Hooray for the Decline in Sexist Language

Posted on November 19, 2012 by zoeweil
Image courtesy Antony Pranata via
Creative Commons.

For thirty years I’ve been committed to both using and promoting nonsexist language in writing and speaking. I was criticized for using “he or she” on my papers in law school in 1984, instead of the accepted “he,” meaning “people.” When my son was in fourth grade and I sat in on a day of classes, I was dismayed that the teacher used “man” instead of humanity or humankind to refer to homo sapiens, but when I spoke to her about considering using nonsexist language she looked at me quizzically, truly perplexed by my comment, unable to comprehend my concerns.

In our graduate programs at the Institute for Humane Education the faculty all point out to students when they are using non-inclusive language, explaining that “he” used to refer to all people perpetuates assumptions in our culture and fosters continued sexist thinking, and sometimes sexist behaviors.

Because the English language doesn’t have a word to describe a male or female in the singular (we have “they” to describe both in the plural), we are constantly faced with the challenges of using language that is not discriminatory. As a writer, I often turn statements about a generalized person in the singular into a statement about generalized persons in the plural simply to avoid “he or she,” which I admit is awkward.

This is particularly challenging when trying to avoid speciesist language as well as sexist language by not referring to an animal as “it.” It can’t be done without resorting to “he or she,” and so I often choose to subvert our assumptions and challenge the default “he” by referring to a wild animal whose gender I don’t know as “she,” simply to shake things up and get us all thinking. Recently, walking with a group of teenagers in the woods we came upon a snake. I chose to refer to the snake as “she,” and one of the students asked how I knew the snake was female. I explained that I didn’t and why I used the female pronoun, but I knew that none of the students would have asked how I knew the snake was male if I’d referred to “him or her” as “he.”

And so I was delighted to read this article in The Atlantic about the decline in sexist language. It’s about time.

~ Zoe

Zoe Weil, President, Institute for Humane Education
Author of Most Good, Least Harm, Above All, Be Kind, and The Power and Promise of Humane Education
My TEDxConejo talk: “Solutionaries”
My TEDxDirigo talk: “The World Becomes What You Teach“
My TEDxYouth@BFS “Educating for Freedom”

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Challenging Times Call for Kindness, Not Vitriol

Posted on February 28, 2011 by zoeweil

I recently blogged about hateful commentary because, having been subjected to it, I felt compelled to write about it. But I’m revisiting the subject again as an important public issue, one which Maureen Dowd recently wrote about in her New York Times editorial “Stars and Sewers.” Here is an excerpt:

When CBS’s Lara Logan was dragged off, beaten and sexually assaulted by a mob of Egyptian men in Tahrir Square the giddy night that Hosni Mubarak stepped down, most of us were aghast. But some vile bodies online began beating up on the brave war correspondent.

Nir Rosen, a journalist published in The Nation, The New Yorker and The Atlantic, who had a fellowship at New York University’s Center on Law and Security, likes to be a provocateur. He has urged America to “get over” 9/11, called Israel an “abomination” to be eliminated, and sympathized with Hezbollah, Hamas and the Taliban. Invited to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2008 about the Iraq surge, he told Joe Biden, the committee chairman then, that he was uncomfortable “advising an imperialist power about how to be a more efficient imperialist power.”

Rosen must now wish Twitter had a 10-second delay. On Tuesday, he merrily tweeted about the sexual assault of Logan: “Jesus Christ, at a moment when she is going to become a martyr and glorified we should at least remember her role as a major war monger.”

He suggested she was trying to “outdo Anderson” Cooper (roughed up in Cairo earlier), adding that “it would have been funny if it happened to Anderson too.”

Sadly, Nir Rosen’s comments are actually tame in today’s climate in which anonymous commenters (as opposed to paid “provocateurs” and commentators) spew the most vile invective imaginable. It’s my deep hope that those who so readily spread their rage and hatred are the minority, but it’s sometimes hard to reconcile the nasty language of commenters that seems to outnumber the thoughtful and helpful ones.

Here are some words of advice from the late Eknath Easwaran, former Berkeley professor and meditation teacher:

“Please do not indulge in unkind words, in negative comments. Criticism, as you know, can only be useful when it is constructive. Comments can only be useful when they are friendly. So even from the point of view of effectiveness, I would suggest that unkind comments add to the problem. Unloving criticism makes the situation worse. It does not mean that we do not have to comment and suggest. Very often we have to. But it is the mental attitude with which you make the suggestion and the loving concern with which you put forward ideas, sometimes opposed to others, that make for effectiveness.”

Please share Easwaran’s words widely. We need to heed them not only for the sake of civil discourse, but for the sake of effective changemaking for a better world.

Zoe Weil, President, Institute for Humane Education
Author of Most Good, Least Harm and Above All, Be Kind
My TEDx talk: “The World Becomes What You Teach“

Image courtesy of SweetOnVeg via Creative Commons.

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Rubie, Elsie, and the Stick

Posted on September 20, 2010 by zoeweil

Most days, I walk my dogs, Ruby and Elsie, down to the ocean. Invariably, Elsie finds a stick to bring home, although stick is really a misnomer. Little Elsie is more likely to carry home a small tree than a stick, and Ruby and I anxiously check our backs because Elsie tears along the path with the stick, banging it into us at high speed if we’re not quick enough to scoot off the path and into the woods. Ruby has taken to jumping aside long before Elsie can ram that stick into her. This morning, I was not so quick. Elsie came up so suddenly that the stick whacked the back of my legs. I sternly said “No, Elsie,” and she looked chagrined. She begin running through the woods with it and avoiding me, but because it’s hard to carry a tree in your mouth through the woods, she changed the angle, carrying it to the side so that the length of the tree was parallel to her body rather than perpendicular to it. What a smart girl, I thought. Yet, why shouldn’t she be smart? Why should I be at all surprised that she’d modify her behavior at my command? She does it all the time.

Although Elsie doesn’t speak English, she has learned far more “human” than I have learned “dog” in our amazing cross-species relationship. She adjusts to me daily, reading my voice, my posture, my movements, my moods, my desires, and tweaking her own behavior to meet both my and her own needs. I have done little to adjust to her, expecting that she will be the one to change – to go to the bathroom only when I let her out and where I expect her to go, to eat only when I provide food and not to eat or chew on the various things in the house that are off-limits (like the CDs and the furniture), to lick only as much as I am comfortable with and no more, to get off the bed on command but know that she is generally welcome to sleep there as long as she doesn’t take “my” space, to “obey” sit, stay, come, lie down, high five, hug, leave it and a few other choice commands, not to mention learning to carry her sticks a new way through an obstacle course of woods rather than a wide open path. She continues to learn how to better suit me while I blithely carry on with no concerted effort to speak her language or follow her “rules.”

Yet I know that her life is an utter joy largely because of the home and life we’ve created for her and Ruby and Griffin (too old now to run to the ocean). I’m happy she’s willing to always adjust so that the back of my legs won’t be whacked by her stick obsession.

Zoe Weil
Author of So, You Love Animals: An Action-Packed, Fun-Filled Book to Help Kids Help Animals, Moonbeam Gold Medal winner for juvenile fiction, Claude and Medea: The Hellburn Dogs and Most Good, Least Harm

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Humane Education: Re-Expanding the Circle of Compassion

Posted on August 24, 2009 by zoeweil

The term “humane education” originated with the founders of the first humane societies and SPCAs who were also the founders of the first child protection organizations back in the late 19th century. Humane education taught kindness to both people and animals, and the leaders of the humane movement were humanitarians in the broadest sense.

During the 20th century, child protection laws were established in the U.S. and other industrialized countries, and child labor was largely (though, sadly, not completely) eradicated. Humane societies began to concentrate solely on the protection of dogs, cats, and occasionally on other companion animals, including horses. Humane education at these organizations began to focus exclusively on responsible care of companion animals, bite prevention, and spaying and neutering to eliminate the dog and cat overpopulation problem, which still persists. Since humane societies andSPCAs were the dumping ground for unwanted dogs and cats, it became essential to educate about pet overpopulation.

What this has meant is that humane education, once a broad term that encompassed all that it means to be humane, narrowed in many people’s eyes. For the past two decades I’ve been working with other humane educators to revitalize the term and re-establish its original meaning: to promote humane living that includes all people, all species and the ecosystems that sustain us all.

Any of us working to educate for a better world, whether we focus on specific issues like companion animals, child slavery, environmental sustainability, or a host of other issues, are humane educators. But let us remember that we are each part of a vital and comprehensive field, a circle of compassion that includes everyone and everything on this beautiful planet.

For a humane world for all,

~ Zoe

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Fun With Pronouns: Bringing “Aha” to Humane Education

Posted on August 19, 2009 by zoeweil

Once a year at the Institute for Humane Education, our M.Ed. and Humane Education Certificate Program students come for a week to our beautiful facility in coastal Maine for the residency component of their otherwise distance-learning program. During residency week, the students each do a 15 minute presentation on a humane education topic of their choice. Two weeks ago, Chrissy Bevens brought the concept of language, and specifically, the pronouns we choose, to our attention in a way that was both funny and educational.

