Gender inequality rooted in culture, not language

THAT ENGLISH GRAMMAR IS responsible for subjugating the lives of English-speaking women, as Cheryl Johnson argued in last Wednesday’s Collegian, is absurd.

Ms. Johnson makes silly observations about the similarity of the words “men” and “women” and then makes a logical leap by relating them to a social structure, which, though it does indeed subjugate women, shows no signs of making any conscious effort to do so through the underlying structure of its language.

She also says that “perhaps with enough effort, we will find a way to create a new language that shows the female sex equality.”

I have to say that I found her article offensive both as a man and as someone who expects to see at least the slightest amount of respect shown for the English language in a university newspaper.

To begin, there is no basis for assuming a language’s grammatical structure will in any way reflect the social structure in which it is used, as I hope a couple examples will clear up.

The ancient Hebrew language uses verb forms that reflect not only person and number, but also gender; this means that a Hebrew-speaking female could describe many of her own actions in a way that was off limits to Hebrew speaking males.

This should be liberating language, but we certainly don’t see feminist advances in ancient Hebrew culture because of grammar.

Much like English, Ancient Greek is a language rich in synonyms, but the most common word for woman, gune (goo-nay), is nothing like the word for man, aner (on-air).

The Greeks would never have to worry about the issue of how to spell “woman” without subjecting women to male-dominated spelling conventions because they had clearly defined and markedly different words for women and men right from the beginning.

This should be liberating language, but we certainly don’t see feminist advances in ancient Greek culture because of spelling.

Ancient Hebrew and Greek cultures are about as chauvinistic as they come; they are everything a good feminist should hate, but their languages show great promise along the lines of the feminist linguistic arguments represented in Ms. Johnson‘s article.

There is a clear disagreement between the assumptions of her arguments and the facts.

I said before that Ms. Johnson‘s arguments offended me as a man, but I think women have just as much cause to be offended.

To argue that grammar and spelling are the cause of egregious social injustices is only a clever way of ignoring the real causes that are in plain sight.

If I crashed my car, I might blame it on bad driving or poor road conditions; Ms. Johnson would blame it on sub-atomic particles or a flaw in Newtonian physics.

What are the causes I would blame? I would blame the subjection of women primarily upon our “me first” culture.

Americans are obsessed with the idea that all we need to do is make ourselves feel happy in the present and, when all is said and done, we will have lived the best lives possible.

Everywhere we look there are advertisements telling us the next set of things we should want and how much it costs to satisfy our urges.

It seems nearly every movie and television show tells us that it is perfectly acceptable to abandon everyone and everything we know in order to satisfy our urges.

Worst of all, our working-class culture is self-obsessed and somehow opens within us a bottomless pit of desire into which all our time and energy is willingly thrown like some grotesque sacrifice.

Don‘t see the connection yet? Consider these situations: families are disintegrating because mom and dad don’t have the same career goals, because mom or dad ran away from the family that threatened his or her freedom, because a parent found another person who was more emotionally or sexually satisfying than his or her spouse (for the time), because in the course of pursuing dreams and fashions and promotions there just isn’t any time to sit down and talk.

These don’t seem uncommon at all; in fact, they seem common to a sickening degree.

Respect for women begins in the home, and it takes the work of strong and committed mothers and fathers to raise children who live their lives honorably at home, in the community and in the workplace.

It is going to take real counter-cultural work at home to change attitudes about women on a large scale, and that includes major changes in the consumption of cultural products such as music, movies and television.

I am not advocating censorship; I simply believe that the members of this capitalist state can control the production of trashy and sexist cultural products by exercising self-restraint and not purchasing them for themselves or their children.

Nobody is going to create a new major language, and even if someone tries it probably won’t catch on and it definitely won’t change the values people hold.

The English language may gradually change at a grammatical level to reflect contemporary values, but I wouldn’t count on that either.

So go ahead and blame grammar for social problems; but the fault, Ms. Johnson, is not in our words, but in ourselves.

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