I’m not a native English speaker, so forgive my ignorance, but isn’t “women” a noun, not an adjective? Why not just say “female artists” or “female writers”?
As a side note, I’ve also literally never seen anyone say “men artists” or “men writers”. What gives?
I’m not a native English speaker, so forgive my ignorance, but isn’t “women” a noun, not an adjective? Why not just say “female artists” or “female writers”?
The English language is unusual in that it doesn’t have gendered nouns, so we find other, often quite clumsy, ways to indicate it. You’re right that it doesn’t make sense grammatically; we say it that way simply because it scans better.
As a side note, I’ve also literally never seen anyone say “men artists” or “men writers”. What gives?
Patriarchy. Society defaults to the male. That’s not unique to the English-speaking world, of course.
As a side note, I’ve also literally never seen anyone say “men artists” or “men writers”. What gives?
Patriarchy. Society defaults to the male. That’s not unique to the English-speaking world, of course.
By this I meant that people more often say something like “male nurse” than “man nurse”, but I agree, fuck the patriarchy.
Because male nurses are uncommon and in that specific circumstance female is the default that most people assume.
Yeah. Regarding gendered nouns, it can be hard to deal with referring to a professional of an unknown gender since the default is generally male.
To add on, I’ve found that referring to women as “females” in anything other than formal or scientific contexts has adopted something of a sour taste in recent years. The practice is often associated with incel/misogynistic behavior and ideology, probably because it implicitly strips women of their personhood and reduces them to their sex. Put another way, both a female dog and a female human could be called a “female”, but only one could be called a “woman”.
That’s my own two cents though, take them with a grain of salt.
That’s kind of the opposite. You’re talking about using “female” as a noun instead of an adjective. And for sure, don’t do that to refer to humans! But it’s perfectly normal and correct as an adjective.
In my writing, if I’m going to refer to someone as “female” it’s usually because I’m also going to refer to someone else as “male” in that same context.
This new trend is kind of annoying because I wrote a book about sapient magical sugar gliders and since they’re not humans, I referred to them as “male” and “female”. That made the writing feel way too parochial and, well, awful so I came up with special words for male and female children and adults for the species instead.
Young females were called “kaydees” and the males were “keedos”. The species as a whole was named “kads”.
I actually had a reader say it was “a bad smell” that I used the word “female” too often (they did a search for that but not “male”, sigh).
Yes, that is if you turn “female” into a noun, which does sound weird and dehumanizing, but using “women” as an adjective just sounds incorrect. Maybe people do that because they try to avoid saying “female” at all costs to avoid being accused of misogyny or dehumanization.
I recognize that “female” is sometimes taken this way now, but I seem to remember a time when it was the use of “woman” as an adjective that seemed more problematic. I grew up watching TV reruns from the 50s & 60s, and in shows from that era, you’d hear characters intended to be seen as sexist railing about “women drivers”, “women reporters”, etc. To my (admittedly young) ear, part of the insult or intended derision in these terms came from the intentional clunkiness of the terms. As no one would say “man driver” or “man reporter”, it made the phrase “woman driver” seem unnatural, and by extension then the idea of a woman driver unnatural. If the characters had used the more clinical sounding “female driver”, it would likely only come off as equivalent to “male driver”, and so lose much of its punch.
I realize that there is now some ick associated with some uses of the word female, but if efforts aren’t made to reclaim it, I think we are doomed to it becoming strictly pejorative - and who wants that?
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I mean, there’s also historical context to be considered here. Throughout history (and still today in many places) women have been treated as subhuman, or at least as lesser to men; in many cultures, married women were literally considered the chattel of their husbands. In that context, using the term “female” which almost explicitly carries no connotations of personhood feels a lot more like a hateful slur. I don’t think “male” really carries that same historical baggage, though.
In that context you’d probably laugh if they used man too.
I never saw anybody using women artists, women writers etc
Lots to unpack here.
First: female/male vs women/men. Female/male is usually used in clinical settings and for animals. Using female/male is implicitly dehumanizing. And I think this is a common trait of most romance languages: macho and hembra, for instance, are used primarily for animals in Spanish. Tell us your language and I’m guessing someone can explain it in your language.
