4 ms·
Is insulting a female inherently sexist? I wouldn't call someone a sexist if they called me a dck or a son of a btch. Obviously the response here is sexist, but
by Draco6slayer 14y ago
Is insulting a female inherently sexist? I wouldn't call someone a sexist if they called me a dck or a son of a btch. Obviously the response here is sexist, but calling somebody bad names is not sexist, regardless of their gender.
- WalterSear 14y agoIMHO, sexualized epithets are sexual. It's more productive not to muddy the waters though: it's not like there are only a handful of ways to insult someone.
- Draco6slayer 14y agoI don't know. Some words are just attached to each sex, and that's just a part of language. We don't say waitperson over waiter or waitress. Something that is both attached to a gender and insulting is by no means insulting someone for their gender or insulting a gender overall. English is definitely one of the least sexualizing languages of the Romance Languages. In French or Spanish, everything would be attached to a gender, but that doesn't mean that the words define the gender themselves. Nobody in Spain thinks that chairs are 'where women belong' or anything like that.
- geoelectric 14y agoWell, no, we say server, because server is gender-neutral. Compare steward/stewardess with flight attendant. And some servers will get mighty angry if you call them a waitress. I don't necessarily think that response is justified when no offense is actually meant. But the point is that there has been an identifiable trend in our language towards moving away from gender-specific terms for roles that shouldn't otherwise have a relevance to gender. I'd argue this movement is overdue for epithets. I think "asshole," "asshat," "assclown," really anything in the venerable ass family, makes for an ideal gender-neutral epithet. We should use these more often! Edit: typo
- gdwatson 14y agoThat's always seemed an odd quirk of the restaurant industry to me. Server to refer to a person sounds stilted to my ear; a server is a computer to me, but a waiter or a waitress is a person. So a sincere question: Why would someone be offended to be described as a waitress?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- youngtaff 14y agoServer is a US thing (maybe AU, NZ too?), we don't use it in the UK. I find server to refer to a waitress and waiter a really odd term, almost de-humanising but that might just be a cultural difference.
- Draco6slayer 14y agoTo be entirely honest, I've never heard server used in the US, and a few of my friends are waiters and waitresses.
- WildUtah 14y agoEnglish is not a romance language. It acquired quite a lot of French words and a few grammar patterns after an unfortunate event in 1066 but remains a distinctly Germanic-family language. Most of the French grammar bits have been discarded in quotidian speech long ago; how often do you hear the subjunctive voice used in English? English is distinct from other Germanic languages, though, in the same way. Most European languages of any stripe are gender-heavy while English mostly applies grammatical gender mostly only to vehicles and individual sexually dimorphic animals.
- Draco6slayer 14y agoI don't know. Some words are just attached to each sex, and that's just a part of language. We don't say waitperson over waiter or waitress. Something that is both attached to a gender and insulting is by no means insulting someone for their gender or insulting a gender overall. English is definitely one of the least sexualizing languages of the Romance Languages. In French or Spanish, everything would be attached to a gender, but that doesn't mean that the words define the gender themselves. Nobody in Spain thinks that chairs are 'where women belong' or anything like that.
- sdgwerwer 14y agoWell, it's not inherently sexist, but in Adria's case we can expect that some of those insults were motivated by misogyny.
- WalterSear 14y agoAs is much of the defence of her behaviour are quite clearly double standards driven by misandry.