Anything that&#39;s dead shall be regrown.

I had to look up Kathleen Hanna. But I'm dumb about that kind of thing.

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Heck, I'd never heard of her either. Nor had I heard of bell hooks!

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I had to read a lot of bell hooks in College. But I did a lot of Women's Studies classes, so there you are.

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mixedborder.livejournal.com

You are Judith Butler! Your postmodern queer theory
has shaken up people's ideas of gender,
sexuality, and sex. Your work has blurred lines
between what it means to be a womyn and what it
means to be a man. Queens and transbois all
over the world worship your Birkenstocks!

Which Western feminist icon are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

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You are Frida Kahlo! You are an artistic,
passionate, vulnerable person, with openly
bisexual tendancies and were the first womyn to
have her own gallery show in Mexico. You slept
with ... Trotsky?

Which Western feminist icon are you? (http://quizilla.com/users/belladonnalin/quizzes/Which%20Western%20feminist%20icon%20are%20you%3F/)

Also... "wymyn"???

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I believe the idea behind the use of the word women is that at some point during the development of feminism, feminists started to recognize the power of words and the subtle messages they send. "Women", because of the spelling, was seen as implying that women are a subset of men, or even just defined in relation to men ("wo-men"). Therefore, womyn and wymyn started to be used instead. While most of the general public ridiculed the attempt, many feminists still use those spellings.

While in a public-relations sense I think it was kind of a disaster, it is true that all the language we use is kind of problematic in terms of when we use words with gender, etc. (E.g. "Hey, you guys!") Like all those books that have a piddly little comment in the intro saying that the author, like, totally recognizes that everything in their book could apply to men or women, but for convenience's sake they're going to use the male pronoun, but they're totally not sexist or anything because they had a disclaimer.

Problem is, there are no easy solutions. Sticking he/she in every sentence is just awkward. I think grammar should be changed to officially allow the use of the word "they" as a singular gender-neutral pronoun.

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When I see "wymyn", I think "whiny man-hater".

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Well...don't! :)

Stereotypes never help anybody.

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Well its hard to break that stereotype when I've never seen it disproved.

Definitely a PR disaster. I think its because the word just looks ridiculous - no other word in the English language has two 'y's as its only vowels. Maybe if they had done "womin" or something like that. Who thought up "wymyn" anyways? I bet you they WERE a whiny man-hater.

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Who thought up "wymyn" anyways?

Well, I don't know, and wikipedia wasn't hugely helpful on the subject. So I can't contend that they weren't a whiny man-hater...but I think that the main push behind re-spelling the language is not to define women in terms of men. And you don't have to be a whiny man-hater to want to do that.

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but there are better ways of doing it than making up words. If I was a whiny man-hater I would have rather tried to re-frame the connotation of the word "girl" into something more empowering (like how "queer" was re-framed). I think maybe people are doing that now with "grrl" but the world "grrl" is also silly.

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but there are better ways of doing it than making up words.

Well, er, yeah, but...shuddup! Sadly, similar to the ultra-conservative Christian movement, the people doing the best work don't always get the most attention. There are a lot of feminists out there trying to address more immediate issues, but they're not as funny as people running around trying to make everyone say "womyn."

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are womyn and wymyn the same word?

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I'm pretty sure the first is singular and the second is plural.

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see, another reason why the word is stupid... follows no grammatical rules.

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See (capitalization), another reason (extra word removed) the word is stupid - (ellipsis indicates missing quote, not applicable here) it (inserted pronoun) follows no grammatical rules.

Ahem. You should be better at debate than to pick on a trivial apsect of the discussion and then make the same mistake yourself! What do they teach kids these days?

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yet even though i broke grammatical rules my meaning was clear. however if you say womyn or wymyn or something like that, i won't have any idea if you're referring to 2561234 people or one person.

i mean you m1ght no7 be savvy to wot grammar rulez i follow but you pick up my meaning NEwayz, follow?

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Well, but I think

sen_no_ongaku hits it closer below when he attacks its inherent ridiculousness. Grammatical rules are ultimately beside the point. You can figure out from context how many women "wymyn" is supposed to refer to. But you'll still probably roll your eyes.

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mixedborder.livejournal.com

>I think grammar should be changed to officially allow the use of the word "they" as a singular gender-neutral pronoun.

