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Sometimes I suspect news stories must be generated by anti-feminist forces to further foment resentment against feminist causes and arguments, because who on earth would otherwise be so ridiculous? A prime example of one of these suspicious events took place last week in Sydney, Australia. According to Agence France-Presse (AFP), prospective Santa Clauses have been warned not to say, "Ho ho ho," as some women may deem it offensive:
One disgruntled Santa told the newspaper a recruitment firm warned him not to use "ho ho ho" because it could frighten children and was too close to "ho", a US slang term for prostitute.
"Gimme a break," said Julie Gale, who runs the campaign against sexualising children called Kids Free 2B Kids.
Yeah. I'm with Ms. Gale. Certainly I have heard immature people giggle and make jokes when they hear, "Ho ho ho," but no one actually thinks that Santa is trolling for booty. The effect of this type of stupidity is exactly what backlash zealots want: feminists are bad people who take the fun out of everything. Even women who support feminism, like blogger Ingrid Caitlin are taking the bait and writing that feminists need to lighten up:
I have nothing against feminism. In fact, I think feminists have made great progress in narrowing the gap in inequality between men and women where voting, the home, and the workplace are concerned. But you have to draw the line somewhere, and when feminist women start complaining that something that has been so natural for so many years is offensive, I’m going to get pissed.
Because I’m a woman too, and when I hear “ho, ho, ho” being said by Santa Clause, I immediately start thinking of the very expensive Christmas list that I’ll be drafting to send to my parents. I’m not automatically assuming that Santa thinks I’m a skank. Well, he might, but that’s irrelevant. When I heard the story of Sydney’s new rule, I immediately pictured the feminist stereotype: a butch woman with unshaved … well, anything, an angry look on her face, and a sawn-off penis in her hand. In other words, a man-hater. For as many strides as conservative feminism has made, radical feminists and their automatic assumption that men are evil and that certain commonly-used terms and expressions disrespect women, labeling them as a sub-human or a man’s property, overshadow any of the good things that feminism has brought to society.
While I don't know whose nutty idea it was to ban "ho, ho, ho," I am willing to bet it was not a "butch woman with unshaved… anything, an angry look on her face, and a sawn-off penis in her hand" (other than the sawn-off penis in hand, this woman just described me pretty well!), which makes me laugh because what else can I do but cry that people buy into this ridiculous bullshit about who feminists are. Not only is it effective in scaring away women from claiming to be feminists (of course, Ingrid goes on to say that although she supports equality, she's no feminist! The horror of such an association!), but stupid policies also divert attention from real issues.
I think that gendered language is actually an important issue. When everything in the world is described in terms of maleness, it affects how we think about things and picture possibilities. For example, the word "he" in English doesn't necessarily mean a male; according to Merriam Webster dictionary, it also is "used in a generic sense or when the sex of the person is unspecified." That's nice in theory, but when I hear "he," I think of a male. This "generic" term thus completely leaves out women. In Spanish, as long as a male is present in a group of people – no matter how many women are also gathered – the group is referred to with the male pronoun. Women are left in the dust.
Somanyfuns conducted a nice experiment on her blog, writing a paragraph using a typical language and then rewriting it using female-only terms. Somanyfuns pointed out that gender-neutral (like using "he" to describe a person) is not the same thing as gender-inclusive. At the end of her post, she asks:
Did reading the female-specific language feel weird to you? Did you get used to it by the end of the response? When reading, did you think of women only, or
