Jun
23
Is Spanish inherently sexist and machista?
Consider the evidence:
perro: Man’s best friend
perra: a bitch
zorro: an extremely astute and crafty man
zorra: a whore, a prostitute
golfo: a gulf (like the Gulf of Mexico), or a human male rascal, jerk or lazybones
golfa: a slut, a prostitute
And the list goes on. The Plataforma Andaluza de Apoyo al Lobby Europeo de Mujeres believes that sexist language is a form of verbal violence and has an ongoing public service campaign to sensitize the Spanish-speaking public about the issue. (See one ad below.)
Another campaign of theirs is to get the Real Academia Española to admit feminine versions of Spanish words. If the RAE can add non-Spanish words like overbooking to the Spanish lexicon, why not words like miembra and jóvena, said Rafaela Pastor, a leader of the Andulucian feminist group, in a news interview earlier this year. Spanish evolved from Latin, a patriarchial language. Pastor believes that the legacy and influence of Latin is holding Spanish back and preventing it from adapting to modern times. Women, she notes, were second-class citizens in Roman times, so the same linguistic rules should no longer apply in the 21st century.
“La lengua es algo vivo y la Real Academia admite que se integren nuevos términos, aunque parece que se sienten más cómodos con las palabras anglosajonas”, añadió la presidenta de la plataforma. “Si tenemos que destrozar el lenguaje para que tengamos espacios de igualdad se deberá hacer”, indicó.
Maybe it’s because I’m an angloparlante, but I see nothing inherently sexist with words like miembro or joven. Using the Spanish article “la” is enough to distinguish that the person being referred to is a female. The other stuff, like the feminine forms of some nouns having pejorative meanings, that’s been with us for time immemorial. Until mankind (or should that be man-and-womankind?) come up with new ways to insult one another with terms that don’t have to do with gender (or race/ethnicity), I’m afraid we’re stuck with the insults we have. Personally, I think Spanish feminists have bigger fish to fry, [whoa, is saying that sexist too?] such as age and sex descrimination in the workforce and battling against the cult of beauty that is so pervasive.
What do you guys think? Is the sexism/machismo ingrained in Spanish inherently harmful to women?
Interesting question. Do Spanish speaking women honestly feel oppressed and discriminated against by referring to mixed company as “nosotros?” Are Spanish speaking men really offended or confused by referring to themselves as “las personas” or “las víctimas,” and somehow feel less manly? Is “el azúcar” more like men and “la sal” more women?
I was taught that noun gender was a fairly arbitrary thing in language, be it Spanish, Arabic, German or some other language. Will people stop speaking poorly of women if “jóvena” and “miembra” become official words due to feminist lobbying? Probably not.
Ryan’s first point is very interesting and I wonder if this is something Spanish speakers even notice. (I’d really love to know the answer to that btw.)
It was the one thing that really struck me as strange when I first started to learn Spanish. The fact that women and girls virtually disappear if they are being talked about when they are in male company. Words like ‘Padres’ for ‘parents’, ‘hijos’ for ‘children’, etc. and 500+ women and one man being correctly referred to as ‘ellos’.
The examples you quoted above seem to be more rooted in people’s attitudes than the structure of the language and these attitudes seem very similar to those in English speaking countries. A woman doing something morally questionable is generally judged much more harshly than a man.
As to using words like ‘miembra’ I guess it all depends on whether women actually feel demeaned by being referred to by the original masculine term.
A question for you, if you had a female doctor, would you refer to her as ‘doctor’ or ‘doctora’?
@Ryan: “Will people stop speaking poorly of women if “jóvena” and “miembra” become official words due to feminist lobbying? Probably not.”
Amen, brother. Truer words could not be spoken.
@Sereda: Yeah, that’s the thing…there are certain words where it is totally fine to use the feminine version like doctora, directora, abogada, etc. But then there are other nouns that are seemingly intocable like miembro.
Your examples about “padres” and “hijos” reminds me of a very common mistake many Spaniards make when speaking English. They will say “fathers” instead of parents or “sons” when referring to sons and daughters or “brothers” when they mean brothers and sisters. Some of my students will say that they’ve got 2 brothers and then when you ask them what their brothers’ names are, they will say “Carmen and Jesús,” not realizing that “brothers” is only for men, not men and women.
I remember seeing a YouTube video of Prince Felipe giving the commencement address at his alma mater Georgetown University in Washington D.C., and I was listening to him thinking, gosh, his English is really excellent, until he said, in his speech, that he and his wife were about to “become fathers.”
