Shel Silverstein wrote songs as well as poems. He was very talented and I feel he’s under-appreciated.
Yes, here he is performing “The Unicorn”.
He was the only poet whose work I liked as a kid. Where the Sidewalk Ends was one of my favorite books. I memorized some of his poems. His work was a big influence on me and my sense of humor growing up. He will always have a special place in my heart.
Sure, but were there a whole lot of women, specifically in the 1960s, who decided that the best way to get around that problem was to give their daughter’s a traditionally masculine name? And then hope when they showed up to one of those gender segregated medical schools that nobody would notice that the new student wasn’t a guy? And they all decided specifically on “Kelly” for this, but not “John” or “Robert”?
There were a lot of women who decided to be called “Ms” instead of “Mrs.”
But I think it was more that male names sounded more succeessful than female names.
According to Wikipedia, the popularity of Kelly as a girl’s name rose in the 1960s, based on the actress Grace Kelly. The cite that backs up this claim, however, does nothing of the sort. Here’s a different cite that at least establishes correlation.
It would be interesting to read contemporaneous accounts of parents from, say, the 1960s or 1970s who gave their daughters traditionally masculine names out of a belief that it’d “minimize the damage the patriarchal genderism would do to” them. While it’s a really interesting idea, I’m not sure it commonly happened, or that it would have been effective: would a girl named David or Jason or Gregory have benefited, socially, in a patriarchal society from the name? or would she have suffered for breaking norms?
To you and @Babale and others, thank you for the clarification about patriarchies. However, I want to stress that I was responding to things that @MrDibble explicitly said, such as these (bolding mine):
“Natural” evolution under patriarchy is an explicitly gendered exercise with a distinct power imbalance"
“Women never just silently go along with what men want” [meant sarcastically]
“IME, we men tend to be blissfully unaware of our privilege and how expansive it is. We have manspread across the language like it was our own personal subway car.”
“I think to me getting to do things by “fiat” implies you’re the group with the power.”
" The forces of patriarchy still control women’s actual bodies, and you’re dumb enough to think language is out of their reach?"
“… the distinction being drawn is bullshit that favours entrenched power systems.”
So forgive me if I reached the conclusion – if perhaps not quite accurately – that Dibble believes that men overwhelmingly control the levers of power, and the corollary that they also control language is supposedly a no-brainer.
Now, as to this:
That has certainly been historically true, but I don’t think it’s inaccurate or dismissive to say that this has been changing a great deal over the past 50 years. I acknowledge that lots of remnants of this legacy remain, both in language and in life, but we also should acknowledge that great progress has been made. Look, when I wrote the bit that Dibble for some reason removed from the bits that he was quoting. this is what I said:
This is all factually correct. It does not mean that we’ve achieved gender equality – far from it. It DOES mean that great progress has been made over the decades, and frankly I resent the suggestion that it means that if women aren’t required to be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, then all is well. It means just what it says, no more and no less. We (as a society seeking equality for all) have come a long way, but we still have a long way to go. But that long road ahead consists of far more important reforms than pronouns or the precise meaning of “dude” or “guys”.
I have no idea. Maybe because you’re a cynical misanthrope? 
Wrong again. It’s in the nature of bureaucracies that when they get to a certain size, they become self-serving and become more interested in furthering their own existence and power than in actual policy. One such organization that I had in mind was MADD – a cute acronym for “Mothers Against Drunk Driving”. Who could possibly be in favour of drunk driving, right? And, indeed, in their early stages they were influential in drastically raising penalties for drunk driving and promoting increased enforcement including roadside spot checks. Gradually, the culture changed and drunk driving became less of an issue, and at any rate, penalties were already so stiff that further escalation wasn’t a useful strategy. So now what for MADD, and all its executives and fund-raising apparatus? This: they continued their lobbying programs, only now with increasingly outrageous and useless objectives. One that I recall from a few years ago was demanding that every new car sold MUST be equipped with a breathalizer interlock that every driver would be required to use! IOW, this originally well-intentioned and productive NGO had become a bureaucratic nightmare. This is not an unusual trajectory.
I’m in danger of splitting hairs here, but I have zero illusions about people having notions of the patriarchy back then. It was the era of the ERA after all. I’m having more trouble thinking all those hundreds of thousands of parents were thoughtfully choosing gender neutral names for their daughters for that reason in the 1960’s.
Anecdotes are not data but my friend Kelly, born in 1968 (peak popularity for Kelly for girls), has an identical twin sister, Kristin. One was much more gender neutral than the other. Now if you say that is just because the name had become popular generally, I buy that. But if it was mostly the pioneers of using Kelly as a gender neutral name for girls that were concerned for that reason, that pushes the origin back to…what? The 1950’s? 1940’s?
I mean maybe. I’m willing to accept that answer as a possibility - maybe I’m just too skeptical of earlier generations 
.
…do you not also think this?
