With surveys reporting that an increasing number of young men are subscribing to these beliefs, the number of women finding that their partners share the misogynistic views espoused by the likes of Andrew Tate is also on the rise. Research from anti-fascism organisation Hope Not Hate, which polled about 2,000 people across the UK aged 16 to 24, discovered that 41% of young men support Tate versus just 12% of young women.
āNumbers are growing, with wives worried about their husbands and partners becoming radicalised,ā says Nigel Bromage, a reformed neo-Nazi who is now the director of Exit Hate Trust, a charity that helps people who want to leave the far right.
āWives or partners become really worried about the impact on their family, especially those with young children, as they fear they will be influenced by extremism and racism.ā
Occasionally my partner does or says some things that remind me of the āmanosphereā aka 4chan neckbeards.
And when it happens, we talk about it. I donāt pretend or let it go as āhe doesnāt mean itā or āhe doesnāt know what heās sayingā. I donāt get mad and he doesnāt get mad. We have an adult discussion and Iām careful not to talk down to him.
A perfect example was that he sometimes says āfemalesā when he means āwomenā. I explain that itās not a swear word but itās still derogatory. I explain why. Once I did, he understood and stopped doing it.
It doesnāt have to be a big deal! Communication is key!
i donāt know how could anyone watch Star Trek DS9 and still call women āfemalesā like a Ferengi
serious answer: by consistently running and reading experiments that refer to male and female patients.
I try my best, but if Iāve read three-four papers in a day about a topic and all of them use male and female, probably gonna accidentally say female.
Funny you say that! He doesnāt do it anymore but I just sent him this meme from [email protected]!
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No. Stop treating people like livestock.
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You can go fuck yourself dude, trans women are women. For all social and identity purposes they are female.
As long as you also made sure that if he does say it again he has to pronounce it like tamales
I laughed at this and now Iām going to do that in my head whenever I see that word
Sure, but honestly it sounds tiring if this kind of discussion is a recurring thing.
Yeah, why canāt he just agree with you on everything right out the gate?
Agreed! But for me itās not all that often, luckily.
Good luck with that. A red flag is a red flag.
I appreciate that he is willing to learn and grow. We all make mistakes. If you understand why itās offensive and keep doing it, yeah red flag.
I think the ability to change with new information is admirable.
It is admirable and increasingly rare.
Iām sure this person really appreciates this warning about a person that they know and you donāt
Itās similar to how I appreciate your reply.
So, are you agreeing that your first comment was useless or that the comment youāre replying to isnāt? Canāt have it both ways.
Iām guessing youāre single.
Everyone, keep in mind, thereās a lot of losers on the internet who will never find love and donāt want you to find love, either.
Donāt end up like them unless you want to.
I think it depends on how often theyāre coming up with dubious takes, and how often there are repeats.
Like if you have to explain that gay people are just trying to live life, and thatās fixing misinformation they got as a youth, fine. Good, even. But if you have that talk and then have to have to again a month later because they āforgotā or picked up more bad ideas? Concerning.
Friend of a friend was always getting talks to patch up his dicey world view, but then heād go back to the same YouTube or shitty friends and come back two weeks later with a fresh batch of bad ideas. Really have to get to the root of the problem
It logically isnāt. While you think that, and anyone spending their future with you should mind it, it doesnāt make it true.
Language isnāt always about logic. Discussing things in terms of male/female is fine in many contexts but is often done when discussing science or medical topics. Ex: the male pelvis has a different, narrower shape than the female pelvis. Itās also used in situations where people are deliberately āotheringā people. Watch any police bodycam footage and youāll see that cops frequently say āmale/femaleā when discussing non-police individuals.
In daily life, most people use men/women for non-scientific discourse. The womenās restroom. A group of men at the restaurant. Etc.
But hereās the thing. Male/female are used for any species (a male beetle), but man/woman are only used for humans.
Assholes like Tate push a twist in this dynamic so that men are called men but women are called females because it can be dehumanizing to women. When you say female you could be talking about an insect, but a man is human. Itās a succinct example of their philosophy. Thatās why people consider it derogatory.
