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1971, Peppermint Patty tells Marcy not to call her "sir"
1970: the first female generals in the United States Army, Elizabeth P. Hoisington and Anna Mae Hayes
I mentioned the debate about referring to female senior officers as “sir” instead of “ma’am” to my dude and he instantly Google-image-searched that on his phone and handed it to me. Turns out he had a book of Peanuts cartoons when he was a kid so he has some really arcane bits of the canon memorized. The above strip appeared in 1971, by the way. (First time Marcy calls Peppermint Patty “sir”.)
So. I guess, there’s your precedent. I know there’s got to be all kinds of bad-ass scifi ladies enshrined in the hearts of basically everyone else, but yeah, now that he mentions it, this is what I think of when someone inappropriately calls a woman “sir”. I’m definitely coming to it from a different place.
(Importantly, who made this narrative decision? Charles Schultz, an adult man telling a story featuring preadolescent girls as characters.)
The convention of inappropriate use of Sir is not without precedent and cultural weight. It’s not an instant back-button for me. I’ll read fics with it in, since, well, apparently they’re ubiquitous. This is a trope that a fuckload of people are already adopting in this fandom. It’s a thing, it’s a widespread thing. It’s in good stories by responsible authors. It’s enshrined in the canon of beloved shows. It’s a thing.
So I hope I haven’t been too strident and obnoxious about it. But it carries a lot of weight for me. There are real live generals serving in real live militaries on our actual planet who are real live women, and there are forms of address that are well-worn by decades of use by the real live women in real live military service, and I don’t feel like it’s right to throw that over because some man writing a script for a show thought that the utmost mark of respect for his fictional female general would be if he called her a masculine honorific.
1971, Peppermint Patty tells Marcy not to call her "sir"
1970: the first female generals in the United States Army, Elizabeth P. Hoisington and Anna Mae Hayes
I mentioned the debate about referring to female senior officers as “sir” instead of “ma’am” to my dude and he instantly Google-image-searched that on his phone and handed it to me. Turns out he had a book of Peanuts cartoons when he was a kid so he has some really arcane bits of the canon memorized. The above strip appeared in 1971, by the way. (First time Marcy calls Peppermint Patty “sir”.)
So. I guess, there’s your precedent. I know there’s got to be all kinds of bad-ass scifi ladies enshrined in the hearts of basically everyone else, but yeah, now that he mentions it, this is what I think of when someone inappropriately calls a woman “sir”. I’m definitely coming to it from a different place.
(Importantly, who made this narrative decision? Charles Schultz, an adult man telling a story featuring preadolescent girls as characters.)
The convention of inappropriate use of Sir is not without precedent and cultural weight. It’s not an instant back-button for me. I’ll read fics with it in, since, well, apparently they’re ubiquitous. This is a trope that a fuckload of people are already adopting in this fandom. It’s a thing, it’s a widespread thing. It’s in good stories by responsible authors. It’s enshrined in the canon of beloved shows. It’s a thing.
So I hope I haven’t been too strident and obnoxious about it. But it carries a lot of weight for me. There are real live generals serving in real live militaries on our actual planet who are real live women, and there are forms of address that are well-worn by decades of use by the real live women in real live military service, and I don’t feel like it’s right to throw that over because some man writing a script for a show thought that the utmost mark of respect for his fictional female general would be if he called her a masculine honorific.
