The difference between actor/actress and male actor/female actor is that with the first pair gender is ALWAYS front and center. With the latter two, “actor” is the default and gender is only mentioned where it is relevant (or at least, that’s my hope and desire - I’m aware there’s a gap between theory and practice.
I can also confirm that this was the case, and in fact the gender neutral terms were frequently mocked and disdained at the time.
Aviation also used the term “airman” to refer to all aviators (which would include aviatrixes) at least through the time I was still actively flying (2007), there was still as thing called an “airman’s manual”, and so forth. Which term never bothered me, personally, but probably annoyed at least a few people.
I suspect tomcat will stay in both its literal and its figurative sense. Almost nobody other than maybe cat breeders seems to use the female equivalent ‘queen’, though.
I think you’re missing the point with these descriptivist observations of the way language is used today. It’s not adequate to just say that a word is in practice applied also to women, therefore by definition it’s gender-neutral and everything is fine. The question is whether history may have endowed current usage with sexist semantic baggage, sometimes in a subtle but pervasive manner. If that’s the case, there may be good reason to attempt to prescribe changes.
I do get it, but the question is, should we somehow consult with railway workers and Olympic bobsledders and try to find out whether they have any strong preferences in terminology before deciding what is what? In fact I don’t feel we need to be at all shy about unilaterally adopting prescriptive changes, but the sexist semantic baggage is subtle and pervasive so am not sure there is always a facile solution.
Will they combine men and women in the Best Actor category? I can’t see that working out very well for women, considering the dominance men have in sheer number of movies and roles.
And if you just split them into Best Actor - Male or Best Actor - Female you may as well just leave them as they are.
Edit: now I see this was already mentioned. I’ll just leave it up anyway.
If there’s nothing wrong with “the dominance men have in sheer number of movies and roles,” then I don’t think that’s an argument against combining the categories. And if there is something wrong with it, then that’s what needs to be addressed.
I don’t know or care if there is something wrong with male dominance in movies. I rarely watch movies and have never seen an award show. I’m just saying if you combine them women are going from 1 best actor a year guaranteed to probably getting no best actor awards, possibly for years at a time. Or until voters say “gee we better vote for a woman this year cuz it looks bad with men winning all the time.” This seems to be a leave well enough alone situation.
Except that equalizing the number and prominence of roles of men and women is going to take some time. And that disparity could be driven in part by market forces.
Men and women play very different roles and the type of performance which wins for male acting is going to be very different than for female acting. It can make sense to have gender categories for acting since there is a significant gender difference in the final product. Other categories like director, screenwriter, and composer are less gender influenced, so it’s not as useful to have gender categories. For example, whether a movie is directed by a man or woman doesn’t really influence what the movie ends up being. Certainly the individual director makes a big difference to the movie, but there’s not really a big difference between men and women directors.
Having spent a number of years working in restaurants, I always refer to them as “servers”.
Don’t underestimate current and growing ignorance of farm animals and biology. Last year I saw a cartoon about “male cows” that clearly had no notion that cow = female, and googling “male cows” gets 611,000,000 results.
Hell, I’ve seen cartoons with cows who were obviously intended to be male but had udders.
That gets a bit of a pass since by and large “cow” is thought of as the gender-nonspecific word for individual cattle. And has been thought so for decades if not centuries.
It just looks weird to us since we’re so used to “the male encompasses the female” that the opposite form: “the female encompasses the male” looks wrong. Despite all the legitimate progress towards gender-neutral terminology over the last 50 years.
Right. If you saw an individual standing in the distance and couldn’t tell its sex you would just call it a cow. Likewise if you saw a mixed herd you could call it a “herd of cows.”
I agree. And if you were teaching a child the names for animals, you would say “an adult male cow is called a bull”. And there I think you’re describing a subset of generic cows, not saying that bull is the male counterpart.
I can’t help but see a set of generic cows as stick figures in a field of green crayon.
Stick figure? You’re obviously not a physicist…
Wiki on “cow”, “cattle”, and gender: