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Male as norm
The principle of male-as-norm is the belief that that grammatical and lexical devices such as the use of the suffix -ess (as in actress) specifically indicating the female form, together with the use of man to mean "human" and similar phenomena promote and reinforce the perception that the male category is the norm, and that corresponding female categories are tangential and thus less important. The idea was first clearly expressed by 19th-century thinkers who began deconstructing the English language to expose the products and footings of their claims of patriarchy.[citation needed]
The principle of male-as-norm and the relation between gendered grammar and the way in which its respective speakers conceptualize their world has received attention in varying fields, from philosophy to psychology and anthropology, and has fueled debates over linguistic determinism and gender inequality.
Feminists believe that the underlying message of the principle is that women speak a less legitimate language that both sustains and is defined by the subordination of the female gender as secondary to the accepted male-biased normative language. By regarding women's language as deficient in relation to that of men, it has been assumed that women's language is imperfect. Subsequent research by feminist advocates, particularly in discourse analysis, has maintained and qualified systematic male bias. In practice, grammatical gender exhibits a systematic structural bias that has made masculine forms the default for generic, non-gender-specific contexts. The male-as-norm principle claims that the male linguistic bias works to exclude and ignore women, diminish the female experience, and determine that female ideas or forms are unfit to represent many social categories.
In the eighteenth century there was a radical reinterpretation of the female body in relation to the male. Prior to this change in thinking, men and women were qualified by their degree of metaphysical perfection, whereas by the late eighteenth century, a new model was established on ideas of radical dimorphism and biological divergence. Biologists used developments in the study of anatomy and physiology to change the understanding of sexual difference into that of kind rather than degree. This metaphysical shift in the understanding of sex and gender, as well as the interplay of these redefined social categories, solidified many of the existing beliefs in the inherent disparities between men and women. This allowed scientists, policy makers, and others of cultural influence to promulgate a belief in the gender binary under a veil of positivism and scientific enlightenment.[citation needed]
Since the eighteenth century, the dominant view of sexual difference has been that of two stable, incommensurable, and opposite sexes on which the political, economic, and cultural lives of men and women are based and social order is sustained. Contrary to modern discourse, "the dominant discourse construed the male and female bodies as hierarchically, vertically, ordered versions of one sex" rather than as "horizontally ordered opposites, as incommensurable." It was not until the second half of the eighteenth century that the idea of two distinct sexes was established and, through the politics of the time, generated new ways of understanding people and social reality.[citation needed] The recognition and discussion of this transition by protofeminists around the 19th century established the foundation upon which feminists would later scrutinize gendered language, challenge the gender binary and its inherent prejudices, and develop the male-as-norm principle.[citation needed]
In 1949, the French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir published her book The Second Sex, in which she described two concepts that would later be developed in the fields of linguistics and psychology and become the basis for the male-as-norm principle in second-wave feminism. de Beauvoir writes that man is regarded as "both the positive and the neutral," foreshadowing the study of markedness, or the linguistic distinction between the "marked" and "unmarked" terms of an opposition. Specifically, "the notion that the typical contrast between opposites… is not symmetric." Instead, the contrast between oppositions is often asymmetric, meaning "the positive, or unmarked, term can be neutralized in meaning to denote the scale as a whole rather than just the positive end; but the negative, or marked, term can denote just the negative end". Unaffixed masculine or singular forms are taken to be unmarked in contrast to affixed feminine or plural forms.
de Beauvoir goes on to write that "there is an absolute human type, the masculine... Thus humanity is male," and the neutralizing of man to include woman is no longer her subject, rather the masculinizing of the whole human species to exclude woman—or at least to otherize her. Thus, introducing her second concept and foreshadowing the psychological concept of prototypicality and the development of the prototype theory in the 1970s. "The prototype theory is a model of graded categorizations, where some members of a category are more central than others. A prototype helps to explain the meaning of a word by resembling to the clearest exemplar". "All members of a category do not have equal status in the mind of the human perceiver; some members are instead perceived as more equal—or more prototypical—than other members… Like the prototypical member of any category, the male is taken to be the cognitive reference point, the standard, for the category of human being; and like the non-prototypical members of any category, the female is taken to be a variation on that prototype, a less representative example of the human species".
Just as Simone de Beauvoir had done in recent decades, French feminist and literary scholar Luce Irigaray centered her ideas regarding the male-as-norm principle on the idea that women as a whole are otherized by systematic gender inequality, particularly through gendered language and how female experience and subjectivity are defined by variation from a male norm; through opposition in a phallocentric system where language is deliberately employed as a method of protecting the interests of the phallus and subliminally affirming his position as norm. Irigaray affirms that the designation of woman as an inferior version of men, an aberrant variation from the male norm, is reflected throughout Western history and philosophy. In this tradition of inequality, women are measured against a male standard, seen in comparison – as lack, complementary or the same. She asserts that any perception of difference between the two genders is an illusion. "Where women are not the same as men, they fail to exist altogether."
