Sexism in the Twenty First Century
Sexism in the Twenty First Century
One of the most important skills to learn if you want to be a successful writer is to know your audience. Know your audience and speak to it. If you're writing for the usual mix of civilization, your audience will be roughly half male and half female. With this in mind, the successful writer is not likely to ignore half of that audience by writing exclusively to one gender or the other. Nonsexist writing is an issue that used to be hotly debated and is now being widely accepted. Most of the resistance to nonsexist writing was based in the idea that "everyone knows that he means he or she." Well, he does not mean she and it never has. Using the male gender entirely in writing now seems less an issue of the writer being sexist as the writer being lazy. The continued use of gender specific language is not only old fashioned and obsolete, but also tells the writer you are not considering your entire audience.
In the piece entitled “ The Great Person-Hole Cover Debate”, the author argues that there is no justification for the continued use of gender specific language. She cites that during the civil rights movements of the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, the manufacturer band-aid had to abandon the “skin color” band-aids as they were only the color of Caucasian skin. Since a band-aid had to be re-named for racial reasons, the writer sees no reason why use of gender specific language should be continued. I agree with the work of this writer that gender specific language should be kept to a minimum. There are two main problems that need to be solved when considering a move to gender-neutral language. First, the sentence structure must be changed to accommodate both men and women equally. For example, “When a student writes a paper, he must proofread carefully.” Becomes “When we students write our papers, we must proofread carefully.” Simply switching he with we and re-wording the sentence achieves the desirable form. The second problem is with male-oriented words such as businessman, chairman, congressman, and mailman. These can be modified to business executive, chair, member of congress, and mail carrier. These new ways of writing are every bit as professional as the traditional ways, but include both...