Arya, Week #2 - Misogyny Will Never Die: How Language Subtly Perceives Women as Less
Image credit: Rusi, “Misogyny.”
I have strong opinions on my femininity. Sure, I dress as a boy sometimes, but I still have a firm identity and sense of pride around being a woman. But society does not. At practically every corner and every step, there is something inherently more difficult about being a woman. Basically, every modern society has some sort of underlying sexism. Some of it is pretty obvious like women not being able to have credit cards (essentially financial freedom) until 1974 with the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, but other times it’s not.
There are small things like how the law of Coverture made women have no legal identity at all, even being called “legally dead”. The tradition of marriage creating one simply meant that the husband was the “one”, which isn’t nearly as romantic sounding as it is today. BBC adds that the male being the default gender–called generic masculine–creates a bias, which embeds itself into our psyche so much so that a gender neutral term like “actor” is still automatically a man in our minds. But this isn’t just an English problem, especially when looking at gendered languages like French, Spanish, Arabic and Hindi, that place more importance on the gender of something or someone. An example is from romance languages (derived from Latin) where there could be 99 girls and 1 guy and that group would use the masculine pronoun, implying that even a singular man is more important than women no matter the quantity. Both of these things push the message that not only should a woman always change to assist the man, but also that her history, life, and identity simply isn’t as important as his.
Unfortunately, as the title foreshadows, misogyny is far too ingrained into international languages and societies to ever fully disappear. That being said, romance languages are trying to incorporate gender-neutral options and new writing styles to get rid of gender-based bias. The way to remove this prejudice is to understand that while there are laws and certain language that try to erase women, they are always a part of humankind.
I found your blog really intriguing! I totally agree that our patriarchal society has made it hard for women on basically every corner of our history. But interestingly enough, I found that for most of human history many if not most societies weren’t like this. In fact, in hunter gatherer societies during the Paleolithic I believe, many communities were egalitarian. This meant that both men and women hunted and often helped care for children. But many historians believe the agricultural revolution in the Neolithic intensified patriarchy. But the one thing I’m wondering about is whether grammatical masculinity can be equated to misogyny. For example in Indo European languages like Hindi, nouns are either feminine or masculine. But Dravidian languages like Tamil don’t mark nouns in the same way and leave inanimate objects like chairs or pens ungendered. Outside of India we also see the counterexample of Iceland. Icelandic nouns are either masculine, feminine, or neuter, yet on the 2026 World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Index, Iceland ranked 1st for the 17th year in a row. So while I definitely think grammar may reinforce existing stereotypes, I wonder whether grammatical gender itself matters more than the actual social meaning attached to that grammar.
ReplyDeleteHi Arya! I definitely related to you right away, as misogyny is a topic I am also incredibly passionate about. I certainly agree with your explanation of how society does not bring women up, but rather puts them down. I also somehow never knew that women were not allowed to own credit cards until 1974. It is appalling that women gained access to credit cards only 52 years ago! Language bias is also something incredibly unfair, built on the ideals of men being “superior” to women. It demonstrates how misogyny is still a prevalent issue to this day. It is amazing to hear that romance languages are finally attempting to rid themselves of gender-based bias, and hopefully this will be another step towards diminishing sexism!
ReplyDeleteArya, I feel that the subtle dominance of male-oriented language is a consistent theme throughout numerous world languages, from English to Chinese. However, I feel that, in addition to Romantic languages, other language families are also attempting to incorporate gender-neutral language into its diction, albeit with varying degrees of success. Activists in China, for example, have been advocating for the adoption of the gender neutral word “x也” (as opposed to “他,” which is masculine, and “她,” which is feminine). However, due to deeply ingrained Confucian values, Chinese society is slow to adopt this pronoun. In the end, it all comes down to how gender is perceived in a society: in some, because of the existence of more than two genders, the transition may be easier, while in others, the task may seem daunting. No matter how hard that transition is, I believe that the binary of society’s current understanding of gender should be broken down into an array of sliders, and what better place to start than language? It is what we learn first, after all.
ReplyDeleteI agree that there is underlying sexism present in virtually every society, and your inclusion of historical examples such as with the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and Law of Coverture show a precedent of women being undermined. If many women could not even hold credit cards until 1974, a sad but logical assumption can be made that misogyny is still readily prevalent. I think that one of the main problems with a lot of gender-neutral words is that many of them were seen as masculine words prior to being used neutrally. This leads to people still thinking of a man when they see or hear them, and it is “interesting” to see how it’s essentially always the masculine term that becomes the word for everybody and never really the feminine one. Your example of the romance languages does a really great job of conveying the bias within the languages’ rules since it is pounded into the heads of kids learning languages like Spanish to use “Ellos” instead of “Ellas” whenever there is a male presence. I have heard people trying to push gender-neutral options for romance languages, but there is always some level of pushback. There was even a gag in a show with Gabriel Iglesias that made fun of a student trying to get her teacher to use “Latinx.” I think as more generations are born, these gender-neutral languages will become more popular and widespread. Even if misogyny is too ingrained in societies to completely disappear, I do agree that understanding that women are always a part of humanity is important and can help to at least chip away at it.
ReplyDeleteWow, what a hot topic! This is sure to generate a lot of discussion. I didn't know about nouns being gendered either masculine or feminine until I started learning French. Now, I have to remember the gender for every noun in the language that I'm aware of so far. It's not easy keeping it all straight, as you know, since you're a fellow French learner!
ReplyDeleteWhile history is full of instances where men asserted dominance over their female counterparts, society has progressively become more equal for men and women. Especially in the modern era in which we live, in the hemisphere of the world we are lucky enough to be in, women are well-respected in our contemporary cultural norms. Even in the past, there has been for a long time the idea that a man should be kind to a woman, like a man being decent enough to doff his hat for her and holding the door so she can enter first. Likewise, I found myself squeezing through one of the doors in the New Buildings at school earlier in the opposite direction as this girl. I realized, "Ooh, I should have waited for her to be able to exit first before going in myself!"