Hollywood’s awards shows are always closely scrutinized for signs of who’s up and who’s down, what’s in and what’s out. Lately they have also offered a clue about a trend that has nothing to do with film production or red carpet gowns. It’s about grammar. Amid all the razzle-dazzle, you may have missed the fact that last year the Golden Globes went where the Screen Actors Guild had previously led: They lauded not actors and actresses (lead, supporting or otherwise) but rather “female actors” and “male actors.”
After so many years and so many ceremonies, that was a real change for the industry, but it emerged from a long history. At least as far back as the 1980s, I’d heard calls to eliminate the use of female-marked terms such as “heroine,” “goddess,” “waitress” and “chairwoman” — and, yes, “actress.” (I for some reason have never truly internalized “flight attendant” over “stewardess,” and still have to remind myself to make the substitution.)
Such terms can seem to imply that the women who occupy these roles are somehow essentially different from — and perhaps lesser than — the men who do. Appending a female suffix positions the male version as the default, and makes the female word a mere version or variation of it.
The call to use “actor,” “hero,” “god” and “chair” to refer to women as well as men emerges from a belief that the words we use can shape our thoughts. That view was put forth most influentially by the linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1930s. The idea is that de-gendering our terms is a powerful gesture, a political act that asserts women’s equality and retrains our cultural assumptions.
A similar impulse has guided efforts to popularize inclusive language about race and gender identity or any number of other sensitive subjects. As those efforts proliferated in recent years, the consensus on what was inclusive and what was outdated seemed to shift faster and faster. It sometimes felt as if the lexical earth was shifting under our feet almost by the week — and not always for clear purpose.
Lately the tide seems to be turning against those attempts to engineer how people speak. In general, I’m glad about that. But de-gendering terms is a worthwhile endeavor that deserves an exemption from our impatience.
The problem with replacing older terms with newer, allegedly more sensitive ones is that a replacement term inevitably takes on the same negative associations that the old term had accreted. The psychologist Steven Pinker calls it the euphemism treadmill. Think of the procession from “crippled” to “handicapped” to “disabled” to “differently abled,” changes undertaken to avoid stigmatizing the people the term refers to. The constant renewal suggests that the effort has only had fitful success.
The introduction of a new term may suggest new ways of thinking, at least for some, and for a spell. But covering a hole in the roof with construction paper keeps the wind out, too, or at least some of it, and for a spell. It’s not actually a solution. The fashion of late to refer to the “unhoused” rather than the “homeless” is a useful example. “Homeless” began as a well-intended replacement of words like “bum” and “bag lady.” However, over time, the same dismissive associations those old terms engendered shifted over to “homeless person.” You can be sure that if “unhoused” becomes the default, it will need replacement in a generation or so. Truly addressing the homelessness (houselessness?) epidemic would be a much more meaningful approach to the problem than changing what we call it, and I suspect the “unhoused” would say the same.
De-gendering, however, is a different case. Unlike creating euphemisms, folding two words into one does not present a new model subject to obsolescence. “She’s an actor” simply phases out “actress” and sends it on its way, along with Studebakers, Koogle peanut butter and Red Skelton. It creates no new word poised to inherit the potentially dismissive air that “actress” implied.
Of course, changing words will hardly eliminate sexist bias. And I can’t help chuckling to recall one person I knew who years ago earnestly insisted on calling a Walkman a “Walkperson.” But to the extent that this kind of language change really can play some part in changing habits of mind, let’s form the new habit and pass it on to our kids.
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