'The English language systematically degrades women' to what extent do you agree with this statement. Support your work with examples.

English Language Essay

You should spend an hour writing the following essay - 'The English language systematically degrades women' to what extent do you agree with this statement. Support your work with examples.

The English language is an incredibly complex and easily manipulated language, but it has some seemingly strange trends, also there seems to be a bias in the internal structure of it. Perhaps this is not an intentional bias but it does represent clear-cut definitions of what would be considered normal, and then new branches of word for what perhaps may be looked upon as not so normal.

It’s strange how people interpret language, there’s often no universal meaning of a sentence many people would interpret its meaning and origin in many different ways. The English language strange in the way it has been constructed, and perhaps many extremists would tell you that it’s sexist in many parts. Surely this cannot be true though how can a language be sexist. Obviously this will date back a long way to perhaps the 1000 AD, when women were not concerned with such things as jobs, and just stayed inside there houses, and looked after there husbands needs. I personally believe that when the English language was first considered, scholars and the people that put pen to paper to bring up the first simplistic dictionary, were in fact all male. I’m not saying that a lot of drunken men sat around drank and came up with as many ways that they could snub women by using everyday speech. I think that assuming this is a highly cynical outlook on men.

But it would be more typical of you to favour your own sex, simply because lets face it, its hard being you.

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But it would be more typical of you to favour your own sex, simply because lets face it, its hard being you.

Particularly in the game of insults, you can see a big bias, strangely many words that are now insults which are mainly used against women, are new words which have only come to meaning recently. For instance, you cannot really see William Shakespeare scrawling across pages of his screen writes the word slut because his wife has cheated on him. This leads me to believe that even today in a much more revolutionized culture, when women have the vote, and may freely leave the house. That we still come up with sexist terms, the creation of a new word would not be so bad, but the problem is there is no such male equivalent or it just doesn’t make sense for a woman to accuse a man of it. Who calls a man a bitch for instance? In English language there are many more sexually promiscuous insults for women than there are for men. Another common feature is that many words compare or associate women with animals, or their sexual orientations. Many of the words phonologically are very bold sounding single syllable words, often they are very simple words perhaps a conclusion drawn from this could be that women do not deserve the time of day so the insults are small, and that they are simple so women can understand them.

It’s also clear and easy to see an order of precedence, where men were/are always placed in the front of women, there is no real clear reason other than prescriptive grammarians suggested rather bleakly that as the male sex is physically dominant if must be that the natural and proper order of things places males first in a sentence. Another way in which women may be degraded in the English language is feminine inanimate. For instance many men will refer to their cars as she. There perhaps represents an ownership of the car, and thus derives that its there property. Although these are often affectionate references its simple to see that perhaps this suggests that women are seen as objects and men may claim an ownership of them.

The last point I have to make, relates to marked an unmarked terms. For instance Actor, Actress, this represents the initial term that was used as only males did it, but a special term has been created to represent women. This is common in many things, manager, manageress, Waiter, waitress. But what does it mean, why are women given special marked terms. Is this to make it easier to discriminate, many women object to these marked phrases and repute them, preferring to be called actors and going against the norm.

"Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed
as an assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemiel to get as
quickly promoted as a male schlemiel."
--- Bella Abzug