Oxford University Press, Misogyny Central

Bolding mine:

A dictionary entry citing ‘rabid feminist’ doesn’t just reflect prejudice, it reinforces it

A Canadian anthropologist, Michael Oman-Reagan, tweeted Oxford Dictionaries last week to ask it why “rabid feminist” is the OED’s usage example for the word “rabid”. Oxford Dictionaries responded by suggesting Oman-Regan may be a rabid feminist. It has since apologised for the “flippant” response and is reviewing the example sentence.

Other sexist OED sample sentences, according to Oman-Regan, include those for words such as shrill, nagging and bossy. Oxford Dictionaries has explained that these sentences reflect common usage – which I do not doubt – and do not represent the views of the publisher Oxford University Press. But they also, of course, reflect an editorial decision.

Is "dickhead" in their dictionary yet?

I wonder if "bitch" is.

When you say Oxford University Press is "Misogyny Central," are you suggesting that every man who works there hates all women? Or are you just making a shrill, nagging, flippant response?

It's such a dumb word, "misogyny." I've never met a man who hates all women. Even Norman Bates loved his Mom, though I would argue his devotion was excessive.

>1 LolaWalser: Debuk's most recent column is on this subject:

https://debuk.wordpress.com/2016/01/26/a-rabid-feminist-writes/

revising a single entry which has been criticized for overt political bias does not address the much larger problem of covert sexism in the dictionary as a whole.

I use the word ‘covert’ for two reasons: first, because most of the sexist examples are incidental, appearing in entries for words which are not specifically ‘about’ women; and second, because much of the sexism will remain invisible if you only look at single entries in isolation. There’s nothing obviously sexist about an entry for ‘research’ where the example sentence uses the pronoun ‘he’; what’s covertly sexist is if there’s a systematic preference for ‘he’ over ‘she’ in all the entries for words denoting intellectual pursuits. The effect is cumulative, and arguably all the more insidious because we’re unlikely to be conscious of the pattern that produces it. This point rather got lost in the debate on ‘rabid feminist’. Oxford was held to account for that particular example, but not for the more systematic bias that Oman-Reagan had detected.

Emphasis mine.

This just sounds like paranoia to me: "covert" "invisible" "insidious" "pattern" "systematic"

Get the tinfoil hats. Cue the black helicopters.

If it's in the dictionary, it's not covert, unless in some paranoid way you are reading between the lines rather than the lines themselves in order to see what you want to see.

>4 southernbooklady: I had a neighbor who worked on writing definitions for the OED. I'm tempted to send him a note asking for his take on this.

>6 RidgewayGirl: I'd be interested.

When you say Oxford University Press is "Misogyny Central," are you suggesting that every man who works there hates all women? Or are you just making a shrill, nagging, flippant response?



Barney, you've come a long way, baby...

Guess what? The Powers That Be at the OUP (and some other places) are still at it:

Sexism in dictionaries: why are 'hussy, baggage and filly' still used to describe a woman?

Giovanardi started looking into it more deeply, using the default dictionaries on different search engines. And she began to explore whether men were given similar treatment. They weren’t – the most derogatory synonym for “man” given by dictionaries she found were “bozo” and “geezer”. She was alarmed, too, by the example sentences given below the definitions. Many, she noticed, were themselves sexist, involving stereotypes and centring men. “I told you to be home when I get home, little woman,” is one from Oxford Dictionaries. (...)

On Lexico, the site run by Oxford Dictionaries and Dictionary.com, synonyms for women include bitch, baggage, piece and filly. The example sentences chosen to illustrate usage are bizarre. “One of his sophisticated London women” is one, as if the woman exists solely in relation to, and as a possession of, the man. Another reads: “The idea that women are real human beings with thoughts and emotions is played down.” (...)

The examples of usage are better on the Collins dictionary site (the dictionary used by the Guardian), including “she was a senior BBC woman”, but it also offers offensive slang names including “ho” as a synonym for “woman”. The worst synonym for “man” Collins could come up with is dude or geezer.