Hear, hear! Everyone uses it that way anyway; only the Grammar Authorities keep screaming "incorrect!"

The various spellings of woman/womyn/ don't bother me, though I think "we'moon" is stretching it too far...

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cybersattva.livejournal.com

Actually, "wo-man" does define woman in relation to man, but not in the way that you think. In Old English, "man" was a gender-neutral term for "human" (the same way it continues to be used in certain non-politically-correct contexts today). A male human was a "waepman" and a female human was a "wyfman". "wyfman" evolved to woman, but "waepman" just dropped the prefix and became "man", which was how all the trouble started.

Doesn't change where we are today, but I thought a little history lesson might be valuable, or at least interesting. It's one of life's little ironies that "woman" is actually a more historically correct noun for "female human" than "man" is for "male human", and that the now-frowned-upon usage of "man" as a gender neutral term for "human" is actually more correct than its accepted "male" usage today.

Dictionary.com has more on the topic here.

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I had no idea about any of that. Thanks for the info!

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I will refer to wavyarms from now on as a wyfman (whiff-man).

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I'll take fewer showers to help you remember.

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I didn't think feminists took showers.

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Crap. I've been wasting all that water for nothing?

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it's worse than wasting... you've been actively trying to conform to a male ideal of atractiveness/cleanliness!!!!1!1111!!

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Because ONLY males have standards of attractiveness and cleanliness. NEVER in the history of the world has any woman had to nag a guy to shower. Or to be neat and/or clean.

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sigerson.livejournal.com

I'm with you on the "they" rather than he/she etc.
The problem with alternate spellings like wymyn is that it joins the ranks of many, many, many alternate spellings of words...which are predominantly obnoxious.

For example, when I see "wymyn", my first thought isn't feminists, or irritation...it's "Wyld Stallyns" or some other alternate-spelling pseudocool hairband: Motley Crue (insert your own umlauts), Ratt, or...or...I dunno, Limoseen. Add to that "AmeriKKKa" or "Texa$" and the huge variety of l33tspeak, and you have a kind of paradigm. So by creating a kind of new genderneutral word, 'wymyn' ends up joining the ranks of the ridiculous unintentionally.

I completely hate it when nothing but the male pronoun gets used all the time. Put me off AD&D a bit; it does send a clear message. What I love, and what I'm seeing more and more of, is alternating between male and female referents for 'generic person'. Like "The reader may wish to respond with her own experience. A character in the book, meanwhile, is unable to change his response."

Plus I'm apparently bell hooks. The heck?

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I completely hate it when nothing but the male pronoun gets used all the time.

Me, too.

Douglas Hofstadter has a really great essay on this in one of the prefaces to a later edition of Gödel, Escher, Bach. It relates his gradual understanding of why a blanket use of the male pronoun is problematic, even with a disclaimer beforehand, and discusses the matter quite well.

That was the only part of the book I read before I had to return it, though, so I don't know how he resolved it. :)

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ethicsgradient.livejournal.com

You are Frida Kahlo! You are an artistic,
passionate, vulnerable person, with openly
bisexual tendancies and were the first womyn to
have her own gallery show in Mexico. You slept
with ... Trotsky?

Which Western feminist icon are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

God, I hate that wymyn thing. It's women, it's a word, get over it. Also, hystory can suck it, too.

Oh, and by the way, Trotsky was pretty good in bed, until he got his head bashed in, though after that he did keep it up longer....

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sen-no-ongaku.livejournal.com

I hate that wymyn thing.

Yeah, me too. I tried taking the quiz, but I saw the word 'wymyn' so many times my eyes started to bleed.

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I was surprised at the prevalence merely b/c the use of the spelling implied to me that pretty much all the people listed in the quiz would have used that spelling. Which I'm not sure is true.

While I don't use the spelling myself, I do sympathize with the philosophy behind it (see above comment to

a517dogg.)

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See, that whole thing pisses me off. I think a lot of people don't like feminism, or claim that they aren't feminists, because they think feminism is all about semantics (like "wymyn"). Whereas the semantics is just a sideline of the real thing, IMO.

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Well, but don't you think that semantics reflects and reinforces deeper preconceptions?

