Sexism in D&D and on ENWorld (now with SOLUTIONS!)

[Dannyalcatraz]

Oddly enough, I agree!

 

[Timeboxer]

Language, while massively important to how human consciousness and society, is not the source of the problem. The source of the problem are economic, cultural, legal, and socital pressures and problems. Linguistic bias is so far down on the list of causes that fretting over it is like worring if you left your cell phone charger plugged in and it's effects on your power bill while running your air conditioning system at max.

I don't agree, because in my opinion, language is the filter with which you construct and interpret culture.

But regardless of whether I agree or not, you're not going to solve economic and societal sexism in a Dungeons and Dragons game. I was just pointing out something that irritates me that pertains to the fundamentally narrative nature of D&D as an RPG. If you're concerned about sexism in what is a subset of a subset of society, it's probably worth paying attention to the essential mechanism of communication.

 

[kolikeos]

I don't think language is the source of the problem, but I do think that language expresses society's way of thinking. When many people perceive something unhealthy as the norm, everything they do will be affected by their way of thought. It will affect the language they use and their worker's salaries as well as many other things.
I can't fight for anyone's wages here, but I can express my dislike of sexist language.
Either way, we are treating the symptoms of the disease.
We can only treat a fraction of those symptoms through D&D and ENworld.
To truly eradicate sexism we'd have to start with people's education from a young age.

 

[billd91]

This is the problem with a lot of the academic efforts on addressing sexism or racism or whatever -ism.

Rather then addressing the legal, cultural, and societal issues and that lead to both de jure and de facto sexism, it spends it's time twiddling around with 'discriminatory language' or 'biased representation' or 'political correctness' and pisses off a lot of people who would otherwise be disposed to their arguments and concerns.

Language, while massively important to how human consciousness and society, is not the source of the problem. The source of the problem are economic, cultural, legal, and socital pressures and problems. Linguistic bias is so far down on the list of causes that fretting over it is like worring if you left your cell phone charger plugged in and it's effects on your power bill while running your air conditioning system at max.

Academia spends time and effort on concerns of language, because they think they matter... and they might as well since they generally don't directly set public policy like politicians and government bureaucrats, they don't set company-wide compensation policies like company managers and HR departments. Academics do, however, often have a great influence on educational policy and teaching methods. And there, they can influence how we think about the world around us, arguably the most difficult aspect of tackling gender bias and discrimination. There's nothing saying we can't make headway on all of these issues.

For what it's worth, where I live and work, I'm far likely to hear fire fighter, police officer, and mail carrier now than I was 30 years ago as a child when the terms, by far, were fireman, policeman, and mailman. So, is that progress? I think so.

When it comes to politically correct speech, I notice that critics don't seem to notice that their own objections often come down to another form of politically correct speech. It's just that the political program they emphasize is not what you would consider traditionally "political" but one about upholding a conservative view of language standards, one that takes the practice of the language at some fixed point in the past before the academic feminists started working at it and makes that fixed point prescriptive.

It may be that the sexism inherent in language, turns of phrase, and so on is passive compared to the active sexism that causes women to make less money for the same work as men. But does that mean it should be ignored?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

But does that mean it should be ignored?

In Economics, there is the concept of an "economically acceptable level of crime." That is, once it costs more to eliminate a certain crime by increasingly aggressive tactics than it does to tolerate it- taking into account all of its externalities- then the economically sensible thing to do is to tolerate it at the current level of law enforcement.

IOW, the answer to your question is "Yes." if- considering all factors- it is more costly in terms of societal and personal effort to eradicate a form of verbal sexism than it is to tolerate it.

I have no problem with Mail Carrier vs Mail Man and the like...but does anyone remember the attempts to come up with gender-neutral pronouns to replace "him" "her" and all the variations?

If you've ever used one of those linguistic chimaera, you'd be the first I've ever encountered. And if you can come up with one without doing an internet search or a dash to your bookshelf, I'd be surprised.

And is anyone at all using "womyn" on a regular basis?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

The reasons why you get more hits for "wife" rather than "husband" in an online search on that phrase include:

1) That phrase is found in the English translation of one of the 10 commandments. That is going to net you lots of hits, both in the form of discussion of the passage itself, and writers making allusions to it.

2) "Thy Neighbor's Wife" is famous book written by Gay Talese that was also made into a movie- the title is an allusion to the Biblical passage noted above. The nearest equivalent for "husband" is a single episode of the Dick Van Dyke show. Which do you think will get more discussion and thus more hits- a single episode from a famous TV show, or a famous novel AND the movie made from it.

3) There are several porn sites that play off of the aforementioned Biblical passage- I presume in order to be more "naughty"- and we all know how much of an impact that industry has on the proliferation of sites on the Web.

If I bothered to spend real time on this, I could probably get the numbers down to about equal on those searches.

To further address this particular issue, I've now dedicated additional minutes of my life to this.

I eliminated those 3 specific parameters I listed above from the search, and pared down the results from 175,000 hits for "neighbor's wife" to just over 11,000. In the interests of full disclosure, however, I did not similarly eliminate the Dick Van Dyke results from the search for "neighbor's husband."

11k vs 7.5k is still a difference, but not nearly so much as it seemed at first blush.

I also did not do additional searches for "neighbor's son" or "neighbor's daughter" which would seem to be ageist if we follow the logic of the original assertion.

 

[Ariosto]

As one besotted with the English language, I find "womyn" ugly in part because it targets the wrong -- the gender-neutral -- component. It would be more elegant to my mind to come up with an appropriate masculine prefix corresponding to "wo-".

I understand, though, that I may be eccentric in that regard!

(It struck me as immediately and irrepressibly hilarious when once I encountered a sign reading "chair" where "chairman" was meant ... as if one might mistake the piece of furniture for a table or something.)

I find singular "they" theoretically as acceptable as the replacement of "thou" with "you", but in practice am more comfortable -- from long habit -- with "he or she" on those rare occasions when I have reason to refer with a pronoun to a person of indeterminate gender.

 

[billd91]

IOW, the answer to your question is "Yes." if- considering all factors- it is more costly in terms of societal and personal effort to eradicate a form of verbal sexism than it is to tolerate it.

I have no problem with Mail Carrier vs Mail Man and the like...but does anyone remember the attempts to come up with gender-neutral pronouns to replace "him" "her" and all the variations?

If you've ever used one of those linguistic chimaera, you'd be the first I've ever encountered. And if you can come up with one without doing an internet search or a dash to your bookshelf, I'd be surprised.

And is anyone at all using "womyn" on a regular basis?

I don't think anybody would say there isn't a point where there are diminishing returns, but there are sexist phrases, terms, and common connotations that certainly can stand to be replaced. Biblical translations that replace strictures against coveting your neighbor's spouse certainly do the job of neighbor's wife, and do a more complete job of it to boot.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Biblical translations that replace strictures against coveting your neighbor's spouse certainly do the job of neighbor's wife, and do a more complete job of it to boot.

No argument there.

 

[Midnight Dawns]

Our language definitely does contain a bias; just look at the gender specific derogatory words we use. The female ones tend to be harsher ones than the ones for men (I will confess I actually can't think of any male specific ones at all at the moment but for women, "whore" is the only one I think that I can get away with mentioning on these boards). While this can reflect a bias in our society it also show the very male dominated roots of our culture. to a degree this is a problem as it keeps certain attitudes alive but there are other issues that should probably be addressed first as they are easier then having everyone relearn a language.