On the Merriam-Webster dictionary site, the fourth definition of “woman” is a servant and the fifth is a wife or mistress. The definitions of man include “an alumnus of or student at a college or university” – as in a Cambridge man – though this is not a definition that is extended to women. (...)

Where serious reference dictionary editors do have power, she says, is in the choice of example sentences. “{The entry for ‘woman’} was revised in 2011, and I did think that some of the choices they made of illustrative examples from recent years were a bit odd,” she says. The example the OED has for the broad definition of woman, taken from a 2009 New Yorker article, is: “A solitary middle-aged woman … was watering her lawn in hip-hugging Capri jeans.” (...)

Note that this is not an issue of "preserving history". We all know very well that women were (are) treated as men's property, slaves, servants, sex objects, things to fuck etc. We all know very well this is reflected in megabajillion ways in the written record. The problem is that the OED (et al.) feeds this shit into definitions including those on search engines and apps where people look for synonyms, terms to use, outside any indication of the historical context. And how many examples of derogatory historical usage do we need? Why do we need them anyway? It's one thing to have "kike", "nigger", "ho" defined--but (why) would you offer them as synonyms for Jew, black, woman? Could the "Oxford men" behind this swinishness, no doubt fine gentlemen to a man (Man, God's Own), be any more blatant and arrogant about their privilege?

If "ho", "bitch", "filly", "hussy", "servant", "mistress" are coming up as admissible synonyms for "woman", then I have a few choice ones for "man", especially the pricks, shits and dickheads at the OUP who obviously think they are being So Very Clever.

>9 LolaWalser: Debuk's most recent blog post is a response to that article and petition:

https://debuk.wordpress.com/2019/07/04/dissing-the-dictionary/

She mostly trolls around the complexities of dictionaries as "authoritative" vs. dictionaries as "reflections of usage" Fixed meanings vs. evolving ones.

But the deeper problem underlying these contradictory demands is the status we accord to ‘the dictionary’ as the ultimate authority on language. In the past that was something feminists questioned: they were less interested in harnessing the power of what Mary Daly called the ‘dick-tionary’, and more interested in challenging its patriarchal claims to ‘authoritative’ and ‘objective’ knowledge.

It's a real battleground, although I tend personally to lean towards the "usage" end of the spectrum --- dictionaries as snapshots of language-in-use. But there's no getting away from the reality that a dictionary, however much you might argue is a constantly evolving thing, is treated as the, uh, definitive authority on what words mean. It governs how we all express ourselves.

Not so long ago the environmental writer Robert MacFarlane created a huge stink over the Junior edition of the OED for dropping a series of "nature" words -- acorn, apricot, heron -- in favor media terms like broadband, blog, celebrity on the grounds that kids were more likely to run into a blog than they were to see a heron. (It wasn't just nature words -- a bunch of religious words were dropped as well -- chapel, bishop, abbey). People were horrified that the dictionaries their kids would be using wouldn't even bother with words that were so...I don't know, fundamental to their own lives.

Debuk's suggestion is to have a kind of "User's OED" that would eliminate the racist and misogynist, etc terms from the dictionary apps and search engine databases that people use just to look up how to spell something, and leave them in the full edition for the scholars to consult.

>10 southernbooklady:

Wow, it's actually even more appalling than the Guardian article showcased...

Yes, of course (as I said, and thought Giovanardi indicated as much too--her focus is on social media apps and search engines as the vectors of transmission among learners), it's not about Erasing!History! but framing that shit as if it were current and admissible. And there's tons of hypocrisy anyway--WHY does the OED draw the line at "cunt" as synonym for woman when it allows, among other, filly, bint, piece, mare, baggage, bitch, wench, petticoat? Is baggage, mare, bitch, ho etc. supposed to be less offensive? Lol!

To say nothing of those examples... Hypocritical bastards, arbitrarily hugging and abandoning their oh so lofty lexicographic principles. Call them scholars, shall we...

This makes no sense:

For instance, one reason why the Oxford entry for ‘man’ is longer than the one for ‘woman’ is that men have been (and still are) treated as the human default. Men are both people and male people; women are only women.