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Male as norm
The principle of male-as-norm is the belief that that grammatical and lexical devices such as the use of the suffix -ess (as in actress) specifically indicating the female form, together with the use of man to mean "human" and similar phenomena promote and reinforce the perception that the male category is the norm, and that corresponding female categories are tangential and thus less important. The idea was first clearly expressed by 19th-century thinkers who began deconstructing the English language to expose the products and footings of their claims of patriarchy.[citation needed]
The principle of male-as-norm and the relation between gendered grammar and the way in which its respective speakers conceptualize their world has received attention in varying fields, from philosophy to psychology and anthropology, and has fueled debates over linguistic determinism and gender inequality.
Feminists believe that the underlying message of the principle is that women speak a less legitimate language that both sustains and is defined by the subordination of the female gender as secondary to the accepted male-biased normative language. By regarding women's language as deficient in relation to that of men, it has been assumed that women's language is imperfect. Subsequent research by feminist advocates, particularly in discourse analysis, has maintained and qualified systematic male bias. In practice, grammatical gender exhibits a systematic structural bias that has made masculine forms the default for generic, non-gender-specific contexts. The male-as-norm principle claims that the male linguistic bias works to exclude and ignore women, diminish the female experience, and determine that female ideas or forms are unfit to represent many social categories.
In the eighteenth century there was a radical reinterpretation of the female body in relation to the male. Prior to this change in thinking, men and women were qualified by their degree of metaphysical perfection, whereas by the late eighteenth century, a new model was established on ideas of radical dimorphism and biological divergence. Biologists used developments in the study of anatomy and physiology to change the understanding of sexual difference into that of kind rather than degree. This metaphysical shift in the understanding of sex and gender, as well as the interplay of these redefined social categories, solidified many of the existing beliefs in the inherent disparities between men and women. This allowed scientists, policy makers, and others of cultural influence to promulgate a belief in the gender binary under a veil of positivism and scientific enlightenment.[citation needed]
Since the eighteenth century, the dominant view of sexual difference has been that of two stable, incommensurable, and opposite sexes on which the political, economic, and cultural lives of men and women are based and social order is sustained. Contrary to modern discourse, "the dominant discourse construed the male and female bodies as hierarchically, vertically, ordered versions of one sex" rather than as "horizontally ordered opposites, as incommensurable." It was not until the second half of the eighteenth century that the idea of two distinct sexes was established and, through the politics of the time, generated new ways of understanding people and social reality.[citation needed] The recognition and discussion of this transition by protofeminists around the 19th century established the foundation upon which feminists would later scrutinize gendered language, challenge the gender binary and its inherent prejudices, and develop the male-as-norm principle.[citation needed]
In 1949, the French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir published her book The Second Sex, in which she described two concepts that would later be developed in the fields of linguistics and psychology and become the basis for the male-as-norm principle in second-wave feminism. de Beauvoir writes that man is regarded as "both the positive and the neutral," foreshadowing the study of markedness, or the linguistic distinction between the "marked" and "unmarked" terms of an opposition. Specifically, "the notion that the typical contrast between opposites… is not symmetric." Instead, the contrast between oppositions is often asymmetric, meaning "the positive, or unmarked, term can be neutralized in meaning to denote the scale as a whole rather than just the positive end; but the negative, or marked, term can denote just the negative end". Unaffixed masculine or singular forms are taken to be unmarked in contrast to affixed feminine or plural forms.
de Beauvoir goes on to write that "there is an absolute human type, the masculine... Thus humanity is male," and the neutralizing of man to include woman is no longer her subject, rather the masculinizing of the whole human species to exclude woman—or at least to otherize her. Thus, introducing her second concept and foreshadowing the psychological concept of prototypicality and the development of the prototype theory in the 1970s. "The prototype theory is a model of graded categorizations, where some members of a category are more central than others. A prototype helps to explain the meaning of a word by resembling to the clearest exemplar". "All members of a category do not have equal status in the mind of the human perceiver; some members are instead perceived as more equal—or more prototypical—than other members… Like the prototypical member of any category, the male is taken to be the cognitive reference point, the standard, for the category of human being; and like the non-prototypical members of any category, the female is taken to be a variation on that prototype, a less representative example of the human species".
Just as Simone de Beauvoir had done in recent decades, French feminist and literary scholar Luce Irigaray centered her ideas regarding the male-as-norm principle on the idea that women as a whole are otherized by systematic gender inequality, particularly through gendered language and how female experience and subjectivity are defined by variation from a male norm; through opposition in a phallocentric system where language is deliberately employed as a method of protecting the interests of the phallus and subliminally affirming his position as norm. Irigaray affirms that the designation of woman as an inferior version of men, an aberrant variation from the male norm, is reflected throughout Western history and philosophy. In this tradition of inequality, women are measured against a male standard, seen in comparison – as lack, complementary or the same. She asserts that any perception of difference between the two genders is an illusion. "Where women are not the same as men, they fail to exist altogether."