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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   34453 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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This is a totally meaningless thing to get upset about, saying females and males is fine.

While I think this seems like an overreaction, I strongly disagree that using "males" and "females" instead of "men" and "women" is "fine."

It might not be worth starting fights over, but it's a weird drift happening for no good reason

"Male" and "female" are often preferable when you don't want to imply that you are excluding certain ages, as man/woman/boy/girl does.

What language is that? Because yeah, that definitely sounds like it could bias you. I don't disagree with you that it is wrongly believed more sophisticated than it is, or that it's not particularly appealing aesthetically, but it definitely feels like those who object to 'male and female' as descriptors are way more aggravated than ugly word choice or psuedo intellectualism usually inspires.

It seemed pretty obvious to me that Armin was a) not speaking his native tongue and b) trying to reduce the emotional load of the discussion by using dry language. In English male and female are just synonyms for men and women - generally kind of clinical synonyms, but the opposite of emotionally loaded. Also we already have too few synonyms for men and women, male and female is better than outies and innies.

In English male and female are just synonyms for men and women

No, they're supersets. And the aggravation is because they're ambiguous supersets. "Male" also includes boys and "female" also includes girls (which makes them tempting words to use when you need to refer to a wide range of ages and "guys" or "gals" sounds too silly) ... but "male" and "female" also include non-humans (which means it's just about impossible to remove at least a tiny level of insulting connotation from them).

I'm not sure why the level isn't always tiny; at some point after the Scopes Monkey Trial we should have become able to occasionally notice that Homo Sapiens is a subgroup of Animalia without anybody rushing for smelling salts. But instead the popularity of "males" and "females" is going down after little popularity increase, and the old usage of the terms to talk about homologies has fallen way behind the Overton Window.

You're right, and I shouldn't have said they were the opposite of emotionally loaded - that's how it used to be in some places (that was how I was taught to use them in school in the nineties) but it isn't the case these days. It annoys me that I can't readily use terms that are accurate and widely understood because some people react (in my eyes) bizarrely to them, and I want to understand where the disconnect lies without assuming they are just over reacting.

The term "white male" appears quite a lot. This may be where some of it comes from.

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