Everyday sexism. The small things in life. When I complain about such “minor” incidents, people tend to accuse me of nitpicking and making a fuss about nothing. But they are frequent, they happen all the time, again and again, day after day, and together they create a deeply sexist environment that enforces upon people outdated patriarchal gender roles.
Today I started reading a book about pumpkins—commercially available pumpkin varieties, how to grow them, how to cook them. In the introduction, I stumbled upon the following sentence: “Pumpkins are a real ladies’ dream—they contain few calories, lots of water, and lots of vitamins.”
Pardon? I was aware that we still live in a deeply sexist society in which women’s value depends on how skinny their bodies are, but I didn’t know that women are supposed to dream about low calorie foods for intrinsic reasons.
Recently I noticed a cookbook (in Latvian, written by a female author, published in 2019) that offered cake recipes. On the back cover, the author addressed their readers as “housewives.” Why the sexism? Aren’t men allowed to be interested in baking? Could it be that readers were addressed as “housewives,” because the book’s description also promised advice on how to cook with children and how to get kids involved in various cooking tasks? Again, aren’t fathers allowed to be interested in spending time with their children and involving them in various household tasks?
It’s amusing how both of these sexist stereotypes that popped up in these two Latvian books are incompatible to boot. One book assumes that women dream about low calorie foods. The other assumes that people who want a recipe book for various cakes (high calorie foods) are exclusively women. Go figure. Well, it’s not like sexist stereotypes ever made sense.
By the way, the Latvian word “saimniece” that was used in the second book has connotations between “housewife” and “matron.” Moreover, a woman doesn’t necessarily have to be married or with kids in order to qualify as a “saimniece”; as long as she’s the one who’s in charge of managing household tasks like cooking, she qualifies even if she’s young and single. Historically this word referred to the female head of the household as opposed to female servants.
The word “saimniece” can only refer to women. The male equivalent “saimnieks” refers to men who are breadwinners, homeowners, and perform various “men’s tasks” like building or repairing things.
Why Latvians still use words with such sexist connotations is beyond me. If I were publishing a recipe book and needed to address my readers, I’d pick something more neutral, like, you know, “cook.”
We seriously need gender-neutral language. You know, gender neutral pronouns and words that refer to people in specific circumstances regardless of their gender. For example, why “housewife”? After all, fathers can also perform this role in their families.
Back in the day, feminists argued that humans need gender-neutral words. Indeed. We certainly need inclusive and gender-neutral language and words. Yet nowadays, when a trans person like me writes about how I want my cookbooks not to refer to me with words reserved exclusively for women, transphobes and self-proclaimed feminists will yell at me about how I am erasing women. Just how did we get here!
Also, I grow and eat pumpkins not because they contain few calories, but because they are tasty. And I do not consider myself a lady. People who write books about gardening shouldn’t make sexist assumptions about who their readers are. Horseradish and chili peppers for male gardeners, roses and pumpkins for female gardeners? Maybe no. Maybe, gasp, each person has their own preferences that do not depend on their sex organs or gender identity?
And addressing cookbooks to women is sexist towards both men and women. Some men enjoy cooking. It’s wrong to erase them and pretend that they don’t exist. Simultaneously, such word choices establish a narrative, a prescriptive norm that women are the ones who have an obligation to cook food for their husbands. Some women hate cooking and would prefer if cultural norms didn’t force them to feed their male partners.
On top of that, times have changed. 50 years ago a man could survive with zero cooking skills, because his mother fed him until he left home. Afterwards he ate at the university or army canteen and married at a young age so that his wife could start feeding him almost immediately after his mother stopped feeding him. Times have changed, people marry late, men often live alone for years if not decades. Being able to prepare healthy and tasty food for oneself is a skill that’s very useful for everybody regardless of their gender. Cookbooks aren’t for women, they are for whomever wants to learn new recipes.
Here in the USA, there are still plenty of men who proudly confess that they don’t know how to boil an egg. Of course, nowadays there are women who don’t, either. In the cities and to some extent in the suburbs, there are people who live off of take-out food and eating in restaurants (well, less in restaurants these days), to the point that there’s not much in their kitchens (if they have any at all) but dry cereal (corn flakes, etc.) and maybe a carton of milk gradually going sour.
Of course, it was never the case that all women or only women did household things. What your examples show is how society ingrains in people ideas of “how it is”; that is, how you’re supposed to think it is. It’s propaganda, brainwashing, a way of erasing the exceptions. (It’s like how they’ve managed to get everyone to think that transgender people only appeared in the last 20 years, when we’ve been around in one form or another for at least 4,000 years.) Then men are made to feel ashamed if they do “women’s work” and women are made to feel ashamed if they don’t. Women have at least had feminism to try and liberate them from these requirements, but I’ve never seen any significant number of men seeking to throw off their own gender-based chains.