Yes, true, obvs, "man" was and is treated as the universal, the default, but it doesn't explain why the entry for "man" would contain five times the examples of the entry for "woman". Why would there be a barrage of examples illustrating this one point?

But I agree with this 100%:

Dictionaries reinforce sexism and gender stereotyping in other ways, which are arguably more pernicious because they’re not so immediately obvious.

An example is the persistent use of sex-stereotyped illustrative examples in entries for words that have nothing to do with sex or gender. I discussed this form of banal sexism in a previous post, prompted by the row that broke out when the anthropologist Michael Oman-Reagan queried the use of ‘a rabid feminist’ in the Oxford Dictionary entry for ‘rabid’. We’ve also got dictionaries for learners of English in which men mop their brows while charwomen mop the floor, and men slip on their shoes while women slip off their dresses. How do these sexist clichés enhance anyone’s understanding of the words ‘slip’ and ‘mop’? Do the entry writers think learners are planning to practise their English on a coach tour of the 1950s?

This shows a will--even an agenda--to spread sexism much much further than the glorious past. And before anyone suggests I might be paranoid, remember how they responded to Oman-Reagan when he contacted them about it--in 2016--21st century and all--they first sniggered back that maybe HE was a "rabid feminist" himself, objecting as he was to the use of that particular phrase to illustrate "rabid". So, yeah. We KNOW there's misogyny at work here, a definite will and ACTION to hurt women.

By the way, I just remembered something I meant to discuss way back (and darn, I don't have the book with me anymore and don't remember the thing exactly)--anyway, Jeanette Winterson mentions in Why be happy when you could be normal? that her tutor at Oxford was misogynistically abusing her and another female student, bemoaning to their faces the fact that women were being admitted, going on sexist tirades, impeding their work and whatnot... This would be in the 1980s.

Ugly, ugly places.

And now I'm flashing to those Brexit shits turning their stinky rumps on the Ode to Joy. It's all of a piece.

>10 southernbooklady:

I missed the Guardian article and was unaware of the lexico.com site.

What strikes me about the lexico thesaurus entry for 'man' is that the list, unlike that for 'woman', omits the category 'Derogatory' entirely. I wonder if that reflects a squeamishness about the anatomical and the fecal: dick(head), prick, schmuck, fuckface, shit, asshole, etc. Then, of course, there are all the homophobic ones. My brain's not feeling lively today; are there derogatory synonyms that aren't genital or fecal?

>12 librorumamans:

There are no comparably derogatory terms for "man" (the human male) because in a misogynistic system it isn't possible to abuse the male gender, which profits precisely from abusing the female gender, on the same footing.

When the principle of the world is the total contempt and hatred of the female (beings, attributes etc.), that very contempt and hatred providing support for the idolatry of the male (beings, attributes etc.), there CAN'T be any parallelism between the two. Those in power, the men, thus will abuse the powerless without the latter ever being able to mount an equal attack.

That's why "slut" is gendered, despite more men than women fitting the stereotype of someone who does, or would want to, to fuck anything that moves. Why "boys will be boys" is a formula of affection and forgiveness, while "girls will be girls" is a threat and a slander (keep an eye on her, bitch needs watching, like mother, like daughter, you're all whores etc.) Why rape is the woman's fault; why even dicktionaries (embracing this term) rape our minds. Why a gang of tweeny little shits is bold enough to yell obscenities at a woman clearly old enough to be their mother, but a gang of tweeny girls using the same type of insults at a man would only be faintly ridiculous and, possibly, be seen as inviting "trouble".

Asymmetrical power, asymmetrical language.

>13 LolaWalser: Why rape is the woman's fault; why even dicktionaries (embracing this term) rape our minds.

It's one of the reasons I was so enamored of Mary Daly's "Wickedary" -- which at first glance seems like a collection of silly puns but as you delve deeper you realize is a valiant attempt to wrest language away from its not at all hidden purpose of idolizing men. If language the base code of culture, Daly had decided we needed a new Operating System.