A recent Key and Peele segment has pirates singing chanteys.”Pirates trade swashbuckling stories about how they’ve treated the women in their lives.” No, it’s not what you think.
Archive for the ‘Language and gender’ Category
Feminist pirates and their chanteys
July 10, 2015LFL
July 4, 2015You can pick up a lot of random information in popular genres, like detective fiction and police procedural television shows. Murder mysteries are typically set in some small special world, so that you can learn a lot about that world: English change-ringing, say, in Dorothy Sayers’s The Nine Tailors. Similarly for episodes of cop shows (understood broadly). So yesterday I was treated to an hour’s drama on CSI: NY about the Lingerie Football League (as it was then), in season 6, episode 13 “Flag on the Play” (first broadcast on 1/20/10). Some LFL players in action, in real life:
An odd cross between sexualized display of the female body and athletic contest.
Two books
May 16, 2015From the NYT Book Review of last Sunday (May 10th), bits from two reviews that caught my eye: Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts reviewed by Jennifer Szalai; and Speak Now by Kenji Yoshino (a memoir combined with analysis of the same-sex marriage case) reviewed by Lincoln Caplan. I haven’t read either book (though I’ve read and posted about other things by Yoshino). But I was intrigued by the reviewers’ comments.
Androids on the march
May 15, 2015Sexy Friday continues, with the war between the sexes in today’s Scenes From a Multiverse:
First, misogynoids launched against the women, then misandroids launched in retaliation, sowing the boner-destroying deathsterone.
blond(e)
May 14, 2015A while back, a friend complained about people who referred to a man as a blonde: blonde is a French word, my friend said, and in French it can be used only for women. So He’s a blonde is a vulgar error. (Similarly for brunette.)
But we’re talking about English here, not quoting from French, so there’s no reason why English has to be used as if it were French. And there are good reasons not to use it that way, though the matter is very complex indeed.
Like a rock
May 12, 2015Yesterday’s Dinosaur Comics, on remembering names:
(#1)
The feminine counterpart to the name Peter is Petra, both ultimately from Greek πέτρος (petros) ‘stone, rock’, but there are also women called Pete — and some called Peter.
fellow sisters
May 4, 2015In the NYT Sunday Review 5/3/15, in “What Black Moms Know” by Yvonda Gault Caviness:
Thankfully, I am a black mom. Like many of my fellow sisters, I don’t have time for all that foolishness [about child-rearing].
I stumbled a bit on fellow sisters, though I understood that it was in no way contradictory; fellow here does not refer to a man or men, but to someone “sharing a particular activity, quality, or condition with someone or something: they urged the troops not to fire on their fellow citizens” (NOAD2). Still, the noun fellow is surely most frequently used for informal reference to a man or boy (there’s a fellow at the door), and this use can interfere with the (gender-neutral) ‘someone sharing an attribute’ use.
Magnum
April 15, 2015Just went past me on television: an ad for Magnum Ice Cream Bars:
(#1)
(from the Magnum Ice Cream site; “Magnum Ice Cream Bars are made with creamy Ice Cream and Belgian Chocolate”). The bars are big in size and big in flavor. The ads tend to feature (female) models with bars in their mouths: both oral and phallic. Here’s model Lucy Wolfert in one ad:
(#2)
Magnum things are all about size and masculinity.
Mansplaining in the comics
April 7, 2015Today’s Dilbert has Alice exploding at the mansplainers in her department:
The pointy-headed boss can’t help mansplaining mansplaining.
Sluts
April 3, 2015Forwarded to me by Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky, this posting on tumblr, with:
She: What’s the boy word for slut?
He: hey still haven’t come up with one yet. But I’m sure they’re working on it.
The issue has often been taken up by feminist critics.