Sexist and Non-Sexist Language

Motto:. This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh:She shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. (The Holy Bible, Genesis 2: 23). Unto the woman God said, I will greatly multiplythy sorrow and thy conception;in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children;And thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. (The Holy Bible, Genesis 3:16)IntroductionMan and Woman were created to be different, in some way, and also so much alike, as human beings. From the beginning of times, they were viewed upon almost exclusively as a pair of antitheses: strong - weak, superior - inferior, sensible - sensitive; one referred to as culture, the other one as nature - ". we are leaves of ivy and sprigs of wallflower. We are women. We rise from the wave. We are gazelle and doe, elephant and whale, lilies and roses and peach, we are air, we are flame, we are oyster and pearl. " (Griffin, 1978: 1). The history of women has generally been one of submission, of a second place, of the "other", implying the existence of "one", the man. As Dale Spender (1985: 152) quotes Elaine Morgan: "He [man] sees himself quite unconsciously as the main line of evolution with a female satellite revolving around him, as the Moon revolves around the Earth". Women's claim that language is "man-made" (see Spender 1985), thus ignoring and excluding them, translates in their attempt to change it, to make themselves "visible". In a patriarchal society, women started to demolish what had held true for centuries: "ye who enter patriarchy abandon all hope" (Spender, 1994: 2). Is language sexist? Does it really reflect the male supremacy and make women "only a decorative sex" (Oscar Wilde)? Are there any alternatives for a non-sexist language? These are the questions this article will try to answer, or, at least, draw attention upon, focusing on the lexical level of sexism in language, since it is firstly at this particular level that sexism occurs. It will talk about certain "male" nouns and pronouns, some feminine words derived from the masculine nouns, common gender nouns with the "female" derogatory sense, some compounds and also unfavourable terms regarding the female sexuality. They all cast light upon the priority of maleness in the linguistic discourse; in a rather too blunt or too obsolete expression, they point to "the construction of male power and the concomitant oppression of women" (in Johnson and Meinhof, 1997: 18). At this point, I should make a preliminary observation: the perspective of the present article is not feminist, but neutral, trying to offer a non-biased alternative to what has been considered sexist language. Yet, at the end of this article, we may wonder, together with Sigmund Freud: "The great question I have not been able to answer despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul is: What does a woman want? "A. The generic male term"The he I man approach to language involves the use of male terms to refer both specifically to males and generically to human beings" (Martyna, in Thorne and Henley 1983: 25). A.l. Generic nouns? According to The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), volume VI, man is defined as "a human being (irrespective of sex or age)" (OED, 1961: 99). Most of the ma^-compounds have been used this way (in a generic sense), comprising and implying both male and female features; actually, "male terms used to include females are called 'androcentric generics'" (Romaine, 1994: 114). Nevertheless, because they can also refer to "male" exclusively, women have felt misrepresented in a man-dominated world and this is their main point in claiming that language is sexist. They denied words like "mankind', "chairman" or "man-made" to reflect an equal treatment of sexes. Thus, they tried to avoid them and make everybody aware of the necessity of changing them to a "gender-neutral", "non-discriminatory language" (Pauwels, 1998: 8). …