I agree, but even so, I think they’re still worth more than the opinions of non-black people on this subject (since other people might be subject to the same biases, and I’m assuming that such biases cancel out over all).
I don’t think you should, for individuals. But in my view, if your views of, say, anti-black racism are contrary to the views of the vast majority of black people, then I think you should strongly consider that this collective experience should be valued very highly.
I’m all for asking for justification and not just taking anyone’s word for it alone.
I would accept that you know more about being mugged than someone who has not been mugged, and I would value your opinions on muggings (muggery?) more than the opinions of an individual who has not been mugged (on this specific issue).
Results of a Twitter search on the word “females”. I would say that more than 25% of them involve some sort of sexist or demeaning remark, although your mileage may vary depending on exactly when you access the site.
I don’t. And I’m not being deliberately obtuse. I was genuinely unaware that “female” used as a noun was offensive. Likewise, if the speaker had said, “I went to the bar and there were a lot of males there,” I’d think not much of it.
The next sentence in my post asked for something like hard data. I would not say that qualified.
In part to gain the rhetorical upper hand by making white males defensive about ordinary speech.
The purpose of much of this kind of nonsense is to give one side the chance to charge the other side with racism/sexism/homophobia/misogyny. To many, such a charge is both instantly accepted as true, and un-disprovable. Thus if one succeeds in defining some ordinary term as a sign of sexism, the discussion can be diverted into “prove you’re not a sexist” where statements by white males in their defense are rejected out of hand.
It saves time on refutation and proof.
If you say “females”, that shows you are sexist and nothing of what you say will is true. Therefore if you deny that you are sexist, or that saying “female” isn’t sexist, those statements aren’t true. And therefore you have been shown to be sexist.
You are picking out one part of my experience, and believing in that, and not the rest, which is equally validated (or not) by my experience. If my opinion on mugging is worth something, even with nothing to back it up, then my opinion on black crime is worth the same. Because it has nothing to back it up, either.
I agree with your assessment that a climate has been created where many people are just waiting to point fingers and say “look… gotcha… you darned racist/sexist/whatever”
At the same time, I haven’t found any specific case, ie, female, thug, illegals, etc, where the “PC police” are saying a word has negative connotations that doesn’t actually have negative connotations, at least i some (rising) applications.
I guess an era of finger pointing is going to be a natural reaction to the long history of oppression and sexism/racism. If it takes a while to even things out I’m ok with that.
Your experience as a mugged person backs up your opinion, if you have indeed been mugged. Someone who has experienced anti-black racism as a black person has experience that backs up their opinion.
It doesn’t mean everything you say about mugging or a black person says about anti-black racism is true, but it means that I will value the opinion a bit more than the opinion of someone who hasn’t been mugged about mugging and who hasn’t experienced anti-black racism as a black person about anti-black racism.
Now you are just getting carried away. It is depersonalizing, in a way that is inappropriate for the class. The teacher is not saying it is genuinely offensive overall, just that it should not be used that way in the class.
I don’t think your pedant argument works, because using female as a noun when referring to a human is actually less precise than using woman. It also ignores the more common usage of female as an adjective, which is why it sounds awkward (just as using “woman singer” seems awkward because woman is not an adjective).
If anything, it makes the speaker sound like a wannabe pedant, and the only thing more annoying than a pedant, is a wannabe pedant.
I went to graduate school in the neuroscience of sexual differentiation in which the terms ‘females’ and ‘males’ aren’t just accepted, they are completely necessary. Referring to anything in sexual differentiation as ‘men’ and ‘women’ as replacement terms isn’t just not the accepted convention, it would be regarded as both unnecessarily informal and inaccurate because most discussions involve phenomena or processes that span a wide range of ages and even species. If you are think that is picking an unusually obscure example, I can assure it isn’t at least for me. That level of specificity comes up surprising often on this board and in real life. As I have pointed out before, you need the terms female and male to refer to people of all ages because women and men doesn’t cover them inaccurately.
I encourage anyone to do a Google search on my posts here and find an example where I use the term ‘female(s)’ in a way that is the least bit derogatory and explain why it is. That would be useful for this (sub)discussion.
It still sounds to me like neo-Victorians are arguing that people of class should only use the terms ‘Ladies’ and ‘Gentlemen’ rather than other arbitrary uncouth terms in polite society. BTW, why isn’t it still ‘Ladies and Gentlemen’? That does sound a lot better than ‘men and women’ if you are making those Miss Manners type of fine distinctions
Well, duh. I’m a science teacher. Of course it is completely appropriate and necessary to use the terms in that context.
We are talking about casual conversation. If you walk into a bank and ask, “Who should I speak to about a loan?”, it would be more appropriate to say, “See that woman at the second desk.” There’s no reason to say, “See that female at the second desk.” It’s awkward and depersonalizing.
No, that would actually be entirely useless, because nobody is arguing that “female” is always inappropriate. There are plenty of contexts in which it is entirely accurate and acceptable. This discussion is not about those contexts: it is about different contexts, in which the word is used, deliberately, to dehumanize women.