Second: Nouns can function as adjectives: race horse, history teacher, ticket office. I think “woman writer” also implies that the writer is writing for a female audience.
Third: “Female artist” is actually OK in my book because it’s used an an ADJECTIVE and the really offensive use is “females” as a noun. “Do you see those females over there by the bar?” But I think it can be a case of overcorrection to avoid “female” as adjective.
There’s a funny one that I heard: “lady senator.” So dainty and refined.
Fourth: MALE is the default in patriarchal societies. If you refer to someone without specifying gender, the assumption is that they’re male (and let’s face it: probably also white).
In my language (Slovenian) all nouns are gendered, so we don’t really use adjectives to gender nouns. And yes, I agree, saying females or males does sound dehumanizing.
Thanks for the explanation!
Second: Nouns can function as adjectives: race horse, history teacher, ticket office
I believe those are called attributives.
I see you and raise: gerund.
I always think the best solution is to start using feminine nouns more, like writress.
woman/women/men/man are both adjectives and nouns. english is fucked because it’s a bunch of different grammars that all jumped another language in alley and then made a new language by wearing that language as a skinsuit, and then conquered most of the world.
we don’t refer to “men artists” or “men writers” because the hegemonic standard within our society is the masculine perspective. so we sometimes have to draw attention to “this artist is showing you a woman’s perspective” to draw attention to that the arts and culture that you see by default show an incomplete view of the world. i look forward to the day the feminine perspective is common enough that we either just call everyone artists or have to start differentiating perspectives to ensure we fully understand the ramifications of what we’re seeing
But you do probably hear things like male nurse or male nanny. (For this comment I’m ignoring the difference between male/female and man/woman, others have already tackled that.) It’s pretty obvious what’s going on, isn’t it? For those professions, people normally imagine them in one gender by default unless other clues are given. You can argue all day about whether it’s right or wrong or justified or whatever, but in any case, it’s true. And if it’s important for the speaker that the listener knows from the start what to imagine, then they add the explicit gender.
Not related to the answer but your post reminds me of a dark joke: it’s not true that there’s a pay gap between men and women. It’s just that men tend to choose higher paying jobs like doctor, lawyer, pilot, while women choose lower paying jobs like female doctor, female lawyer, female pilot.
Misogyny
As a side note, I’ve also literally never seen anyone say “men artists” or “men writers”. What gives?
Sexism. It’s “normal” for a male to do it and exceptional for a female.
It’s bullshit.
That being said context is key, it could be fine depending on what it is in and about.
I have seen people say “male artists” (though much less often than the female equivalent), just not “men”
Saying “male nurse” is a thing. And for the same reason (misogyny).
Yeah, but I haven’t seen “man nurse” used much as opposed to the other option.
Not all women are biologically female
See this thread
I think it’s more that woman is singular, in that context and female is plural. Usually when people denote gender in a description, because fuck the patriarchy, they’re referring to one person not a whole group of writers, artists etc.
A woman isn’t necessarily female.
Right, but I think it’s pretty clear from context that in phrases like “female artists”, “female” is used as an adjective that includes all women, and saying “women artists” just sounds clumsy tbh.
I don’t know, using new pronouns can also sound clumsy, doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea.
The strong implicit links in language between sex and gender are not really helping anyone, and a bit of clumsiness for a while isn’t such a big cost.
I don’t know if that was the intention of the example you mentioned obviously.
Eh, I don’t think “female” is exclusively used to refer to sex. Language is subjective, so there is no objective definition of words that are used to describe something as complex as gender or sex.
Per Cambridge dictionary:
female adjective (GENDER)
belonging or relating to women or girls:
- she was voted the best female vocalist
- she was the school’s first trans female athlete.
Female has meanings that mean “female sex”, woman doesn’t.
Language influences and even if theoretically, female can mean woman, it still adds an implicit link to sex.
As you said, language is subjective, so even if a dictionary says that female can refer to women, in practice as someone else pointed out, you can talk about a female dog, you can’t talk about a woman dog.
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I’m pretty sure those terms were widely used before transgenderism was much of a thing.
You mean before being trans became less stigmatised? We’ve always existed.
I mean before it was in the mainstream awareness enough to be affecting commonplace language.
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I’m sorry your dad’s politics are infecting you.
