Man Made Language (Dr. Dale Spender)

Man Made Language

Source: Man Made Language (1980) publ. Routledge & Kegan Paul. Just the Introduction

Women are aware that male superiority is a myth and they deal with this knowledge in numerous ways. Their response to 'enlightenment' may range from disillusionment to elation, from masking their feelings in an attempt to hide their disappointment and preserve the myth, to outrightly declaring their knowledge in an attempt to explode it. But male superiority is not to be confused with male power: only one is a myth which can be exposed and eradicated by knowledge, by a change in consciousness. While they are different, however, they are also inextricably linked, for male superiority has served as a justification for male power. Any exposure of the false nature of male superiority, while not a direct assault on male power, is an indirect attack which undermines it. If and when sufficient members of society no longer give consensus to the myth of male superiority, if and when they no longer act in a manner which acquiesces in that superiority and permits it to go unchallenged, then, rather than being taken for granted, that power will need to be defended or transformed.

It is because males have had power that they have been in a position to construct the myth of male superiority and to have it accepted; because they have had power they have been able to 'arrange' the evidence so that it can be seen to substantiate the myth. The myth was made a long time ago and for centuries it has been fostered by women and men so that now it is deeply embedded in virtually every aspect of our existence. It is a myth which may be attacked but one which is not easy to eradicate, for all myths still have a hold over us long after they have been intellectually repudiated, and this one, which is fundamental to our social order, is particularly pervasive and particularly hard to dislodge. The fabric of our social organisation has been woven to support and substantiate it and nothing less than a restructuring of our beliefs and values is necessary, if it is to be laid to rest.

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One of our fundamental rules for making sense of our male-dominated world is - predictably - that the male represents the positive while the female, necessarily then, represents the negative. On this foundation stone we have erected many of the structures which make male dominance seem reasonable and even 'natural' for our feedback is determined largely by what we feed in. It is this rule which must be changed if we are to construct a view of the world in which both sexes are accorded equal value. When we begin to select, pattern and interpret according to the rule that the sexes are equal, we will construct a very different reality, we will make very different ideas 'come true'. The claim for male superiority will no longer seem reasonable and the male monopoly in power will be seen as problematic. Each day we construct the world we live in according to these man made rules. We select, pattern and interpret the flux of events in the attempt to make life meaningful and few of us suspect how deeply entrenched, and arbitrary, these rules are. We impose them on the world so that what we see conforms to what we have been led to see. And one of the crucial factors in our construction of this reality is language.

Language is our means of classifying and ordering the world: our means of manipulating reality. In its structure and in its use we bring our world into realisation, and if it is inherently inaccurate, then we are misled. If the rules which underlie our language system, our symbolic order, are invalid, then we are daily deceived. Yet the rules for meaning, which are part of language, are not natural; they were not present in the world and merely awaiting discovery by human beings. On the contrary, they had to be invented before anything could be discovered, for without them there is no frame of reference, no order, no possibility for systematic interpretation and understanding. Once made, however, these rules have a habit of becoming self-validating and self-perpetuating, regardless of any misapprehensions on which they may have initially been based. Although it is not possible to 'begin at the beginning' and to identify the forces which were at work in the construction of these rules to determine whether or not they were accurate or justified, it is possible to analyse the contemporary classification system of our language and to speculate on the origins, and the reasons for these rules, which now play such a vital role in the construction of our world view. One semantic rule which we can see in operation in the language is that of the male-as-norm. At the outset it may appear to be a relatively innocuous rule for classifying the objects and events of the world, but closer examination exposes it as one of the most pervasive and pernicious rules that has been encoded. While this rule operates we are required to classify the world on the premise that the standard or normal human being is a male one and when there is but one standard, then those who are not of it are allocated to a category of deviation. Hence our fundamental classification scheme is one which divides humanity not into two equal parts (if two is to be the significant number) but into those who are plus male and those who are minus male. At the most basic level of meaning the status of the female is derived from the status of the male and on this has been erected many strata of positive and negative classifications.

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