That is the exact problem though. People are presenting it as general guideline when it isn’t so it shouldn’t be presented as a rule without detailed elaboration with several hundred subparts. That is the reason why many people, including me, get so confused when people object to the term itself. I am not naive and I have been around many offensive people and I cannot think of a single time when someone used ‘female’ (or ‘male’) as a pejorative. People that want to present that angle almost always dive straight in and go for ‘bitches’, ‘ho’s’, ‘sluts’ or whatever else they can think of at the time.
OTOH, some people are so skilled at pejoratives that they can make almost any innocuous term sound offensive just through tone or context. I have met people that can use ‘women’ and ‘men’ as offensively as any other term when they wanted because they are that good.
Are there really any groups going around intentionally insulting people with the term ‘female’? Even my completely and blatantly sexist grandfather who would make Archie Bunker blush uses the term ‘broads’. The only example I can think of is Baby Got Back by Sir-Mix-Alot and that is just supposed to be a fun top-40 rap song that is a semi-parody of heavy rap that most people love even today. Even he only uses the term ‘females’ once near the end to mix it up but lots of other terms as well including ‘ladies’ earlier. Are you honestly telling me that the term ‘females’ is the one thing about the song that might send a hard-core militant feminist off the deep end?
I think people are making this way too complicated. The rules should be fairly simple and not sound like they were written by a drunk pro-bono lawyer from a 5th rate law school. The SDMB gets it mostly right with its basic rules. Colleges should be able to do almost as well.
The Professor should have written the class discussion rules much more simply and broadly:
Don’t be a jerk
Don’t interrupt others when they have the forum floor
Racial, ethic and blatantly sexist slurs are not allowed unless they are being discussed intentionally as part of the class.
Maintain basic respect of all ideas presented in class even if you do not immediately agree with them. You will be given opportunities to give dissent in some form.
The Professor is always the moderator of any discussions and moderator orders must be adhered to or there will be consequences.
When in doubt, see rule #1.
You can add or subtract to those as you see fit but that should be the basic set of rules for adults in any discussion or seminar class. There is no need to make it more complicated. I went to undergrad and grad school not all that long ago and none of my professors pulled any of this bullshit on me. We knew the basic rules and hardly anyone ever violated them. That is why it is a mystery to people like me why people feel the need to micro-manage speech down to the extremely detailed but very arbitrary level today. It isn’t ever going to work because most people get confused about what you are even talking about in the first place let alone what the overall goal is.
I disagree with you about it being a mystery. I think intent is usually obvious, at least when you can see/hear the person speak and read body language. At some point the word “colored” was used as a more respectful term for “negro” or, the other N word. At some point colored became a derogatory term. During that transition period, it was probably pretty obvious when someone said colored and had bad intent. Just like now, when someone says “female firefighter” or"illegal worker". It’s generally not a mystery when some bigoted person uses one of those terms as to what they really mean. Not if they are speaking.
All the complaints that the use of the word “female” (especially as a noun) is dehumanizing to, well, females seems to ignore this point: A lot of the same people who refer to females as “females” also consistently refer to males as “males”. If, when it’s relevant to mention a person by his/her reproductive phenotype, one consistently uses “male” and “female” as nouns, is it still dehumanizing? If so, is at least equal-opportunity dehumanizing? And if so, is it okay then?
(I get that Men’s Rights Activists and their ilk seem to use “female” in this way. But do they also use “male” to refer to males? Or are they one-sided about that?)
I’ve used “male” and “female” pretty much exclusively as the terms to describe a person by his/her reproductive phenotype, when it seems useful to mention it at all. I don’t know why one needs to say “See the woman/female at the second desk” (camille’s example, above) when one could just say “See the person at the second desk.”
I use “male” and “female”, first of all because for my own life purposes, I don’t need an extensive vocabulary to describe people by their gender (in contrast to, say, the alleged dozens of Inuit words for “snow” or the alleged dozens of Guinean words for “sweet potato”, or the actual half-dozen or so words we have for “horse” by age and sex). I’ve chosen “male” and “female” to be the words in my vocabulary exactly because I view them as being totally neutral of any specific additional connotations, as well as their versatile usefulness as both nouns and adjectives. (ETA: Again, as camille points out, “woman” doesn’t work well as an adjective. Is a “woman doctor” a female doctor? Or a doctor who specialized in treating female, just as an “eye doctor” is a doctor who treats eyes?)
If Professor Dictionary wants to dictate exactly what words I may or may not use because he/she sees additional connotations (“dehumanizing”) that I don’t, I see that as an attempt to dictate how I’m allowed to actually think. I object to that.
So I guess when you see a guy in a bar elbow his buddy in the ribs and say, hey, checkout that female firefighter… thank god it’s 2015, I guess you would assume he is not being derogatory in any way.
It’s funny that you mention using person as an alternative in my example, because that is the point. A woman is a person. A female could be any species; that’s why we’re saying it’s dehumanizing. Why would you choose to refer to a person based on their “reproductive phenotype” in a non-clinical setting?
And yes, the same holds true for using male as a noun to refer to a person in a non-clinical context. Is it really too much work to have separate words for nouns and adjectives? And no one is “dictating” how you should think by establishing a rule for appropriate language in a specific setting.