I would like to state very clearly in my blog now, I do not like it when people address me with the salutation 'MISS'. Like what i have said in class, i only associate the term 'MISS' with primary school teachers and specifically those who are unmarried. On the other hand, I think 'Ms' sounds professional. I attribute this stereotypical thinking to the fact that most professionals i come across use 'Ms'.
'Ms' carries the ambiguity of marital status which respects the fact that not everyone wishes to disclose their marital status. Whereas, using 'MISS' forces the bearer of this salutation to transit her salutation to 'Mrs' in most cases, after she gets married. This I find particularly distasteful as she does not get to retain her maiden name. In Singapore, there's a choice of transiting to a 'Madam' if one wishes to retain her maiden name. However, personally I feel that 'Madam' makes a lady sound way mature. On Wednesday, i have even been informed that 'Madam' carries the burden of being a brothel's owner!
To resolve this issue, perhaps it may just be easier to get oneself a doctorate and transit directly to a 'Dr'. Though hopefully the bearer in question does not get mistaken as a male doctor. LOL
Sexism in language has always been present. Instead of thinking of it as a form of sexism penetration in language, i would prefer to think of it as a resultant of history. I'm not sure about other places, but at least in Singapore, I feel that there is little sexism present nowadays. The statistics about the number of women in parliament or the Fortune Global 200 could be a brought forward effect that is not representative of modern perceptions of today.
People in the past preferred to send their sons to school when they are faced with limited resources. Thus, our older generation observe the trend of having more males educated. This is brought forward to effect on today's society with more male ministers and CEOs. Similarly, chinese characters with the female gender character in it being associated with adversary is a consequence of the past. Women have very low social status in ancient China and thus, all these negative associations with them. The only good word associated with the females, which I can think of is the word 好. But then again, it is paired with the character 子, which means son. Thus, the word simply summarises as 'a woman is only good when she can bear a son'. This reflects the severity of discrimination against women in those times. In present times however, this kind of mentality is more or less eradicated and people simply use the word to express its surface meaning of something being good.
In class, we also talked about some of the language tools males use to reinforce their ideas, which can be interpreted as a form of sexism. Males interrupt, use profanities and indecipherable pronunciation. In engineering, especially with the large numbers of males, these acts are being played out in front of me everyday. I don't see my classmates using them for male dominance. I think this is just how they behave. Given time, most learn how to interact with females more naturally. They don't interrupt, swear or use their 'male lingo' as much and transform themselves into gentlemen. The initial observations of such occurrence could also be due to 2years of national service, where guys are too comfortable speaking in this manner. Furthermore, some women also swear and interrupt as much.
I feel that instead of looking too much into how language disadvantages women, we should do more to raise their social status through actions. After all, there should always be a balance. We are all MANkind living on MOTHER Earth, which is controlled by GOD (male). Who decided the gender of these anyway?
2 comments:
Speaking of sexism resulting from history. In ancient South East Asia, right where we are, females used to hold a much higher status than men. Studying old SEA artifacts, you would come across females being portrayed as warriors and males being dancers. It was through Middle Eastern influences into the Malay dominant states (Malaysia, Indonesia) and China influence into Singapore and Vietnam that males started to dominant. That is sexism, the other way round!
linguists sometimes do give people the impression of making too much a fuss over trivial matters. I agree that society does change and hopefully people will have more respect for one another no matter what gender, race and other social traits they happen to fall into.
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