David Skinner, assistant managing editor
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THE PERSECUTION OF SCHOLARS for gender bias, on even the flimsiest evidence, has long been a fact of life in academe. Should one professor write, "Mary entered the kitchen," another boils over with feminist indignation, convenes a panel to investigate, and soon the whole campus is sucked into a tedious speakathon on the evils of sexism. But more than just the hobbyhorse of a few discontented radicals, heightened scrutiny for potential offense to preferred political groups has become policy within most disciplines. So it comes as an unexpected pleasure to see the practice of telling scholars what to write and say receive the kind of treatment it deserves.
Along these lines, in 1992, the Linguist Society of America began urging scholars to use androgynous names when writing example sentences. The aim, set in the Linguist Society of America Guideline for Nonsexist Usage, was to get linguists to forgo stereotypes and to "avoid peopling . . . sentences with just one sex." If anything, argued University of Wisconsin linguist Monica Macauley and co-author Colleen Brice five years later in Language, the official journal of the LSA, efforts to steer linguists away from unsavory example sentences needed to be expanded. For a taste of political correctness from its true vintage years, we'll examine their article, "Don't Touch My Projectile." The title is a disingenuous play on the kind of suggestive humor sometimes found in example sentences, which the authors argue needs to be stricken from textbooks.
MACAULEY AND BRICE'S case starts from the
illogical premise that much can be learned about present-day bias in example sentences by studying grammar texts from over the last 25 years. Thus do Macauley and Brice construct a sample using texts that had been written before feminism rose to its current commanding heights in academe. And a good deal of their criticism proceeds from this historically skewed sample. For instance, after complaining that women don't appear nearly as often in subject sentences, they try to score an additional complaint from the fact that men appear in a greater variety of jobs in example sentences. Obviously the latter is at least partly a function of the former and not prima facie evidence that textbook writers have narrow views of what jobs women can and cannot hold.
Throughout their piece, Macauley and Brice do much to call their own reasonableness into question. At one point, they complain that men appear more often than women as causal agents in their sample of example sentences. And "in the relatively small number of cases where males are depicted as experiencing emotion, they almost always experience heterosexual affection." In a footnote, the authors write, "Thanks to Siobhan Somerville for pointing out to us that such examples show heterosexist bias as well." Indeed, these textbooks, which go back as far as 1969, should have shown more sensitivity when it comes to the recognition of gay feelings.
When not complaining about women's relations to the means of causality in example sentences, Brice and Macauley complain about the actions associated with women in example sentences, especially those that make women seem bitchy. Verbs like "call, scold, yell, get angry, and shop" are all given the sideways glance, even if they appear in a surprising and empowering sentence like this one: "The woman scolding the policeman is my mother." (Unlike Macauley and Brice, Mom here clearly isn't one to get over-worried about the presence of masculine authority figures.)
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