Re: male / female

[bloch%mandrill@ucsd.edu (Steve Bloch)]

dbk@MIMSY.UMD.EDU (Dan Kozak) writes:
>I notice that alot of people these days use "females" and "mailes"
>rather than women and men.  These are extrememly awkward in my dialect
>and I was just wondering if anyone else out there felt the same way,
>or could explain why this is happening.  In the last case, "feminine"
>would seem to me to be an infinitely preferable adjective, rather than
>just using "female" in an adjectival way.  Comments?

There's been a lot of discussion on alt.feminism about the difference
between "male/female" and "masculine/feminine".  To compress megabytes
of argument into a few words, the former is an anatomical distinction
while the latter is a cultural one.  To speak of a "female" album,
therefore, makes little sense (except in that it has a hole in the
middle).  And there is no particular reason to use "females" and "males"
as nouns in preference to "women" and "men".  My pet peeve is the
reverse: people using "women" and "men" as adjectives when we have
perfectly good adjectives "female" and "male" (or "feminine" and
"masculine", depending on context).
The flames start when one person reads "feminine" to mean
"traditional, Phyllis Schlafly-feminine" and another reads it to mean
"anything women do"; the former extreme doesn't reflect reality, while
the latter essentially equates "feminine" with "female", thus losing a
potentially valuable distinction.

"Writers are a funny breed -- I should know." -- Jane Siberry

bloch%cs@ucsd.edu