19. Gender in Language

Zine Study XIV: [language] by Shawn Econo made available under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License

Gender issues are not limited to social life and status. The languages we use hide a vast amount of masculine/feminine differences. Turkish and English are relatively more gender-neutral compared to French and German which have masculine and feminine articles and even nouns. I don't know whether the word blog is a male =) Anyway, I am more concerned with English (that's what I'm supposed to do!), which seem to be "uninterested" in this issue but it is not the case indeed. For instance, until a few years ago, there was a word called "spokesman". Nowadays especially with the work of feminists who claim that job isn't peculiar to men, the word has become "spokesperson". It is not the only word struggling to find its identity. Feminists are now endeavoring to change the word history (his story) to herstory, but that is exaggerating and exploiting the concept I think.
To think more generally, in older times (sometimes today as well) people used to think of "being man" as a value - that is, being a man meant being a righteous human being. This is a bit more masculine than needed, surely. Also, bear in mind that we still use the word "mankind" to talk about all human beings. So, the Mr. Mrs. Ms. Miss things that were talked about in Marked Woman were not the only possible examples to be given. It is widely used, although often without purpose.