No more hags, bags and nags — setting the sexist seesaw right

Ramani had, in October 2017, wrote an open letter in Vogue.in titled, To the Harvey Weinsteins of the World.

The language of sex is sexist, we all know that. A man ‘takes’ a woman, a woman ‘gives’ herself. ‘Womaniser’ sounds way more respectable and discreet than the predatory and gluttonous ‘man-eater’. There is hardly any female equivalent to either ‘playboy’ or ‘sugar daddy’. And while ‘cougar’ is an older woman with a younger man, the vice versa of that is just a ‘silver fox’.

Language does not tone down its masculine and feminine divisions even outside of the bedroom door. Things just get worse thereon. A ‘nag’ or a ‘shrew’ is always a woman, so is a ‘prude’ or a ‘spinster’, with no delightful male counterparts to their meanings. ‘Rabid’ and ‘shrill’ bring to mind women, not men

‘Hysterical’ is the woman turned down by a man and ‘frigid’ is the woman who turned him down. A 'mouse' is a quiet woman, but a 'fishwife' is loud. 'She's such a cow’ has been heard now and then delivered in a cheap baritone, but ‘bull’, on the other hand, is only a nonsense story by lad or lass alike.

Blithe punch lines almost always include a ‘mother-in-law’, which can be the mommy of the husband or the mommy of the wife, but nonetheless a woman every time. Saying ‘father-in-law’ though doesn’t require the same downward lip movement.

Inherent gender bias of words

Language, which is the first formal tool of communication and carries in it the nuts and bolts put into place from the day it went under construction, gives away the inherent gender bias of words. Just like racial and communal references jump up to offend suddenly after decades of unconscious usage – like they did in Enid Blyton’s books many years after she died a bestselling writer – certain words reveal their true colours by and by.

In the he and she of what we say in our daily speech, it is the latter that comes away demeaned. After four years of much research, the Oxford English Dictionary decided to take steps to correct this imbalance between man and woman by weeding out those words that perpetuate sexist stereotypes.

Feminist organisations like the Women’s Aid and the Women’s Equality Party wrote to Oxford University Press to change the sexist definition of the word ‘woman’. Both ‘bitch’ and ‘maid’ were its female synonyms, said the letter. As a result of this and its own internal awakening, a whopping 500 definitions have been thus altered!

A ‘hag’ and a ‘nag’ and an ‘old bag’ and a ‘crone’ can all now go into retirement as descriptions of women. In exchange, we have ‘MeToo’, a newly minted term very much owned by all the women of the world, even more so now that Harvey Weinstein has been sent to jail forever.

Older, slightly maligning nuances with their air of inferiority and weakness are thankfully history. The newer coinings have ‘empowerment’ written all over them. Whatever you may say about the politically correct or woke brigade, an extreme lunge in the opposite direction does set the sexist seesaw right.

Shinie Antony is a writer and editor based in Bangalore. Her books include The Girl Who Couldn't Love, Barefoot and Pregnant, Planet Polygamous, and the anthologies Why We Don’t Talk, An Unsuitable Woman, Boo. Winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Asia Prize for her story A Dog’s Death in 2003, she is the co-founder of the Bangalore Literature Festival and director of the Bengaluru Poetry Festival.