a conclusion on “sir”
Mar. 15th, 2016 10:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/1S2P9Qg:
deputychairman:
bomberqueen17:
I get wanting to make a society that is gender-neutral but Leia’s entire arc in the original trilogy hinged on them not taking the girl seriously, so I feel like it’s too late.
I can abolish homophobia in this ‘verse, I can get by with totally different ideas about sexual norms and so on, but I can’t get behind half-assing There Is No Gender in a series where the canon material is literally groaning with binary-gender bullshit.
Which is a shame, but I can’t abide the inconsistency. Sorry: the SW universe certainly has defined gender roles in at least the predominating humanoid cultures, given the preponderance of canon evidence demonstrating this– and while they could be significantly shifted from our expectations and I’d enjoy an exploration of that, no argument can seriously be made that they are absent.
Also: erasing the female form of address is not the way to go to neutrality. Making male the default is not neutral.
It’s fanfic, I’ll go with whatever bullshittery the canon universe dictates to us because those are the constraints we come up against. I get it.
But I’m not going to wholeheartedly adopt fanon interpretations that hinge on the assimilation of other fannish tropes from fandoms I’m not even *in*, unless they’re really good.
Which erasing “ma’am” is not.
So that’s my conclusion on it. And I’ll restate, you’re not a bad person if you do it and I’m not, like, mad at you. But it’s bullshit and I’m not going to budge from that.
Unless somehow it’s actually in-universe canon and I just missed it. In which case I’ll shut up about it, but you can be damn sure I won’t use it.
#i’m not mad at anybody#but i’m definitely mad about it in general#and on principle#make up a new word if you want a neutral one#it’s fantasy you can do that#we’re better than this#also it’s all written by a bunch of men#so i bet they’ve got no issue making male the default#and don’t even imagine anyone would#but you bet your sweet ass I do#REPRESENTATION MATTERS#and if you truly let women tell their own stories#they wouldn’t call themselves sir
Hey! I feel a bit responsible for your rage as I know I defaulted to ‘sir’ not ‘ma’am’, and first off I have to confess I didn’t even think about it. That was just the word that sounded right, I wrote it down without a pause. So that’s interesting.
Now that I am thinking about it, I would say maybe this happened because:
1) I know absolutely nothing about the military IRL, either in my country or anywhere else.
2) My defaults for ‘quasi military organisation in space’ are Star Trek and BSG, of which I have watched many, many hours and where people say women are called ‘sir’ although I can’t claim to have remembered that or specifically borne it in mind myself.
3) Star Wars doesn’t give me a RL military vibe, so when I’m reading/writing it, I’m not really making any connection to how women in the military might be addressed IRL. I go straight to my sci fi background. Hence ‘sir’ for Leia.
4) I think there’s still a conversation to be had about gender-neutral words, like the Guardian’s style choice of using ‘actor’ for both men and women, and female forms of address in English (miss/ms/mrs) where individuals have strong feelings but there is no overall consensus.
5) Also, I’m British, and while this is a clear case of YMMV, to me the word ‘ma’am’ is what you call the Queen. Or what servants in Downton Abbey type shows call the lady of the house: Jeeves calls people ‘ma’am’. In the absence of any military exposure, that is immediately what I think of. And as you can imagine, all that monarchy and class baggage is the opposite of what’s on my mind when I write General Organa (yes! I know she used to be a Princess! I’m totally inconsistent! But she wasn’t like the Queen of England!)
So if you ask me, personally, which one I’d pick for myself if I was leading the Resistance (bearing in mind that this is a cherished career goal for me), I would go for ‘sir’, despite all your sound and very true points above.
Actually! I noticed “sir” in the thing of yours I was reading, and didn’t really clock it, but then saw it somewhere else, and I was like wait this is a thing why is this a thing, so you were a plot point on the graph but not the entire axis, y’know?
I thought about the example of “actor” as the gender-neutral term too, but here’s the thing: Actress is a made-up word that they coined expressly as a diminutive/feminization of actor. Ditto waitress, stewardess, etc. Those were deliberate feminizations of an existing word, and so abolishing it simply goes back to reclaiming the word as neutral, since English nouns don’t have innate grammatical gender and so there is nothing inherently masculine about “actor”, it is just the word for someone who acts. (Butcher; there is no “butcheress”. Farmer: there is no “farmeress”. Teacher: there is no “teacheress”. Nurse: there is no “nurse-ur” or whatever the masculinization of the stereotypically-feminine noun would be. So– not that there aren’t traditions associated with the nouns, but the nouns themselves, no.)
And soldier– there are no soldieresses. The honorific used for them is dictated by their presented gender, yes, but their title is not. Captain and Captain, as my sister and her husband were when they got married. Major and Major, and now finally, Lt. Col. and Lt. Col. since he finally got his promotion too. He is sir, and she is ma’am, and he salutes her first because she has more time in rank.
And so, maybe Star Wars isn’t a military vibe, but Leia Organa is no longer a Princess but a General, and General is a military rank.
In the end, though, it comes down to this: you call the queen ma'am and you call the lady of the manor ma'am. What do you call the king? What do you call the Lord of the manor? Sir. Why is the masculine honorific neutral, but the feminine is not? Why is the feminine honorific offensive to class-conscious sensibilities but the masculine is just functional?