I think we grasp cognitive meaning & emotive force in language. I think we also understand the concept of twisting words, have likely rolled our eyes witnessing it, and generally agree that a fair, reasonable person should resist it.
The claim is the word itself is derogatory. Itās an argument roughly of the form:
These look like errors of reasoning: a persuasive definition (a definition biased in favor of a particular conclusion or point of view) and a type of straw man fallacy. While it can be used in a derogatory way, thatās not the general, conventional meaning.
Yet you attempt to defend the claim by a (specious) logic language doesnāt follow, either. Language does follow a standard (of sorts): convention. By that standard, the claim is false.
Natural language gains conventional meaning through collective choices of the language community. This general acceptance is reflected in responses of native speakers (not niche online opinions who donāt decide for the entire language community).
If (as reported) native speakers require frequent ācorrectionā on a wordās meaning, that indicates the proposed meaning isnāt generally accepted. A longstanding definition (like āfemaleā as a nonderogatory noun) holds more weight than a novel reinterpretation recognized by fewer.
If the ācorrectionsā arenāt, then what are they? At best, a proposed language changeāan attempt to push the idea that the noun āfemaleā is derogatory and change the way allies speak.
Is it a good proposal?
Would defining the noun āfemaleā as derogatory weaken sexist ideologies? Unlikely: extremists like Andrew Tate wouldnāt adjust their rhetoric because of a vocabulary. They wouldnāt need to adjust a single word.
Is it just? Justice requires targeting wrongdoers narrowlyādiscrediting problematic messages, condemning extremist ideologies, promoting deradicalization. Blanket condemnation based on a word punishes nonoffenders instead of actual wrongdoers. Antagonizing nonoffending parties alienates potential allies rather than foster change.
The result? A reductive purity test that challenges & penalizes allies instead of challenge wrongdoers. That is neither right nor beneficial.
Would making the noun āfemaleā a dysphemism suggest to society that femaleness is wrong/taboo? That seems misguided.
Why that word? The assumption appears to be that usage by sexist extremists taints the word itself as if the word is to blame for their rhetoric. Itās roughly an argument of the form
First, is premise 1 true: do figures like Andrew Tate even use the noun āfemaleā disproportionately? Iāve only seen it among socially awkward individuals: not the same crowd.
More crucially, this argument is invalid: itās a genetic fallacy (guilt by association).
Thus, the proposal doesnāt advance (and may undermine) a good cause, is unjust, may rely on incorrect premises, and is poorly reasoned: itās not good in any sense.
or legal or technical or any context for impersonal abstraction. Such language has appeared in classified ads for apartment rentals: thereās even a movie about it. Not derogatory. Context matters.
While US policing has serious issues, this claim seems forced: impersonal terms are standard in legal settings.
Recalling an earlier question: do they?
Though interesting if so, that alone doesnāt make the word in general derogatory. Nonderogatory instances are common (as youāve identified). If a word requires a particular message to be derogatory, then the message (not the word) is responsible.
The use of a word in a derogatory message doesnāt make it derogatory. That would require an unattainable level of purity (ie, never appear in derogatory messages) for nonderogatory words.
Your argument really shows the people who āconsider it derogatoryā misattribute an entire rhetoric to a word.
Final thought: humans donāt need constant reassurance that theyāre humans to know they arenāt being demeaned (unless theyāre painfully insecure).
tl;dr The claim that noun āfemaleā is derogatory is false according to conventional meaning established by the languageās community, corroborated by the frequent need to ācorrectā native speakers. Moreover, the claim doesnāt advance (and may undermine) a good cause, is unjust, may rely on incorrect premises, and is poorly reasoned.
It is if you say āmanā and āfemaleā instead of āmaleā and āfemaleā. While it can be a noun, itās mainly used as an adjective to describe sex.
Itās like saying āA black owns the shop.ā Instead of āA black man owns the shop.ā
Notice how calling someone āa blackā is kinda icky?
The rule of thumb I use is that you shouldnāt use adjectives as nouns when talking about people. The adjective needs a noun to describe.
I was going to comment that, a while ago, I saw someone on Lemmy make almost exactly this comment.