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Yes, that's true, but I think it also does the movement of feminism a grave disservice. Language is important, but if people think that's *all there is* to feminism (and I've heard plenty of people express that exact opinion), then it trivializes what the greater movement is about. There has to be something *more* - more substance - but "regular" people just see the re-spellings, and think "hey, this is ridiculous. These feminists are idiots/stoopid/not worth my time."

Basically, I'm saying that while semantics are important, they need to be presented as part of the larger whole. In context it makes more sense, but when separated from the context, it's just bad for the movement as a whole.

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So, basically, we have to figure out how to present a complex idea in a way that can be digested by the general public, probably through the media, right?

;)

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Yes. Easy, right?

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sen-no-ongaku.livejournal.com

I don't particularly sympathize with that philosophy, as you may have guessed, though I don't deny that semantics have power.

First of all, let's get this out of the way: I'm a hardwired language Nazi; poor grammar and misspellings upset me in the same way as hearing wrong notes or an out-of-tune instrument; I am willing, however, to use 'they' as a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun.
___

The use of alternate spellings of any word has always struck me as a fairly pathetic form of rebellion, a kind of verbal adolescent sneering. What's your reaction when you read an attempt at political commentary referring to 'AmeriKa'?

My impression is that such respelling is a way of tackling an insignificant problem to foster the illusion of progress, because the real causes are difficult and complex. "Females are still getting paid 30% less than their male counterparts, but we're now they're better off because we call them 'wymyn'."

In addition, (and this comment was made elsewhere, I believe) such use of language is exclusionary and therefore self-destructive. The implication is that people who still spell 'women' correctly are, at heart, patriarchs or Stepford wives, unworthy of being part of the feminist movement; and the flipside is that such gestures allow someone to dismiss the feminist movement by focusing on a superficial aspect and ignoring the deeper issues.

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I think all of what you said is pretty much right on.

However, I think the people who began to agitate for the changing of spelling intended to ultimately be successful, and have everyone actually use that spelling. I think they didn't examine the realism of their expectations very well, but I think that was the point. It was just that in falling short it became both ridiculous and exclusionary.

Admittedly, they probably should have called that one before they bothered starting.

But I do think that the pronoun thing should be changed...because that's an example where the grammatical status quo really does enforce preconceptions about gender roles. (Heck, read any book on conducting.)

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mixedborder.livejournal.com

The most ridiculous example of always-using-male-pronouns-for-everyone that I ever heard of was a scientific article my father told me about--written pre-1960s, I believe. The article was a report of a scientific study where ALL OF THE SUBJECTS WERE FEMALE. But they were all referred to with male pronouns. Leading to such phrases as "his pregnancy."

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zdenka

One of my teachers once used the spelling "herstory". That really infuriated me, because the word "history" has nothing to do with "his"-anything -- it's from an Ancient Greek word meaning "investigation".

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rissymonster.livejournal.com

You are Angela Davis! You were the THIRD WOMYN IN
HISTORY to appear on the FBI's Most Wanted
List. You are a communinist, black power-lovin'
lady who shook up the United States when you
refused to lie down quietly to oppression. You
WENT TO JAIL! Wow. You kick so much more ass
than Foxxy Brown.

Which Western feminist icon are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

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greenlily.livejournal.com

I took this quiz once and it said I was Angela Davis, simply because I checked most of the answers having to do with "feminism is part of a larger issue involving race, class and gender politics". Which I believe is true. I'm not a radical, though. So I took it again.

Emma Goldman mugshot!

You are Emma Goldman! You are the mama of
Anarchist/Communist feminism and you inspired
millions to embrace the labor movement. Without
ever directly saying so, you directed efforts
toward saving wymyn and children from
exploitation. Oh yeah, you were also a total
sexpot!

Which Western feminist icon are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Actually I think I might be Catharine McKinnon, but I'll go with Emma.

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zdenka

You are Virginia Woolf! You were openly bisexual
and had public affairs, but you never liked
sex. You wrote a seminal feminist work, long
before feminists knew that they were feminists.
In this vein, you never really considered
yourself a feminist. You were a tragic figure,
but a damn genius.

Which Western feminist icon are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

*shrug* Okay, if you say so. Never actually read anything by her. If my result had had "wymyn" in it, I was going to change it to the normal spelling, but it doesn't.

Also, what's with the claim that one of the other results was one of the first women to write love poetry to other women? If the quiz author paid more attention to the Western Classics, she might have heard of Sappho. :-)

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