Over my lifetime cookbooks and instructions on products (such as laundry detergents) in Israel switched from being in feminine singular to male plural (Hebrew lacks non-gendered forms, plural masculine is considered the inclusive form).
Another observation about how gender expectations infect language and thought – I have seen it claimed that in languages where the word ‘bridge’ is feminine people associate the noun ‘bridge’ preferentially with the adjective ‘elegant’ whereas speakers of languages in which the word for ‘bridge’ is masculine people associate the noun with the adjective ‘sturdy’. Caveat: I only read a report in popular literature rather than the technical article so I don’t know how strong the effect is.
anat @#2
This is called “linguistic relativity” aka “Sapir–Whorf hypothesis” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
As many topics in linguistics, evidence for or against it is complicated, because scientists cannot easily observe how the human brain itself processes language. But yes, there is some experimental evidence indicating that native speakers of different languages tend to perceive various real life phenomena slightly differently. The emphasis is on “slightly.” When it comes to linguistic relativity, many people have tried to jump to far reaching conclusions that aren’t supported by any available evidence.
By the way, here’s an example from me. When I think about pumpkins in English, the first association that crosses my mind is pumpkin pie. When I think about pumpkins in Latvian, I think about gardening and foods like pumpkin pancakes or pumpkin soup.
I have never eaten a pumpkin pie in my entire life, it’s not a common food in Latvia. Instead, when I learned the word “pumpkin” in English, I learned it in the context of pies. And I always memorize foreign language words in their contexts. When I think about pumpkins in Latvian, I get associations from my actual life, namely growing pumpkins and eating pancakes and soup made from them.
Allison @#1
I don’t know a thing about food prices in the USA, but in my part of the world take-out food is reserved for people with money. A single take-out meal tends to cost more than my entire daily food budget. On top of that, healthy take-out is very expensive. Only junk foods are sort of semi-affordable.
Of course, I could come up with a cheap and healthy diet that requires no cooking. Carrots, pumpkins, and cabbage can be eaten raw. Rolled oats can be eaten after soaking in water or milk with no cooking. Even eggs can be eaten raw. But most people probably wouldn’t like such a diet and would prefer to cook their meals.
Anyway, I make no judgments about other people’s food choices, I certainly do not criticize those who prefer to eat in restaurants. Nor am I criticizing people who have no cooking skills. Other people’s life choices are none of my business.
Instead my point was that in modern world it is incorrect to imagine that men don’t need cooking skills while women absolutely need them. As soon as a society achieves something that starts to resemble gender equality, depending on individual circumstances, both men and women are equally likely to either happily get by with zero cooking skills or realize that they really need to learn how to prepare food for themselves. The days when men were fed by their mothers and wives are gone now.
Yes. Unfortunately.
Also, not all women are housewives. No, not even those with kids.
Though I cannot remember having such a blatantly gendered cooking book. In small ways, yes, some of them are clearly marketed towards women (100 cupcakes, pink binding, very cute), but never written like that.
What is horrible in that aspect are crowdsourced recipe platforms like “Chefkoch”, where a site with a gendered male name is 99% populated by women who exchange advice on how to make the “Göttergatte” (Devine Husband) eat vegetables by hiding them under 5 pounds of meat.
Well I’m glad the Supreme Court Justice will put an end to sexism with her views that, let me look them up real quick, “women should obey the husband who is in charge of all things.” Well, cr@p!
Giliell @#5
I forgot to mention in the original post that the Latvian word “saimniece” can refer also to women who have jobs as long as they satisfy the requirement of being the ones in charge of kitchen and other household tasks that are stereotypically reserved for women. This Latvian word has no exact English translation.
But yes, many women, even some of those who are interested in reading cookbooks, would not qualify as a “saimniece.”
Most Latvian online pages that offer recipes have gender neutral names that focus on food and cooking. But there are also a few sexist outliers. I just did a Google search for “pumpkin recipe” in Latvian, and got results from webpages with domain names like “goddess,” “women’s club,” “women’s world,” “mothers’ art,” “mothers’ club” (original names in Latvian, translations mine).
