Yeah. I went to a GWAR concert after my lymph-node biopsy was done.
I think part of the problem is that society still, in general, unites Sex and Gender, to use Judith Butler’s terms. Basically, the physical, genetic determinants, chromosomes or external genitalia or whatever is decided is one’s sex, while one’s chosen role and identity is one’s gender. So, she could be a male woman. As such, for physical activities, she is a male, while for most other purposes, she is a woman. Basically, I’m with Sin and GAP.
Zeppelin was joking around, so I didn’t say it then. But I will say it to you because I know you’re being serious. I hope to God you never call a transsexual male or female “it,” because that’s extremely offensive. If you’re retarded enough to do that, I hope that someone is around to beat your ass.
What will you think when inevitably (outside of Brown), guys start trying to peek through the gaps in the stalls? When a timid person makes any embarrassing noise in front of the opposite sex and has his or her identity discovered? If that person is caught masturbating in a stall? When after a football game, a crowd of raucous drunk guys stomps into the bathroom, kicking stall doors and pissing on the floor? When girls with “girl issues” are inadvertently discovered during a private moment? When a pimply girl wants to do or redo her makeup in the bathroom mirror, and guys are standing there watching? Do the urinals have to go, because they unfairly bias bathrooms toward male use or make females uncomfortable to watch? Or can women now use them too? How about when a couple are on a date, the girl says she is going to the bathroom (she needs a moment), and the guy says, “I’ll come along, I’ve got to go too”?
I think you call this “segregation” of bathrooms “silly” because you have this image of a stuffy old white male declaring it improper and immoral, whether due to his empty religious sentiments, or to cover up his Victorian anxiety toward idealized women. But when you realize this was designed to protect people from humiliation at a vulnerable moment, and to circumvent a situation full of awkward sexual tension and even temptation, and to give people at least one retreat where they need not worry about keeping up appearances – then suddenly, gendered bathrooms don’t seem so silly anymore.
I agree that bathrooms should probably be separate for privacy reasons but I’ve always though labeling people was kinda silly, be it he/she/gay/lesbian/black/white/etc
Then how would you refer to someone when you don’t know their name, profession, hobbies and don’t want to use terms like he/she/gay/lesbian/black/white/etc? Using a physical feature like hair colour would go against your values toward labeling and everybody can’t be referred to as ‘that individual’.
While those are all fair points, I think that the idea that all the privacy you mention is only necessary when the opposite sex is involved is part of the foolishness; do you argue that it wouldn’t be humiliating if one were caught masturbating by a member of one’s sex? Because I’m pretty sure it would still be pretty damn humiliating. A restaurant I went to a while back used a gender-neutral restroom with full doors, rather than stalls, which seems to solve the majority of those problems. I guess doing one’s make-up and trying to get a breather from one’s date would still be problematic, but those don’t seem altogether that pressing, to me. If nothing else, it would be ideal for a gender-neutral option, like the “family restrooms” you see every so often, to exist.
The existing system has more drawbacks than an imagined stuffiness, though. There is the already mentioned problem of which bathroom should be used by those of nonstandard gender identities. Single-sex bathrooms provide their own awkward situations, especially for parents of young children; there is an age where one is not comfortable sending one’s child into the bathroom alone, but that the child is old enough to make others in the restroom uncomfortable. A lot of the embarrassments you mentioned aren’t really erased, only maybe lessened, by single-sex bathrooms.
Lex: There is a difference between a label and a description; saying someone is “a ginger” is different than saying someone has red hair. Labels have more intentionality and connotation behind them than descriptions, as they tend to define someone as or by a trait, rather than merely list a trait to identify someone.
Damned if I am going to wait to use the bathroom at some bar because there’s a shit ton of women that are holding up the entire line because they’re taking they’re sweet ass time. I just need to go in, piss, and be out like a minute later. I bet, at bars, if there are only unisex bathrooms, you’ll see a lot more men being cited for public urination.
Also gender pronouns allow people to be more specific with their descriptions. While some labels are offensive, some labels are their for convenience in language.
You basically said everything I wanted to, but better. Family restrooms are great, when they exist, because it really is a pain in the ass for, for example, a man to take his four year old out to the mall, because it is really awkward when she inevitably needs to pee. Can you send her in the women’s room alone? No. Can you go in with her? No. Do you want to explain why men pee standing up?..no.
Family restrooms are typically single-occupant, instead of stalled. This causes a problem, however, in keeping the line for the bathroom moving. When there are stalls, more people can go at once.
I would prefer that there were not gender-specific bathrooms overall. Sharing a bathroom will not hurt anyone. Examples about making embarassing noises,etc. are just as applicable in single-gender bathrooms. And as for peekers? I’m sure there are pervy homos, the same way there are pervy heteros.
I’m pretty sure there are a lot more descriptive ways of identifying a person or character’s gender than using a pronoun. Do you quiver at the raw femininity of the woman’s description every time you read the line “She said” in a book? Do you lambaste authors who go so far as to describe her personality traits and appearance for the excessive, “purple” prose with which they flesh out this character when “she” is a perfectly adequate description?
It’s really not all that convenient, even. In my writing, the only time it’s mattered in any way, it was an inconvenience, which is when I started to think it was stupid. Ever since, I’ve noticed a lot of situations where they get in the way, and none where they achieve anything that wouldn’t have been done better by something else. Turkish gets by just fine without gendered pronouns, by the way.
Actually, speaking tags should be as unintrusive as possible. So “she said” is much better than, “The raven-haired siren declared” or whatever. And yes, purple prose is almost never good. That isn’t to say that an evocative description isn’t sometimes desireable, but you don’t want to get too purple.
Furthermore, I dare you to write a GOOD work of novella length (~25,000 words) fiction/creative nonfiction without using one gendered pronoun or noun. I triple dog dare you.
I’m not really arguing pronouns are The Patriarchy’s heteronormative grip holding down what it defines as “women” from achieving an anarcha-feminist utopia. I’m saying I think having “he,” “she,” and “it,” is really unnecessary for words that really carry very little importance. There are better ways of identifying what gender someone is, in literary uses, and any situation where it needs to be identified in everyday uses would probably also require clarification and correction if gendered pronouns were used.
Whether or not it stylistically fits your taste has nothing to do with how descriptive it is, which is what Cav brought up and thus what I responding to.
I didn’t ask if purple prose was good, I asked if using description beyond “he” and “she” constituted purple prose. Cav’s comment was that gendered pronouns added descriptive specificity, which I find ludicrous, since they’re among the least specific ways to identify a character’s sex. If they count as a specific description, even a basic run-down of a few physical attributes must be excessive.
I never said I had anything against gendered nouns.
I was trying not to say what gender a character was without making it obvious that I was avoiding mentioning it. It’s really hard to do in English. While it’s simple to avoid certain descriptions that would give it away, every time the character did something, I had to jump through a linguistic hoop to avoid using a pronoun, or use the character’s name (which would eventually become repetitive and obnoxious). While it’s a fairly minour situation, I can’t think of anywhere a gendered pronoun has done much of anything beneficial, other than identify someone’s gender in way that was either redundant or, at best, uninteresting. If redundant-to-uninteresting descriptions are really that important, there are plenty of other ways to do that, in English. Gendered pronouns don’t serve much purpose, that I can see, and the language is simpler and more open without them.
This is what English would sound like if Arac had his way:
“Ah, yes, see; for you, young person of the epitome of person; the person people are people. Woe, person, for your time has ended, trapped forever in the amber of aquanet, we watch the folly of our fall with half-closed eyes, slipping into the inumbrating emrace of the (eye)shadow of death.”