Boycott ESPN's Monday Night Football

I find this call to action food for thought.

I don't think there is anything inherently wrong IMJ about saying "...women and men..." when referring to the sexes or even using "she" as a generalized pronoun for people.

I think what is irksome about this state of affairs is that 1) It is a conscious change from what has been done when referring to fans and players, since fans and players of men's sports teams are almost all (first case) and are all (second case) men and 2) It is likely that most of those working at ESPN on Monday Night Football to bring it to the viewer are men. So what is bothersome about this change is that it reflects an inaccuracy of description of those involved in giving the "hello fans, good-bye fans" collective message.

If I were at an event as a spectator attended mostly by, and whose participants were all or mostly women, I would expect the use of "she" as a pronoun and would find placing "women and men" as a general self-reference by those representing the event to be an accurate and natural state of affairs, linguistically-speaking. However to do so when the opposite is quite obviously the case does indeed send a not-so-subtle signal to the audience (of almost all men) saying just this: "Again, ladies first-- always-- you men just are not as important."

I agree with the story submitter that this is a bad thing since it does tell men to go fly kites in a soft-peddaled, "gee how can you object?" sort of way, which makes it really sneaky and especially annoying. As for boycotting, well, that is a personal decision. But you know, letting them at ESPN know that you have noticed the change and what you think it means is not a bad idea. It costs 6x as much to get a new customer as it does to keep a current one, or so they say in mgt. schools. That's an argument the ESPN home office will listen to!

hello

They'll be throwing snow balls in hell before i use that term.

Whats next?....

"The New York Yankee's won 5-4 on a ninth inning homerun by Derek Jeter. s/he hit a low fastball to right center field." Stay tuned for the post game show when (s/he) will discuss the importance of today's win"

It could come to this>..."Todays game between the Packers and Jets is sponsored by Tampax and Oprah's book club". Join us next Monday when the Giants and Cowboys will play at the newly renovated "Vagisil Anti-Itch" Arena.

maybe this from CNN in two years:

"We would like to pay our respects for all the Women and Men that have lost their lives in Iraq"?

anthony

p.s

I would like to thank all the women and men that made my post possible!

Personally, I don't see anything wrong with s/he (which I usually pronounce sha-he), he or she, or she or he. One game manual I have does it the best way that I've seen. They simply use he for a page or two, then use she for a page or two, switching when the topic changes. The best solution would to just use 'it' as the gender neutral pronoun. People use it often with sexed living things, such as dogs, cats, other animals, and even plants... so why not for humans?

As far as men and women or women and men, neither is right and neither is wrong. To say that one is sexist, or regulating one of the genders to a second class, inharently make the other exactly the same. Again, this is a place where another word would work wonderfuly, such as "People." Altho I must admit in a situation such as ESPN's MNF, men and women would be more approperate as I'm sure there are more men involved on the broadcast of that event than women.

In all, however, it just reaks of PC speech control. Is it any more 'right' that we demand people speak a ceritan way, rather than feminists demanding their own speach codes?

--Demonspawn

This is ultra female supremacist policy. They force people to mention women first in a TV show that's almost completely about males with mostly male viewers.

I'm also firmly against the "s/he" feminazi shit, because this would just be pronounced as SHE with no respect to the word HE and males in general.

The reason why he comes first then she is because it's in alphabetical order same is with men, women.

Proper respect to the words that refer to each gender should definitely be mandatory.

What these feminist supremacists do is gravely insult males, while glorifying the females when it isn't even earned!

Now Anthony... you know that the accepted way to convey laughter online is no longer lol... which is insulting in that the vaginal 'o' is surrounded... no dare I say ASSAULTED by not one but TWO phallic l's.

The new correct form is "s/he s/he s/he"

Dave K
A Radical Moderate

I have long observed this here. In German, the problem is more obvious because everything has a grammatical gender. Customers are Kunden or Kundinnen. The longer female form comes second alphabetically, but guess what is used first these days almost everywhere. Interesting sidenote: I recently noticed this was already often the case 10-15 years ago when the issue never occured to me. I seem to be more sensitive to these things nowadays, I'm sure this has happened to a lot of us.