Yep, they were. Remember, the decision of what to name your children doesn’t solely lie with the father (thank goodness). What is hilarious is that my given name is gender neutral, and a surname as well. My father did not realize it in 1960 when I was born and named. My mother spoke to him as if it was automatically known as a girl’s name, so he agreed. What was important to both of them is that the name is Irish, so he didn’t dig any further into it.
Languages change constantly and for all sorts of reasons. Some are very intentional responses to current events and cultural shifts – like renaming German Shepherds Alsatians, and sauerkraut, victory cabbage, during WWII. And like searching for gender-neutral pronouns in a language where none exist but there is now seen to be a need for them. Baby names go in and out of popularity with equal constancy.
Feminism first became widespread in the early 1970’s. It went underground as a movement, but its basic insights never left the women who grew up with it. When I was born, the popular girl names were staid and safe, a strong ideal in the 1950’s: Mary, Katherine, Jane, Susan, Linda, Cindy. Gender roles were set in concrete. After the end of the 1960’s (I know someone born then who was named Tree, and another woman named Karma), people started treating baby names as a kind of statement of individuality, much as they began to see their own lives. Unfortunately most people aren’t very original, so they copy the ideas of others (mostly celebrities). Gender-neutral girl names are both a response to patriarchy and also a fad.
If you want language to follow prescriptive rules laid down when you were young, well good luck to ya.
My quibble is with the subjective concept of “overwhelmingly”. It seems not to acknowledge the major progress that’s been made in the past half-century and more. If men today “overwhelmingly control the levers of power”, what were they doing in 1950? In 1940? In 1900? I was reminded the other night, watching an old TV drama from 1955, that at the time a woman absolutely could not go into a bar alone. Serving an “unescorted woman” was forbidden. How quickly we forget.
I’m not saying it’s enough. I’m not saying we’re where we should be yet. But we need to keep perspective on what’s been accomplished. And I confess that I bristle at the notion that there is an ongoing patriarchy that controls the evolution of language. The linguistic biases that we see, like the default male pronoun “he” when describing the actions of some unknown actor, I believe are almost entirely a legacy of past history. Others may disagree, but I constantly see efforts to move against that, unfortunately hindered by the limitations of the existing lexicon of the language itself.
Back then, they didn’t “overwhelming control the levers of power”, they simply held all the power. Yes, women couldn’t open their own bank account in many states. They were legally the property of their husbands, for all intents and purposes.
Of course we’ve come a long way. And I’m delighted by that, and keenly aware of all the choices I’ve had that my mother didn’t have. But it’s still true that men overwhelmingly hold the levers of power.
You’ve been told by at least 3 people that that’s not what MrDibble meant. fwiw.
Also, I agree with most of what he’s written in this thread.
OK. In my anecdotal experience, I’ll say that the top executives of most major corporations tend to be overwhelmingly male. But I want to bring this discussion back to the contemporary “control of language” question. My anecdotal experience also tells me that the language that these CEOs and senior VPs speak is the absurd gibberish commonly known as “biz-speak”. No one cares. But I could name all sorts of women who are respected writers, journalists, editors, and influencers. I would posit that these people DO influence the language. And that the inequalities we see today in language are mostly a historical legacy.
Not to be argumentative, but I gave you six quotes in post #206 that certainly seem to suggest that this was a perfectly reasonable interpretation of what he meant.
Who cares if it’s a “perfectly reasonable interpretation,” once it’s been clarified for you? That’s absolutely meant to be argumentative; it serves no other purpose at all.
you said:
1: nothing about “an explicitly gendered exercise” means that a cabal of men are explicitly dictating language choices.
2: I fail to see the relevance
3: this is more a comment on why you might not have noticed how preffered men are in gender than it is a statement about who is driving language how.
4: Here, he is just protesting your claim that my asking you to call me “Ms” rather than “Mrs.” is a fiat. It’s not. It’s a form of organic change, as are people who uas you to use some set of pronouns to refer to them.
5: Eh, here he is being dramatic. But I see how you could misintepret this to mean that there are men plotting to keep language gendered. (although, fwiw, a lot of the same men who fight to outlaw abortion ALSO do their best on social media to keep language gendered, and to mock and denigrate anyone who, for instance, asks to be referred to as “they”.
6: Here he’s disagreeing with your post, and it has nothing do to with that cabal of editors, or whatever. He’s just pointing out that your arguments are aligned with those used to keep women in their place.
Nothing he says contradicts:
Hey, I confess to enjoying a good argument.
Wait, what?
For one thing, “clarifications” – even if they’re omniscient – aren’t retroactive. I listed six quotes citing @MrDibble’s exact words to explain why I responded the way I did. No, my intent here was not “absolutely meant to be argumentative”, it was meant to be explanatory.
My first post in this thread was #9 to expound on how I felt about some of the general matters that the topic touched on. Post #122 was a brief reply to Dibble. That did it! Little did I expect that it would unleash a Dibble-fueled shitstorm, but now there it is. I now cite, for the future edification of all, Wolfpup’s learnings about the rules of debate: Never risk starting a debate – not even with the most inconsequential comment – with an aggressively cynical misanthrope. Because it will continuously escalate and never end.
I feel unread. 