Thesaurus.com Says 'Female' is Equivalent to 'Weaker'

Both feministing and Jezebel reported this week that a Thesaurus.com entry has shown up for the word "weaker" where the only two entries are "female" and "lady." The entry has been removed so you can view the screenshot here.

My guess is this was supposed to be some sort of a joke, since not only have those two synonyms been removed, but if you look up "weaker" in Thesaurus.com, there is no entry for it, period, only for "weak." From looking at the site, though, it doesn't seem to be user-generated so if it was a joke, it was an "inside" one or a hacker--I hope.

Not only am I bringing this up because it is so blatantly sexist, not to mention completely unproductive, say for a student needing a real synonym, but because this connects a great deal to my previous post about gendered-language and the denigration of the female that is encapsulated by the term pussy, but also because language politics in terms of gender/sexuality has been popping up in the news. A couple weeks ago, weakness was aligned with femininity in the recent commentary on Obama's bowling performance, and Christopher Hitchens' characterized (gay male) Andrew Sullivan as acting like a 'lesbian' in order to insult him.

This Thesaurus.com incident proves how deeply embedded these associations are in our culture-- whether it goes to show that woman is "officially" connected to the meaning of "weak" or that a hacker understood this cultural connection and attempted to embed it into institutional discourse.

The synonyms they provide for the "weaker" synonyms "female" and "lady" are seems to be taken from the actual entries for various woman-related terms. And as long as we're talking about language and thesaurus.com, lets do some word analyzing.

"female":

noun-amazon, babe, beauty, broad, cutie, dame, doll, dowager, duchess, femme, filly, fox, gal, gentlewoman, girl, lady, madam, mama, matron, petticoat, pinup, seductress, she, siren, sis, skirt, temptress, tomato, wench; adjective-changeable, child-bearing, delicate, effeminate, effete, fair, feminine, fertile, gentle, girlish, girly, graceful, ladylike, maidenly, matronly, modest, muliebral, oviparous, petticoat, pistil-bearing, pistillate, pure, refined, reproductive, sensitive, she-stuff, shy, soft, tender, twisty, virgin, vixenish, weak, womanish, womanlike

vs. "male":

noun- ape, beefcake, boy, bruiser, buck, bull, chap, dude, father, fellow, gent*, gentleman, guy, he, he-man, hunk, jock, john, macho man, papa, stud, tiger, tom, wolf; adjective-macho*, manful, manlike, manly, potent, virile

Notice anything? Perhaps an emphasis on sexual appeal in terms of being female and sexual action in terms of being male? Perhaps mostly terms of confidence, self-identity, and positivity for male while female terms are largely relational (not individual), object-like, or negative.

Looking closer at these listings for each...

• Most of the entries for female and male regarded adults. However, while "girl" is among the 12 listings for "female," "boy" is not listed among the 14 listings for "male." I suppose there's a significant difference between a boy and a male, whereas between a girl and a female, not so much.
  
• Curiously, "men's movement" and "misogynist" is part of "male" while women's movement is absent from the "female" listings.
  
• "Drag queen" is under the "female" listings (not male).
  
• "Matronly," and "daughter" are part of female, while "family jewels," "virile," and "male pattern baldness" are in the listings under "male" (though male pattern baldness is notably not part of the definition of male), rather than "fatherly" and "son."
  
• There is a separate entry for "gigalo" under the male listings, but not "prostitute" under female. Maybe that's because pinup, seductress, temptress and vixenish are all definitions of "female," and "call girl" is one of the first listings under the search for "girl."
  

So how about looking at "girl":

babe, baby doll, bird, blonde, bobby-soxer, boytoy, broad, butterfly, canary, chick, coed, cupcake, cutie, dame, damsel, daughter, deb, debutante, doll, female, filly, gal, jail bait, lady, lassie, mademoiselle, maid, maiden, minx, miss, missy, mouse, nymph, nymphet, piece, queen, schoolgirl, she, sis, skirt, spring chicken, teenybopper, tomato, tomboy, virgin, wench, witch, woman

vs. "boy":

buck, cadet, chap, child, chip, dude*, fellow, gamin, guy, half-pint*, junior, lad, little guy*, master, punk*, puppy*, runt*, schoolboy, shaveling, shaver*, small fry*, sonny*, sprout*, squirt*, stripling, tadpole*, whippersnapper*, youngster, youth

Looking at the girl/boy listings, of which there were 50+of each...

• In the first few for "boy" were such listings as "boy wonder," "office boy," "mama's boy," "playboy"--one for boy's employment, one for a non-boyish boy, one for a boy's intellectual genius, and one for a man's (active and selfish) sexuality.
  
• In the first few for "girl" we listings like "girl Friday," "bachelor girl," "call girl," "cover girl"--one for girl's employment, one for her marital status, and two for her (passive) sexuality.
  
