In the reading we learned about feminist philosophy of language. One of the topics was false gender neutrality which I agree with. They tried to make “he” and “man” neutral but it isn’t. Janice and Adele both showed that when using he and man in sentences needed she and woman. I think that a gender neutral term that would be appropriate to refer to both men and women is “a person” or “people”.
Another topic that was read about in the text is Maleness as norm. Like I had said before in the U.S we do have gender specific occupations in the title. For example, we say garbage man not garbage women or mailman. But then there are titles that do have like a waiter and a waitress. This is probably the most common one used. One reason people don’t like gender specific occupations by the title is that the use of these terms seems “premised on the idea that maleness is the norm, and that women filling these jobs are somehow deviant versions.” But this is also a key objection to the use of ‘he’ and ‘man’ instead of ‘she” or “woman”.