Well, i am a spanish girl and answering to sereda and ryan, we do notice some words are masculine when they refer both genders (this is also usually taught at school). But by no means do i feel offended because of it. Besides, at times it also works the other way round (eg. un dentista, una dentista). It’s just the way it is, and yes maybe it comes off as sexist but i think it’s not sexist at all anymore.
I honestly start to think it’s just trendy nowadays, to be all cool and feminist lol and that’s why these views emerge. I study translation and some teachers even ask me to translate “doctor” for “doctor/doctora” which in some texts, you can imagine, is quite exhausting and, to me, plain stupid when everyone understands that if you say “doctor” you mean both.
But i guess it’s good in the sense that it might make people aware of it and their intention is good (some of them believe that by changing the language, you can change society).
To the contrary, I’d say the author of this piece is loading the terms a bit. She (he?) loaded the translations with… not merely the literal meaning, but the figurative meaning of the words as well. To use the author’s examples:
perro: male dog
perra: female dog
Of course, in Spanish as in English, a female dog is indeed a “bitch” in breeder’s terms just as a male dog is a “stud” in those same terms. On the street, a promiscuous guy is referred to as a “stud” and a promiscuous gal as a “bitch” as if they were dogs. The idea that a “stud” is a good thing to be and a “bitch” is a bad thing to be, though, comes from the sexist people using the slang, not the words. To put it another way, a perro could quite literally be considered a “son of a bitch” rather than “man’s best friend” as the author says. The connotations all come from outside sources, not the words themselves.
zorro: a cunning man
zorra: a cunning woman
What suggests that a “zorra” is a “whore” or “prostitute” as the author says is what guys and gals usually have to be “cunning” about. This is rather like the different connotations that have grown up around “working guy” and “working gal” from previous usage. Until women started getting regular employment in what had previously been considered men’s jobs, there weren’t a lot of jobs open to them other than the rather disreputable kind. Moreover, disreputable work of the non-sexual sort usually requires a lot of violence, for which men with their muscles and testosterone are usually better equipped, so even there, work for women would trend overwhelmingly toward prostitution or something related to it, the odd bank robber like Bonnie from “Bonnie & Clyde” or contract killer like Saleno from “The Sting” aside.
Zorro may be a lovable rogue, but as the word implies, he’s a cunning rogue all the same. A zorra might have a heart of gold too, but she’s likewise a cunning rogue all the same. The difference in connotation comes from the traditional strengths and weaknesses of each gender while engaged in anti-heroic behavior, not the words themselves.
golfo: a lazy, slovenly, filthy guy
golfa: a lazy, slovenly, filthy gal
As with zorro and zorra, the hint of prostitution being involved in the feminine version comes from the outgrowth of figurative meanings. “Slut” in the English language originally just referred to a gal who was so lazy and unproductive that she regularly slept on the dirt floor, or in the straw, or in other similarly filthy circumstances. (There’s a poem that uses the word to this effect in the early original, unabridged Mother Goose rhymes.)
As with the “working gal” mentioned earlier, this word took on connotations with whoring as filth and prostitution came to be associated with each other. Again, there are gigolos and (for that matter) homosexual prostitutes out there, but the feminine prostitution remains far more well-known and therefore easy to associate with words concerning filth and personal disgrace. Neither golfo or golfa are very flattering descriptions in any case.
The defaulting of plural nouns to masculine forms does indeed arise from the cultural bias toward masculinity in Spain, though not so much from its Latin origins. True, the Romans were pretty patriarchal too, but the original Latin had neuter forms for a lot of words, and such forms could be revived for anyone speaking it now. Spanish, on the other hand, has been under the influence of the Moors and their very patriarchal Arabian languages, which didn’t much encourage Spanish speakers to hang on to any of those gender-neutral forms in everyday speech.
Trying to revive those neuter forms for Spanish would be like trying to revive the singular “thou” and plural “ye” in English; it probably would work better, but there’s just not much cultural demand for it. Language, in any case, has limited power to change anyone’s circumstances. Feminists would do better to focus on fairer treatment for women, as their suffragette predecessors did, and trust that the language will eventually take care of itself, as it did for blacks. (The word “negro” in English is now largely obsolete, as I learned when I used it in college once in a discussion of history. I didn’t mean anyone any offense, but everyone was looking at me kind of funny…)