Chrissy began by exploring sexist language — that is, the use of words, such as the pronoun “he,” to describe the gender of an undetermined human. Then she entertained us with a Mad Libs story that called upon us, her audience, to fill in a variety of words. In the context of her lesson, the most important word was naming an animal, and we chose “anteater.” At the end of the Mad Libs, the story unfolded (humorous as is always the case with Mad Libs), and nothing seemed amiss.

But then Chrissy asked us to change “anteater” to “humane educator,” and suddenly the story read very wrong because the humane educator was referred to as “it” in the beginning of a new sentence. When the story was about an anteater the word “it”didn’t seem wrong to most, even though anteaters are comprised of males and females and certainly are not things, but rather beings.

For years I’ve talked about sexist and speciesist language and have written in the margins of students’ papers when such language has been used — raising the questions that Chrissy raised — but without the “Aha” moment her excellent, fun, and amusing approach elicited.

Learning this way – through “Aha” moments and humor – sticks. I’ll be using Chrissy’s activity in the future.

~ Zoe

Image courtesy of di_the_huntress via Creative Commons.


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A Swine Flu By Any Other Name (Like H1N1)

Posted on May 4, 2009 by zoeweil

Swine flu has been renamed. Why? Largely because pork producers are worried that people won’t eat pig flesh from fear that they will get swine flu from bacon. And this could negatively impact the industry, which, during a recession, nobody but animal and environmental protection advocates seem to want. It’s true that you can’t get swine flu from eating pigs, but there’s much evidence that swine flu originated in an industrialized, confinement pig “farm.” It’s also true that there is every reason to reject this form of agriculture, which is not only potentially dangerous to human health, but which is cruel to pigs and a source of significant pollution. Personally, I think it’s important to call Swine Flu, Swine Flu, and Avian Flu, Avian Flu, so that we understand the source of potential pandemics and, both as individuals and societies, oppose industrialized animal farming.

~ Zoe

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An Apple by Any Other Name: Language and Change

Posted on March 18, 2009 by zoeweil

In this month’s issue of Ode Magazine, editor-in-chief Jurriaan Kamp writes, “What do the terms ‘organic apples’ and ‘social entrepreneurs’ have in common? Both are pleonasms; they contain unnecessary repetition.”

I pride myself on avoiding sexist, specieisist and biased language. I use humanity not mankind, and she or he, not it, when referring to animals. I say that I’ll feed two birds with one hand rather than kill two birds with one stone, but Kamp’s short essay illuminated a whole new lens with which to view language.

Kamp points out that an apple grown without chemicals is just an apple. As he writes, “If any kind of apple needs a modifier, it’s the kind thatisn ’t grown organically. Those we should call ‘chemical apples.’” Instead, when we read a modifier for non-organic food and clothing, it’s usually the word “conventional.” In fact, I just used that term in an essay I wrote last week to distinguish organic T-shirts from their “conventional” counterparts. The word chemical is more descriptive and honest, although conventional is true enough. But perhaps as we change our words and stop hiding ugly realities through language, chemical foods and clothing won’t be “conventional” anymore and we won’t need modifiers to distinguish our apples.

~ Zoe

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Lipstick on a Pig

Posted on September 11, 2008 by zoeweil

At the risk of adding yet another comment on the endless, ridiculous commentary on Barack Obama’s remark about John McCain’s economic policies (that his policies, no matter how he tried to recast them, amounted to putting lipstick on a pig; the policies were still a pig), I feel compelled to say this:

In a Washington Post editorial we read: “Mr. Obama’s supposedly offending remark was not only not offensive — it also was not directed at Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.” Indeed, Obama’s comment was not offensive to Governor Palin, but it was – hear me out – offensive to pigs, even though pigs are not capable of taking offense to human language.

The expression “putting lipstick on a pig,” like so many expressions (“She’s a cow,” “What a dog,” “He’s chicken,” “She’s a weasel,” among countless other pig expressions), subtly perpetuates our perception and treatment of animals. These expressions subconsciously influence how we view other species: as lazy, stupid, worthless, cowardly, untrustworthy, fat, ugly, etc. They lead us to believe that these animals are not worthy of consideration, protection, or kindness. They are ours to use and exploit because they are, after all, just animals.

This is not a criticism of Obama – we all use these expressions; they are embedded in our language and culture. But it’s worth asking, in all the hoopla that has surrounded Obama’s remark, whether, although it was utterly innocuous in relation to Sarah Palin, it was really harmless after all. Given that hundreds of millions of pigs are tortured, and I use that word intentionally, in our modern agricultural systems, perhaps we might want to find new ways of saying what we mean without perpetuating the oppression of other sentient species.

~ Zoe

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