific terms such as ‘Policemen, chairmen, postman and so on. This has been deemed to promote authority and has connoted that other genders are unworthy of such occupations. Traditionally the use of masculine pronouns in place of generic was regarded as non-sexist. Moreover the American author Bryan A Garner stated that the single biggest problem in sexist language is the generic masculine pronoun. But is it time society agreed on a gender-neutral singular pronoun? This has already been established within Sweden, when in 2014 in was announced that ‘hen’ would be introduced into the official glossary of the Swedish Academy (first proposed in 1966!). The lexis ‘Hen’ is simply implemented where the gender is unspecified. Evidently this has created vast debate globally but it vastly concludes that language on a large demographic scale is sexist. To abolish the sexism there has been a positive movement to integrate different alternatives due to society is moving away from being conservatively heteronormative and transmitting this heterosexual ideology.  

But then again society is heavily patriarchal. On the contrary through the recent movement that has occurred within the last decade for a move towards a more gender-neutral language and especially within the work-domain. There has been a societal move towards non-segregating occupation related terms such as police officers, postal workers. This is a positive move towards diminishing barriers for all genders; not just the typical two most adored and overused terms in language; female and male but also including a variety of genders: bisexuals, Asexual etc.  Which has led to the fundamental shift in English honorific. Within the 20^th century ‘MS’ was reintroduced. The American Heritage Book of English Usage states that: "Using Ms. obviates the need for the guesswork involved in figuring out whether to address someone as Mrs. or Miss: you can’t go wrong with Ms. Whether the woman you are addressing is married or unmarried, has changed her name or not, Ms. is always correct.’’. Personally I typically prefer the usage of ‘MS’ as to some certain degree it creates glorious mystery (as the ‘women’ species are socially deemed to be) but also establishes as ground meaning for individuals who identify as women sex in general but also feels drastically empowering. Men have not surprisingly been pre-established an honorific which never questioned whether they were of marital status or not. Therefore the use of lexical asymmetry between ‘MR’ and ‘MRS’ highlight the inequality.  The dominance model suggested that women use language in a way which reflects their subordinate position in society, whereas men use language which reflects their dominant position. However why do ‘men’ feel the audacity to have patriarchal dominance within language as well as the false generic ‘mankind’ being established across humanity to refer to all gender.

The typical ‘female rant’ is concluding upon this note; Language is evidently sexist through numerous data and both sociological and linguistic theorist. Howbeit how can society enforce positive liberalization within language where prejudices, discriminative remarks and male dominated terms are not given recognition within our ‘gendermutualkind’.