3
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
3 points (51.9% liked)
Unpopular Opinion
6216 readers
245 users here now
Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
- If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Women singers legit sounds like cave people speak as in “grug go hunt”. It’s so grammatically jarring.
Women of London - Normal
Female of London - Ferengi/Incel
Women Journalist- Caveperson
Female Journalist - Normal
Men of London - Normal
Male of London - Weird
Men Journalist- Caveperson
Male Journalist - Normal
Etc. I don’t know where this grammatical shift came from, but its only really popped up in the last 5 or so years and feels chiefly American.
For future reference:
Male/female is chiefly used to refer to biological contexts. “Female spiders in some species tend to devour their male mates” is a perfectly acceptable description.
Men/women is chiefly used to refer to human-centric sociological contexts. “Women in technology roles face hurdles that men in similar roles do not.” is also a perfectly reasonable description.
@SatanicNotMessianic @Deceptichum I think that's somewhat fair, but linguistically "female" is an adjective and "women" is a noun. The noun in that sentence is "singer" and female is a classifying adjective.
The original post IS stupid and has sexist overtones, but I don't think they come from word choice.
I think I’m going to have to disagree on the basis of such usages as “women singers/songwriters.”
The differentiation is socio-linguistic, because “female” is often used in a dehumanizing context in English. Sociology-linguistically, it’s similar to referring to “blacks” as opposed to “black Americans” or “deafs” as opposed to “deaf people.” The problem is specifically substituting a noun that historically been used to dehumanize the people to which it refers, because it is exclusionary of the “default” status (male, white, hearing).
I am on the side of the linguists who take a descriptive rather than a prescriptive approach to the analysis of language, but part of being a descriptivist is recognizing the subtext potentially if subconsciously involved.
@SatanicNotMessianic can't say any of that is wrong or unreasonable, but I still do find the expressed intent of the post more misogynistic than the use of the word female in context.