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Thesaurus.com Says 'Female' is Equivalent to 'Weaker'

April 13, 2008 10:03 pm by lindabeth in
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Both feministing and Jezebel reported this week that a Thesaurus.com entry has shown up for the word "weaker" where the only two entries are "female" and "lady." The entry has been removed so you can view the screenshot here.

My guess is this was supposed to be some sort of a joke, since not only have those two synonyms been removed, but if you look up "weaker" in Thesaurus.com, there is no entry for it, period, only for "weak." From looking at the site, though, it doesn't seem to be user-generated so if it was a joke, it was an "inside" one or a hacker--I hope.

Not only am I bringing this up because it is so blatantly sexist, not to mention completely unproductive, say for a student needing a real synonym, but because this connects a great deal to my previous post about gendered-language and the denigration of the female that is encapsulated by the term pussy, but also because language politics in terms of gender/sexuality has been popping up in the news.

A couple weeks ago, weakness was aligned with femininity in the recent commentary on Obama's bowling performance, and Christopher Hitchens' characterized (gay male) Andrew Sullivan as acting like a 'lesbian' in order to insult him.
This Thesaurus.com incident proves how deeply embedded these associations are in our culture-- whether it goes to show that woman is "officially" connected to the meaning of "weak" or that a hacker understood this cultural connection and attempted to embed it into institutional discourse.

The synonyms they provide for the "weaker" synonyms "female" and "lady" are seems to be taken from the actual entries for various woman-related terms. And as long as we're talking about language and thesaurus.com, lets do some word analyzing.

"female":

noun-amazon

,

babe

,

beauty

,

broad

,

cutie

,

dame

,

doll

,

dowager

,

duchess

,

femme

,

filly

,

fox

,

gal

,

gentlewoman

,

girl

,

lady

,

madam

,

mama

,

matron

,

petticoat

,

pinup

,

seductress

,

she

,

siren

,

sis

,

skirt

,

temptress

,

tomato

,

wench; adjective-changeable

,

child-bearing

,

delicate

,

effeminate

,

effete

,

fair

,

feminine

,

fertile

,

gentle

,

girlish

,

girly

,

graceful

,

ladylike

,

maidenly

,

matronly

,

modest

,

muliebral

,

oviparous

,

petticoat

,

pistil-bearing

,

pistillate

,

pure

,

refined

,

reproductive

,

sensitive

,

she-stuff

,

shy

,

soft

,

tender

,

twisty

,

virgin

,

vixenish

,

weak

,

womanish

,

womanlike

vs. "male":

noun- ape

,

beefcake

,

boy

,

bruiser

,

buck

,

bull

,

chap

,