I can’t think of a good reason. Only dudes writing scifi and thinking “ma’am” is for old ladies or dominatrixes. And erasing the thousands of women currently serving in the English-speaking world’s militaries in the meantime.
deputychairman:
bomberqueen17:
I get wanting to make a society that is gender-neutral but Leia’s entire arc in the original trilogy hinged on them not taking the girl seriously, so I feel like it’s too late.
I can abolish homophobia in this ‘verse, I can get by with totally different ideas about sexual norms and so on, but I can’t get behind half-assing There Is No Gender in a series where the canon material is literally groaning with binary-gender bullshit.
Which is a shame, but I can’t abide the inconsistency. Sorry: the SW universe certainly has defined gender roles in at least the predominating humanoid cultures, given the preponderance of canon evidence demonstrating this– and while they could be significantly shifted from our expectations and I’d enjoy an exploration of that, no argument can seriously be made that they are absent.
Also: erasing the female form of address is not the way to go to neutrality. Making male the default is not neutral.
It’s fanfic, I’ll go with whatever bullshittery the canon universe dictates to us because those are the constraints we come up against. I get it.
But I’m not going to wholeheartedly adopt fanon interpretations that hinge on the assimilation of other fannish tropes from fandoms I’m not even *in*, unless they’re really good.
Which erasing “ma’am” is not.
So that’s my conclusion on it. And I’ll restate, you’re not a bad person if you do it and I’m not, like, mad at you. But it’s bullshit and I’m not going to budge from that.
Unless somehow it’s actually in-universe canon and I just missed it. In which case I’ll shut up about it, but you can be damn sure I won’t use it.
#i’m not mad at anybody#but i’m definitely mad about it in general#and on principle#make up a new word if you want a neutral one#it’s fantasy you can do that#we’re better than this#also it’s all written by a bunch of men#so i bet they’ve got no issue making male the default#and don’t even imagine anyone would#but you bet your sweet ass I do#REPRESENTATION MATTERS#and if you truly let women tell their own stories#they wouldn’t call themselves sir
Hey! I feel a bit responsible for your rage as I know I defaulted to ‘sir’ not ‘ma’am’, and first off I have to confess I didn’t even think about it. That was just the word that sounded right, I wrote it down without a pause. So that’s interesting.
Now that I am thinking about it, I would say maybe this happened because:
1) I know absolutely nothing about the military IRL, either in my country or anywhere else.
2) My defaults for ‘quasi military organisation in space’ are Star Trek and BSG, of which I have watched many, many hours and where people say women are called ‘sir’ although I can’t claim to have remembered that or specifically borne it in mind myself.
3) Star Wars doesn’t give me a RL military vibe, so when I’m reading/writing it, I’m not really making any connection to how women in the military might be addressed IRL. I go straight to my sci fi background. Hence ‘sir’ for Leia.
4) I think there’s still a conversation to be had about gender-neutral words, like the Guardian’s style choice of using ‘actor’ for both men and women, and female forms of address in English (miss/ms/mrs) where individuals have strong feelings but there is no overall consensus.
5) Also, I’m British, and while this is a clear case of YMMV, to me the word ‘ma’am’ is what you call the Queen. Or what servants in Downton Abbey type shows call the lady of the house: Jeeves calls people ‘ma’am’. In the absence of any military exposure, that is immediately what I think of. And as you can imagine, all that monarchy and class baggage is the opposite of what’s on my mind when I write General Organa (yes! I know she used to be a Princess! I’m totally inconsistent! But she wasn’t like the Queen of England!)
So if you ask me, personally, which one I’d pick for myself if I was leading the Resistance (bearing in mind that this is a cherished career goal for me), I would go for ‘sir’, despite all your sound and very true points above.
Actually! I noticed “sir” in the thing of yours I was reading, and didn’t really clock it, but then saw it somewhere else, and I was like wait this is a thing why is this a thing, so you were a plot point on the graph but not the entire axis, y’know?
I thought about the example of “actor” as the gender-neutral term too, but here’s the thing: Actress is a made-up word that they coined expressly as a diminutive/feminization of actor. Ditto waitress, stewardess, etc. Those were deliberate feminizations of an existing word, and so abolishing it simply goes back to reclaiming the word as neutral, since English nouns don’t have innate grammatical gender and so there is nothing inherently masculine about “actor”, it is just the word for someone who acts. (Butcher; there is no “butcheress”. Farmer: there is no “farmeress”. Teacher: there is no “teacheress”. Nurse: there is no “nurse-ur” or whatever the masculinization of the stereotypically-feminine noun would be. So– not that there aren’t traditions associated with the nouns, but the nouns themselves, no.)
And soldier– there are no soldieresses. The honorific used for them is dictated by their presented gender, yes, but their title is not. Captain and Captain, as my sister and her husband were when they got married. Major and Major, and now finally, Lt. Col. and Lt. Col. since he finally got his promotion too. He is sir, and she is ma’am, and he salutes her first because she has more time in rank.
And so, maybe Star Wars isn’t a military vibe, but Leia Organa is no longer a Princess but a General, and General is a military rank.
In the end, though, it comes down to this: you call the queen ma'am and you call the lady of the manor ma'am. What do you call the king? What do you call the Lord of the manor? Sir. Why is the masculine honorific neutral, but the feminine is not? Why is the feminine honorific offensive to class-conscious sensibilities but the masculine is just functional?
I can’t think of a good reason. Only dudes writing scifi and thinking “ma’am” is for old ladies or dominatrixes. And erasing the thousands of women currently serving in the English-speaking world’s militaries in the meantime.
