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>In English, "man" and "woman" are the preferred terms for male and female humans, respectively. "Male" and "female" are clinical and dehumanizing. It's like sa
by rhapsodic 9y ago
>In English, "man" and "woman" are the preferred terms for male and female humans, respectively. "Male" and "female" are clinical and dehumanizing. It's like saying "Laura is gestating an embryo" instead of saying "Laura is going to have a baby." They're also just grammatically weird, because they're adjectives that have been turned into nouns. It's like saying "Ben is a Hispanic" instead of "Ben is a Hispanic person." Finally, they're one letter longer for no benefit.
Neither of the reasons people use "male" and "female" instead of "man" and "woman" are any good. The first is attempting to sound educated by using French-derived words like male and female in preference to German-derived words like man and woman. The second is that "male" and "female" punt on having to refer to the person's age, and in our era of perpetual adolescence people are terrified of being considered a "man" or a "woman."
No offense, rayiner, but I think everything you wrote is simply ridiculous on its face. Saying they're "clinical and dehumanizing" or "grammatically weird" are simply your opinion, which I do not share. And saying that "they're one letter longer for no benefit" just smacks of desperation.
If you want to indicate the gender of a person, there is absolutely nothing wrong with using the terms "male" or "female".
But, as evidenced by this thread, there are people who want to make that usage taboo.
- rayiner 9y agoNo Python programmer would say that it's "simply [an] opinion" to prefer using "for __ in __" to iterate over a list instead of indexing it using integers, even though the two constructions give you the same result. English isn't any different. Words carry "out of band" information, and good English speakers and writers choose words carefully to convey the intended extra-lingual meaning. None of the reasons I gave are "simply ... opinions." They're based on the rules of the language. First, English has specialized words for people and things people do, and we use those words in preference to their generic counterparts unless we are purposefully trying to dehumanize the subject. It's not necessarily wrong to use dehumanizing language. Consider the word "human" versus the word "person." They basically mean the same thing. But "human" focuses on the biological species, while "person" also implies things like legal status and rights. So we might talk about humans migrating to North America 10,000 years ago, but we say that several people transferred to Google's California office from New York. Second, "female" and "male" are typically used as adjectives, and it is weird to use them as a noun ("weird" being by definition what people don't typically do). It's not wrong (the Oxford English Dictionary does recognize that the words can be used as nouns), but it's weird, especially when there are perfectly good nouns to use in their place.
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- harryh 9y agoThere is a reason that the Ferengi on Star Trek referred to women as females. It sounds weird and dehumanizing. This isn't a new thing either. The first Ferengi episode aired in 1987. You can obviously believe what you want but know that people will judge you in a negative light if you talk like that.
- qb45 9y agoTo me these terms simply sound like how a biologist would talk about animals. But it seems they are indeed gaining traction among feminists for reasons I haven't cracked yet.
- rayiner 9y agoRelevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYRTmvhOOVU#t=30s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYRTmvhOOVU#t=30s.
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