I’ve never really seen the need to respell words – ie wimmin, womyn etc. – to exclude men and man from them. It’s hard enough to spell things in the first place, and while I guess it would be nice to have more than one right answer, it also makes things more confusing, as demonstrated by the difficulties my brain has with bilingual conversations.

Just today I was speaking to Americans, in English, and found myself repeatedly throwing in Spanish conjunctions, as in “I can’t believe you go to school con my cousin!” Slightly embarassing as I had just met most of them, but what can you do, and they seemed to understand.

Back to our abandoned topic: I do share the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s belief in false gender-neutrality in English (hat tip to Unapologetically Female for the link). Which just means that I don’t say things like

“3. When a student comes into the room, he should pick up a handout.”

or “4. Man is a primate.”

According to the SEP, “Feminists have also argued that terms like ‘he’ and ‘man’ contribute to making women invisible — that is, to obscuring women’s importance, and distracting attention from their existence. . .

“There is good psycholinguistic evidence that those who encounter sentences (like (3) and (4)) using the terms ‘he’ and ‘man’ think more readily of males than of females.^[2]” [Duh.]

“If this is right, then the use of these words can be seen as contributing to the invisibility of women. This gives feminists a good reason to object to the ‘gender-neutral’ use of these terms.”

More interestingly, the SEP also has things to say about sex and the male worldview:

“The idea that some terms encode a male worldview is initially a puzzling one. One thing that is meant by it is, roughly, that the meanings of certain terms seem to divide the world up in a way that is more natural for men than for women.

“Good examples of this come from the terms ‘foreplay’ and ‘sex’. ‘Sex’ is generally taken to refer to an act that is defined in terms of male orgasm, while the sexual activities during which many women have their orgasms are relegated to secondary status, referred to by terms like ‘foreplay’.

“These terms, then, can be seen as based in a male perspective on sex. (It is worth noting that the ‘male perspective’ claim need not rest on the (implausible) idea that this perspective is shared by all men. Rather, it can rest on claims about what is typical for men, or on the claim that the only perspective from which certain understandings make sense is a male one.)

“As a result, these terms may serve as a barrier to accurate communication or even thought about women’s experiences of sex. (Cameron 1985, Moulton 1981b, Spender 1985). Catharine MacKinnon and Sally Haslanger also discuss legal definitions of ‘rape’ as (among other things) involving more than ‘the normal level of force’, an understanding that seems committed to the idea that some level of force is acceptable in sexual relations (Haslanger 1995: 109; MacKinnon 1989: 173).

Languages may also lack words for things that matter a great deal to women. This sort of gap is another way that a language can be seen as encoding a male worldview. The term ‘sexual harassment’, for example, is a recent feminist innovation.

“Women’s discussion of their experiences led them to see a certain common element to many of their problems, and as a result they invented the term ‘sexual harassment’. Once the problem was named, it became much easier to fight sexual harassment, both legally and by educating people about it (Farley 1978; Spender 1985).” Word!

Oh yeah, the polyamory discussion. Well, google has revealed the little-known internet fact that the polyamorous call themselves “polys” and have a parrot as their mascot.

Being polyamorous is not cheating! Why? Because, wait for it, your partner(s) already know that you are sleeping with other people, and they know who those people are and talk to them about it, too.

I’m probably a little too uptight/East Coast at heart to be polyamorous – ie be having sex with more than one person – because I don’t feel an emotional attraction/attachment to more than one person at a time, and because -for me, so far- sex without emotional attachment is just very very awkward masturbation. It doesn’t really appeal.

This also ties back to objectification. If you’re just having sex with someone because you think they’re hot, you’re not getting the full experience. So objectification isn’t just politically incorrect, it’s also not sexually fulfilling. Woo! Subjects 1, objects 0.