Something reminds me...

[telophase]

...I read (in an f-locked LJ) a post on gender politics that reminded me of a snippet I heard on NPR this morning shortly after my clock radio came on. I don't remember the context because I was barely awake, only that the speaker was Middle Eastern - Iraqi or Iranian - and he was talking about, I think, some sort of violence (well, that's pretty much a given in the area these days). The quote was something like "All the people were killed, and their wives and children."

Reminds me of the passage from an ethnography that one of my anthro professors was fond of quoting: "The entire village rowed away in canoes, and I stayed on the riverbank with the women and children."

Comments

[anderson-t.livejournal.com]

Well, women and children just aren't really 'people' are they? But it's funny you should quote that last one...because doesn't that one in particular, cancel out the popular childrearing quote, 'it takes a village.' ^_^

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

Geeze. On the other hand, I do like the joke from my linguistics professor's advisor: Linguists have more fun than people!.

[vom-marlowe.livejournal.com]

I still remember reading a legal case in Ancient Greek where the person, a slave, was referred to as "it" throughout. Chilling.

[janni.livejournal.com]

Or of the contemporary western science fiction who claimed writing female characters was easy; you just write them as if they were people.

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

The author who said that --

Is the implication that he didn't think women were people, or that *other* authors failed to see women as just people? My interpretation was the latter, that author authors made out women to be some weird species or sub-species.

So while there is still the sentiment that women don't as people, there would be the important distinction of whether that is the opinion of the originator of the quote versus of others.

[janni.livejournal.com]

Except at that point, wouldn't you say something like "just remember they're people" or "write them the same way you would anyone else." It's the "as if" that's troubling--it implies they're not really, whether deliberately or not.

Of course, I don't have the exact wording of the quote--it is possible the wording was different, and I heard or remembered it wrong.

But that "as if" is no small thing. It's not the sort of wording one would use if writing women and men both as fully human were, well, intuitive to the writer, and not something they had to think quite hard and consciously about--a troubling thought in itself.

[tammylee.livejournal.com]

It wasn't that long ago we moved past that idea...

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Some people, it seems, still haven't.

[cicer.livejournal.com]

Wow. That's a really succinct and poignant example of the inherent misogyny so many cultures seem to have. Just the implication that the women don't count as people...ugh.