so, am I a bloggeress?

There's a guy called Oliver Kamm who writes a weekly column in The Times called The Pedant - for obvious reasons this is one of my favourite bits of the Saturday paper :)

Usually I just read his column and nod enthusiastically, but this time he got me thinking, as he's picked a rather thorny issue - he's talking about the rather quaint and outdated word "authoress", and a bit more generally about the change in English usage in the last half century or so - the tendency to avoid gender-specific terminology so as not to offend.

I found myself wondering - how come "authoress" in English would bug me (and I know it would, just as it bugs me when I hear people talk about "a lady doctor") whilst in Hebrew it doesn't bug me that the word that would be used to describe me if I ever get round to finishing that novel would be gender-specific. But then I answered myself that of course it wouldn't bug me in Hebrew because in Hebrew that is normal - every noun has a gender, there is no gender-neutral form, so there's nothing unusual about the fact that the words for author are either masculine or feminine. Whereas in English most nouns are not gender-specific, so when you add "ess" at the end of a noun, the effect is that you are stressing the gender - and the question then is: why stress it? why mention it at all? is it relevant? does it matter if a book was written by a man or a woman? or if we go back to my other example of what seems to me quaint British usage - "lady doctor" - does it matter if the doctor is male or female?

At which point I argue back with myself and say, well, actually sometimes it can matter.

In the case of the doctor, it actually matters to me sometimes as a woman that I see a woman doctor and not a man - it rather depends on what the problem is and how embarrassed I might feel, as a woman, discussing it with a man. This was actually the reason that when my husband and I moved here we registered with a doctors' surgery that is not the nearest to us, because the closest one has only male doctors.

In the case of the author it doesn't matter to me personally, but I can imagine there might be women who prefer to read novels written by women; or men who prefer to read novels written by men. I can't see any reason to hold that against them.

So yes, gender can sometimes be relevant, it can be a useful piece of information. But here's the thing - you only get that information if it's a woman, not if it's a man. And I think that's why it can be annoying - it can feel like we women are being singled out, and it can feel like we're being singled out as being of less value. This might not be the intention, but because of the long history of women being belittled, regarded as less intelligent, less "up to the job" in certain areas (like medicine, or - amazingly - like writing!!!) - and when I say "history" that's not to say that these prejudices have totally disappeared off the face of the earth - because of this, we have good reason to assume that when we're being singled out, it's for the purpose of belittling us, as if to say: hahaha, isn't it funny that a woman, with her fluffy feminine brain, is playing at being a doctor...

Oliver Kamm ends his column with this:

An "authoress" is a writer of trifles, not a female writer. If used at all, it should denote writers such as Barbara Cartland or Judith Krantz, not Jane Austen and George Eliot.

And I think that sums up what the problem is with this kind of terminology - that's the kind of thing it implies, a kind of ditzy femininity, all pink fluffiness and not much serious thought. That's why it's offensive.

I needed to think this through, because I feel that sometimes the avoidance of gender-specific terminology can get a bit over the top. There's all of that chaos we get into with saying "he or she" because some people aren't comfortable with the use of "he" as a non-gender-specific pronoun. There's all that stuff about saying "person" instead of "man" because some people aren't happy with the use of the word "man" to signify mankind in general. So I don't want to just go with the flow - I needed to work out for myself whether or not I agree that the term "authoress" had better go on the scrapheap.

But yes, speaking as a writer who happens to be female - let's leave the "ess" ending to animals (e.g. lioness), royalty (princesses) and nobility (e.g. duchess). It's annoying and patronising when it's used for an occupation.

The more we know, the more we care?

An interesting question came up in last Saturday's Times - they'd had some criticism from readers about the apparently-out-of-context inclusion of property values in news reports, e.g. 'Speaking at his £600,000 home in Hampshire, Mr Yeates...' in an item about the murder of Mr Yeates' daughter. Some readers wrote in, and Sally Baker, who writes the fascinating Feedback column, responded with an explanation about the need to add 'colour' to news reports, or else they 'would consist only of the barest "who, what, when, where, how" details, and leave too much to the imagination.' She ends with this: 'if we know a little more about them, doesn't it help the rest of us to sympathise with those caught up in such rare and ghastly events, while we offer silent thanks that our own lives have been spared?' [emphasis mine]

And I think the answer to this question is: yes and no... it's tricky.

Yes, a bit of detail does help to make a person more real to us, less of an anonymous "statistic". That's one of the reasons for giving people made-up names when for some reason you need to protect their identity - it's a lot easier to feel for someone if you read about them as John or as Ann than if they're nameless.

But as soon as you add any detail, as soon as you start colouring in the picture, you also risk alienating some of your readers, you risk a collision with some of your readers' prejudices - including those we're not conscious of.

Even a name says something - a person's name can give you clues about ethnic origin, or social class, or it can kind of ping a connection in your brain because you've known a person called, say, Sandra and you have an image in your mind of what Sandras are like.

And mentioning the value of someone's property - that definitely pings into people's prejudices, big time. It's right up there with mentioning in the UK that someone was privately educated - that definitely reduces the sympathy levels amongst a large chunk of the population (though possibly slightly less amongst the readership of The Times).

On the counselling course we had to write an essay about prejudice - to identify some of our own and look at how they may affect our ability to be of help to certain clients. It was a fascinating and humbling exercise, because once you start listing all your prejudices you see you're not quite the totally impartial and accepting kind of person you'd like to be... none of us are. We take one look at a person and have a whole set of preconceived ideas about them just based on their looks, their clothes, their hair style, their jewellery. oh, and their body language of course... I heard a really interesting example about body language from someone who came to England from Jamaica: about youngsters from her culture getting into trouble with the police here in England because these boys had been brought up never to look an adult in the eye, they were taught it's not respectful, they would lower their eyes as a mark of respect; but to the English policemen, that looked like they've got something to hide.

But I wasn't going to get into misunderstandings, just prejudice. Just the fact that we humans do have certain preconceived ideas about people who live in expensive houses/who went to certain schools/who drive certain cars/who give their kids certain names/etc etc etc - it's endless. So the more detail you include in a news report, the more chances are for people to lose sympathy for the person caught up in "ghastly events"... whilst at the same time it is necessary to fill in some detail so that the person will become real to us. And of course some of the details will affect different people differently - my prejudices are not identical to yours.