Only using the male form is/was supposed to be gender neutral. Grammatical gender doesn't have anything to do with natural gender. If you wanted to address your customers, you said "Sehr geehrte Kunden" and this meant all of them, male or female. But this was considered sexist with the rise of feminism because it supposedly treats men as the norm. Of course you could also say that because the male form covers both genders and the female only one, it's harder to express that you do mean only males.

Anyway, you can spot the radical left by looking for the "inland I" as in KundInnen. In vacancies as well as in law, the so-called "gender neutral" form (X and Xinnen) is required by law, even though the male form addresses all people.
But now check this out: when they imported the anti-DV stuff from the US (a process that to my knowledge has never been documented and not only the average German is completely unknowing about), turning it into the so-called Gewaltschutzgesetz (violence protection law), the text of the law suddenly talked exclusively about Täter, perpetrators, with no Täterinnen to be seen anywhere. AFAIR this was updated in the last minute.

Either way, what they call gender neutral speech is what is sexist because it forces thoughts about gender into the general language when they're not meant to be there. By and by, the important difference between grammatical and natural gender could disappear from my language.

edit: Another great invention; students of universities are no longer called Studenten/Studentinnen, they are now Studierende (the "studying") because this form does not have a grammatical gender. Studying are of course something else than students, but well, it's Political Correctness, what do you expect.

This subtle manipulation has been going on for many years, yet never pointed at, never seemingly noticed until it's just part of everyday speech.

For instance, when did the term 'gender' replace the term 'sex'? I don't recall a specific time when it happened, only that I've been very aware of these issues for many years yet the change to 'gender' occurred seemingly unnoticed to the point where it's used without question or thought, and I can't even pinpoint the date it changed.

When I see an article about anything in any magazine and it refers to a person as 'she', it raises a flag with me and then I proceed to count and analyse how the word 'he' and 'she' is used. Invariably, a few 'he's are tossed in especially when a traditionally female role is mentioned, but the gist is always the same - the 'she' is being promoted as the default 'sex' while a 'he' sounds as though it's just thrown in as a token for the odd dinosaur that needs a pat on the back.

The joke for years has been the countless Bachelor of Arts degrees and Women's Studies degrees that were never considered as serious qualifications for real work. The reality is that the numbers of people infused with the indoctrination are working everywhere, at every level and in every corner, so that nudging their concept into mainstream thinking is a cinch. The 'boys are stupid, throw rocks at them' T-shirts is the perfect example. How objections were trivialized and how we lack a sense of humour contrasts sharply with the demand to change hurricane names and manhole covers.

The power that words have on the masses is not a mystery - it's just sad when an aware individual chooses to go along.

Kirk

..I'm using this simply because in German, sex only means sex as in intercourse, and gender seems to be derived from "genus" just like our equivalent word "Geschlecht" that only has the other meaning. Plus family lineage / house of.
I have no feeling for and no idea about the connotations the word has in English.

I don't know if you are a regular poster here, or someone sent here to make us look bad, but you're getting a "cease and desist" order from me. There's absolutely nothing misandrist about using "(s)he." In speech, you can pronounce it either "she or he" or "he or she."

If you're so afraid of making men second-class citizens, then simply alternate. Say "men and women" half the time and "women and men" half the time.

It is pretty stupid to bother changing “men and women” to “women and men” during a football broadcast that will be watched by a minority of women.

Didn’t the women always have “ladies and gentlemen” anyway? Oh but according to feminists using the word ladies betrays your misogynist penchant for keeping women in traditional roles.

Feminists have always had the Orwellian tendency of tweaking, editing and politicizing our language to suit their agenda. I am no fan of the feminist ministry of truth, no matter how harmless the edit appears.

Unless it's insults slurs or bashing being edited I think changing and altering language for political reasons is much more stupid than complaining about those alterations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Truth