natty dread wrote:BigBallinStalin wrote:This pretty much annoys me about this certain kind of feminism. They assume that we are the product of our culture, so subjective meanings of words like "he" and "she" somehow (like magic) promote this gender inequality. Never mind that the subjective meaning will differ. To many of them, it's like my saying "the employer hired 10 workers. He then did...." magically promotes gender inequality. Why? Because according to them we have very little agency. We just respond to things like robots and think the same as these feminists presume.
Ok that's not really it, you're kind of misrepresenting and/or misunderstanding the whole argument there...
The problem is really only in situations where people don't know the gender of the person that is being referenced, and the language convention usually always defaults to "he". Kind of like male gender is the default assumption. It's not about not having agency, or gendered pronouns magically making people hate women or anything. It's more about creating an environment that is inclusive to all genders, you can still use gendered pronouns when referring to a person whose gender is known.
It's kind of like if you were a black person, and there'd be different pronouns for white and black people, and people would always default to using the white-people-pronoun... I bet that wouldn't feel too good for you.
No one's claiming that adopting gender-neutral pronouns is going to somehow magically fix gender inequality, it's more of a gesture or courtesy towards people of other than male gender, that their existence is acknowledged and so on...
Another thing is, that stereotypes and cultural conventions
do affect the behaviour of people - even if you consciously know that men and women are equal, or white and black people are equal, or straight and gay people are equal etc. there's tons of assumptions about gender, race, sexuality etc. hidden in the cultural narrative, which you can internalize even without consciously realizing it. They usually manifest as unconscious assumptions, or things everyone just takes for granted... it's only when you really think to question those assumptions that you'll notice that there's really no basis for them.
I understand all that, and I agree that my criticism is might be misplaced regarding the topic; however, this particular method reminds me of this strand of American feminism, which behaves very similar to Adam Smith's
The Theory of Moral Sentiments excerpt about the chessboard.
There's these kind of feminists, who are the "men of the system," (to use his 1759 way of speaking) and there's the chess pieces. The men of the system design plans which they try to impose on the people, i.e. the chess pieces. It works if the chess pieces already want to move that way. It creates conflict when the chess pieces want to move toward a place different from the designed plan.
(see:
http://cafehayek.com/2008/12/the-human-chess.html)
No one's claiming that adopting gender-neutral pronouns is going to somehow magically fix gender inequality, it's more of a gesture or courtesy towards people of other than male gender, that their existence is acknowledged and so on...
I understand this, and it's a better move as oppose to forcing people through the government to change their behavior. Neverthless, their plan won't matter if people are geared toward interpreting the meaning of words in a certain way.
In other words, if you supply a word, then the demand will follow; however, this demand is still constrained by the demanders' already established interpretation of the meaning of words.
Another thing is, that stereotypes and cultural conventions do affect the behaviour of people - even if you consciously know that men and women are equal, or white and black people are equal, or straight and gay people are equal etc. there's tons of assumptions about gender, race, sexuality etc. hidden in the cultural narrative, which you can internalize even without consciously realizing it. They usually manifest as unconscious assumptions, or things everyone just takes for granted... it's only when you really think to question those assumptions that you'll notice that there's really no basis for them.
I agree that this effect has some magnitude of unknown proportion on some unknown proportion of people and their behavior. Regarding the underlined, I agree, but only because it depends on how one's mind
filters through the information received. That's the approach I'm in favor of--the change within. The other approach in the OP is supplying a word to language which allegedly lacked it (they didn't have "that person")?
The approach in the OP is between external and internal change, and they're free to change dictionaries and children's books only if those producers voluntary agree to make these changes (i.e. no government interference).
My concern is that some people see this internal-external type change and then justify their own plans which require implementation and enforcement by the government (i.e. total external change). That approach typically describes this particular group of American feminists' MO (modus operandi). They exaggerate the external cultural effects, downplay the individual's agency, and overestimate the effectiveness of imposing external change. That's my main point.
