Marked Women, Unmarked Men
Speaking of looking pretty, and the power of language, and stuff... Here's another piece that I found interesting. I hope some of you will enjoy it too.
http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/tannend/nyt062093.htm
Wears Jump Suit. Sensible Shoes. Uses Husband's Last Name.
(originally titled "Marked Women, Unmarked Men"
by Deborah Tannen
The New York Times Magazine, June 20, 1993.
(snip)
The unmarked tense of verbs in English is the present -- for example, visit. To indicate past, you mark the verb by adding ed to yield visited. For future, you add a word: will visit. Nouns are presumed to be singular until marked for plural, typically by adding s or es, so visit becomes visits and dish becomes dishes.
The unmarked forms of most English words also convey "male." Being male is the unmarked case. Endings like ess and ette mark words as "female." Unfortunately, they also tend to mark them for frivolousness. Would you feel safe entrusting your life to a doctorette? Alfre Woodard, who was an Oscar nominee for best supporting actress, says she identifies herself as an actor because "actresses worry about eyelashes and cellulite, and women who are actors worry about the characters we are playing." Gender markers pick up extra meanings that reflect common associations with the female gender: not quite serious, often sexual.
(snip)
Writing this article may mark me not as a writer, not as a linguist, not as an analyst of human behavior, but as a feminist -- which will have positive or negative, but in any case powerful, connotations for readers. Yet I doubt that anyone reading Ralph Fasold's book would put that label on him.
(snip)
To say anything about women and men without marking oneself as either feminist or anti-feminist, male-basher or apologist for men seems as impossible for a woman as trying to get dressed in the morning without inviting interpretations of her character. Sitting at the conference table musing on these matters, I felt sad to think that we women didn't have the freedom to be unmarked that the men sitting next to us had. Some days you just want to get dressed and go about your business. But if you're a woman, you can't, because there is no unmarked woman.
= new reply since forum marked as read
My formal title in that capacity in Ontario was "barrister and solicitor". In England, the professions are separate; in Canada they were merged long ago.
So in my early days, I became good friends with a younger woman working for a civil liberties organization in the building where I shared space with several community groups. She was becoming politicized as a feminist, largely by the sexism of her boss.
The question of job titles and such came up one day, and she suggested that I should call myself "Barristeress and Solicitorette" just to make the point.
And yup. A man can put on jeans and a Tshirt, or a suit and tie, or a bathing suit, and just be a man wearing his normal man's clothes for whatever the task at hand is. There just ain't no such way of doing and being, for a woman.
Women are deviant no matter what we do or are. Deviant from "normal", which is male, or deviant from "normal female", which isn't normal.