Now I wonder if the person I saw was you or, alternatively, whether you saw the same person.
I donāt recall where it came from. I definitely read it somewhere and didnāt come up with it on my own. Probably here on Lemmy or on Reddit before that! It was the first example I saw that was able to articulate why it doesnāt feel right to say āfemaleā as a noun when referring to a person.
Well, good on you for your progressive perspective and your willingness to express it.
Thatās extra cringe if they do: that person needs to sort out their words. Is it not if they say āmaleā and āfemaleā?
Itās hard cringe & awkward: certain to provoke odd looks.
Referring to someone as an instance of their gender could be icky & cringe. That itās also derogatory doesnāt follow: the easiest counterexample is āa maleā.
What makes you the ultimate authority on what terms a woman can consider āderogatoryā? Where do you get the power to decide what words other people should use to describe their own feelings? What makes your opinion about it more valid than those of others?
Have you considered that the same word can make two different people feel two different ways? Unless youāve got the power to know exactly what another person is feeling, there is nothing that makes your thoughts more valid than the thoughts of others in this matter. Doubling down that āderogatoryā isnāt the right word to use gives the impression that you donāt believe āfemaleā actually feels derogatory to a lot of women. Gotta wonder why that might be.
I donāt need to be or decide it and itās not my opinion: the language community is the ultimate authority of their language. Their collective choices establish observable conventions. Linguistics is dedicated to that approach.
Subjectivist fallacy: your opinion/feelings donāt make claims true. Up doesnāt mean down because someone feels that way.
Language has conventional, established meanings.
Another comment fully argues, explains, & criticizes your argument, which I wonāt bother to rehash here.
Way to absolutely miss the point.
A not-insignificant amount of women think using the term āfemaleā is derogatory. Women who feel that way are part of the ālanguage community.ā Youāre talking like weāre some outsider group, whose use of English is less valid than yours.
Language is alive - it evolves, it changes. As well, English famously doesnāt have an established body to define meanings. Rather, English words are based on common usage. Women commonly experience the usage of āfemaleā in a derogatory sense. We didnāt designate it this way - all weāre doing is pointing out that itās used in this way. Just because you donāt feel a derogatory sense from a given word doesnāt mean those that experience it that way are wrong.
If you had gone out to research the usage of āfemale,ā including how people perceive it in different contexts, youād see just how many anglophones disagree with you. But those people would probably, by and large, be those whoāve experienced that word in a derogatory way - in other words, theyād be women. So how about we stop acting like this is a semantics issue and get to the point youāre really saying, which is that womenās experiences and opinions are somehow worth less than yours.
And a nonsignificant amount donāt. That doesnāt establish a generally accepted convention of the language community.
True: still not a conventional definition per earlier remarks.
Exactly: convention.
Incomplete evidence or composition fallacy.
Nope, itās about established convention: see earlier remarks (noticing a pattern yet?). My arbitrary opinion isnāt āvalidā, either, per same remarks.
And plenty of innocuous instances exist as discussed before. That doesnāt make a word itself derogatory:
I donāt deny derogatory instances. Do you deny nonderogatory instances?
People can draw wrong conclusions about their observations, especially if they disregard conflicting observations (incomplete evidence fallacy). Observing derogatory uses while disregarding nonderogatory uses doesnāt justify any conclusion about a wordās conventional definition.
It varies by message, so itās not the word itself.
Straw man fallacy. Not implied.
Maleās havenāt been actively repressed as a result of their gender for thousands of years. Simply switching the genders does not work because theyāre not equitible terms. Systematically speaking, they come from different backgrounds and expectations.
I take your point that āfemaleā as a durogatory term is relative to the context itās used in. But we canāt pretend weāve lived in a world of equal opportunity that treats men and women, males and females, equally in trying to make that point.
While I agree with the first part, that is not implied or necessary to refute the argument as presented.
They argued the same reasoning applies to āmaleā (literally). It clearly doesnāt.
Therefore, whatever the reasoning could be, their argument isnāt it. Basic logic.
If a sound argument exists, we should present that. Otherwise, weāre pretending to reason.