• Note that tomboy (the arguably female equivalent of mama's boy) is part of the definition of girl whereas mama's boy it outside of the definition of boy itself. This here reveals how ingrained how threatening troubling gender roles is for hegemonic, heteronormative masculinity in a way that it isn't as much for girls...so long as they are also "reproductive" and "pinups."
• Several of the terms for girl referred to sexuality, while the terms for boy simply referred predominately to youth. Even further, the sexual terms are those of the ubiquitous male fantasy of girls' sexuality: virgin and nymph, whereas the sexual terms related to (adult) "female" tended to cluster around her dangerousness: temptress, seductress.
• The boy is primarily a young man, whereas "girl" seems to have a discursive function of its own, producing a sexualized and appearance-oriented image of young femininity that will be coupled with being wifely and motherly as an adult female.
  

You might be thinking, "it's just Thesaurus.com...what's the big deal?" Well, Thesaurus.com and Dictionary.com are heavily used and are considered reputable sources. And words mean things. Language shapes thought, and what we are able to think. So long as we overload terms for female with passivity, sexualization, objectification, and motherhood, and male with activity, active sexuality and prowess, we will continue to think of men and women in these terms. Think about it--what do we call a woman who's sexually active--slut, loose, whore? What do we call a passive male sex object? Um, hunk...maybe? Or meaty? And of course juxtapose those terms with "delicate," "weak," and "sensitive," and maybe now we're seeing this isn't just an issue of a word or two.

And when "mama's boy" is an anomaly of "boy" while "tomboy" is part of the definition of "girl," we have some serious heteronormativity in our language. And when nymph and virgin, doll and cutie are the way we think of young girls rather than simply being not-yet women, some light is shed on our incredible social problem of girls' sexualization and the sexualization of the young and vulnerable (even if legal) in general. And why is there no term for an intelligent girl, like we have for "boy wonder"....just "cover girl"?

When we can't think without words, when we understand that words do not simply reflect our thought but actually shape it, we can begin to understand that they're not just words.

*for more of the same, check out dictionary.com for "woman" and "man."

cross-posted to The Reaction

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How sexism works

I've seen this cartoon in a few places today, but it is very true, and worth a few thoughts.

(feministing.com's headline for this was brilliant, "Boys suck at logic, non-sexism."

Sexism turn attributes of people into attributes of gender. Senator Clinton (I refuse to call her the demeaning "Hillary" as if she were Britney or someone) becomes a poor candidate because she seems like a "bitch" or her expression of emotions are read as "weak" or "manipulative"; if done by a male candidate they would have been read as "caring" (remember Bill Clinton?). Further, the authenticity of her tears was questioned since she, of course, comes off like a cold, hard, bitch.

See a bad driver? When it's a woman, the comment is often made, "women are such bad drivers." If the driver is a male do we then say "men are such bad drivers"? Does anyone really keep a tally of the quality of drivers by gender vs. the proportion of the driving population they consist of? And really, does one person's set of observations really produce a truth?

No it doesn't-but experiential "evidence" like this is meant to reinforce what we already think about particular identity groups. In the philosophical arena, "direction of fit" is when what we think about the world fits the facts of the world. In the feminist critique of epistemology, we see that this idea doesn't really happen, because the facts we recognize are those that reinforce what we already think about the world-we see in the world that which confirms what we already believe, and the mere observation of it in the world serves as "proof" of the truth of said belief. Think about it: it is so much easier for people to believe a "scientific study" that confirms "common sense" than one that defies it.


But science has been used for centuries to reinforce ideological views about the inferiority of races (non-white), ethnicities (non-Euro), gender (non-male), and sexualities (non-heteronormative), using their "facts" as "proof" of their discrimination and oppression. Much of the "old" science has been refuted, although many of their claims persist as "common sense." Indeed, sexist and racist views continue to be circulated in contemporary scientific studies.

Let's go back to the driving example-all this is to say, have you ever considered that in our society, despite what we think is our "gender equality," and regardless of whether she holds a paying job (versus the unpaid work of mothering), women disproportionately bear the burden of child-raising and rearing? Thus, if you do happen to notice that women drivers seem to be "bad," did you ever look to see if there were kids in the car, screaming for her attention? Did you ever think she was trying to make doctor's appointments and decide what to make for dinner while she's driving from work to pick the kids up from the sitter's? IF, and that's a big IF, women are "worse" drivers, could it actually be because of the prevalence of sexism that causes these things and not because of the "fact" of them being female? This just adds sexism to sexism. Perhaps it is better said that "people with young kids in the car are bad drivers."

This is the same thing that happens in the math example. IF indeed boys score higher than girls on math exams, it is wrong wrong wrong to say that because we are "gender-equal," (and that's up for debate in my book) that means boys are better than girls at math. Don't blame girls for continued gender discrimination in the classroom, from parents, hell, in the McDonald's happy meals, where the kinds of play and developments tools we give to kids will highly inform their capacities for certain academic subjects. Of, if a person's not good at math, maybe they're just not good at math. Blaming it on their gender is just as logical as blaming it on their eye color.

I think the appropriate saying here is, "you find what you're looking for."

And that's sexism for ya.

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