In Latvian, like in German, nouns are either masculine or feminine. Unlike in German, we don’t have the third gender. For example, in English you can say “actor” and “actress.” In Latvian, there is such a gender divide for every noun that can describe human occupations or hobbies. For example, “pavārs” refers to a male cook and “pavāre” refers to a female cook. When referring to an unknown person or people in general, male versions of words are usually used and are meant to refer to both men and women. Thus, if a recipe author addressed readers with the word “pavārs,” they would refer to both male and female readers. Thus using words that can refer exclusively to men or women is an intentional and avoidable choice. For example, instead of “mothers’ world,” owners of some website could call it “parents’ world,” or even “mothers’ and fathers’ world.” The latter would still fail to acknowledge that there are non-binary parents but at least it would be an improvement over the assumption that people who are interested in recipes for baby food must be mothers.
I actually once overheard a lady excitedly tell another that pumpkin contains “few calorias”. It stuck to my mind because of the odd phrasing (it was in Finnish, I’m trying to convey an English equivalent) and because her speaking style was annoyingly loud and jarring (she was someone I had to overhear occasionally).
“Back in the day, feminists argued that humans need gender-neutral words. Indeed. We certainly need inclusive and gender-neutral language and words. Yet nowadays, when a trans person like me writes about how I want my cookbooks not to refer to me with words reserved exclusively for women, transphobes and self-proclaimed feminists will yell at me about how I am erasing women.”
Transphobes will yell; not all women/men/humans will.
What exactly is a ‘self-proclaimed feminist’? Who should proclaim someone a feminist? Is there an official bureau where one applies and, if they pass the test, receive a membership card?
Be mindful that even these words betray an unconscious sexism, as they are unnecessarily divisive.
I am happy to use any personal pronoun any individual chooses.
However, while I can do so easily when I speak English (not my first language), it is not so easy, as you would know, with romance languages that have no neuter forms. We have to find other ways.
I dream the day will come when gender will become totally irrelevant. Some countries are considering eliminating silly questions about gender or marital status on forms and passports.
I agree with you entirely that sexism is insidious, that the ‘minor’ but constant ‘incidents’ wear you down. Women put up with this every day.
You say: “Women have at least had feminism to try and liberate them from these requirements”, as if women have actually achieved this. But we are far from it.
I dream of the day when calling myself a feminist will become unnecessary. I don’t wish to be reduced to mere labels: feminist, atheist, etc. A bit more comfortable with humanist though.
For of course there is no liberation for anyone unless it includes all individuals.
In the meantime, let’s not ourselves exclude those you are not our enemies.
I would like you to consider this: You are right to feel offended by a recipe book that excludes you, but weigh it against the discrimination that still largely expects women to do most of the cooking (amongst many other things) at home and to do it for free, while it is still mostly men who, having proclaimed themselves chefs (even wearing a crown to prove it), are highly paid for doing something they would otherwise not consider their job.
So, dear men, what is the point of bickering when we all have the same enemy to vanquish?
And know this: feminists are actually your best allies even as we disagree on things. Beware of those who make a point of telling everyone they are not feminists: they respect NOBODY.
maat@#9
Trans-exclusionary radical feminists, people who are self-proclaimed feminists who appear to be more concerned about abusing trans people than about protecting women’s wellbeing, have themselves decided to declare me their enemy.
I will never consider as an ally a person who disagrees about whether I ought to be granted human rights. I can agree to disagree with people about many topics, but trans people’s human rights are not one of those.
I have already banned a bunch of TERFs and their defenders from commenting on my blog. Every time it usually drags on for numerous comments. At first a commenter says something vague that might or might not be an attempt to defend TERFs. Next I must ask them to clarify what they meant. Then we exchange a bunch of comments until they finally state something unambiguously transphobic, at which point I am finally free to ban them. If you are trying to play this game with me right now: please don’t, because it will only waste both of our time.
Of course, it could have been that you accidentally typed something that sounds like an attempt to defend TERFs (your suggestion that I should consider them allies and not enemies) and actually meant something different. I cannot know, but I’m so sick of dealing with transphobes lurking in the comment section, that I might as well give a warning in advance just in case. Granted, like this I might end up being unfair towards you, so I’ll offer my apologies in advance in case I have misunderstood your point.
Andreas, I am devastated by your response.
I may have tried to address or say too many things in just one post, or I may have said them badly, but still I believe I had made it clear that what I believe in is the rights of every individual.
I am NOT transphobic!
I absolutely never suggested you should consider transphobes your allies! I mean, how absurd would that be? I was pointing out that those who keep saying they are not feminists are in fact less likely to be championing individual rights for all.
We will find transphobes among men and women, and that includes some feminists (some, not all); something that surprised me when I first heard of it, but then we are talking about millions of individuals who cannot possibly all believe exactly the same thing. Unfortunately, we cannot expect that any group, even a small one, will be entirely made up of rational, fair, or compassionate people.
My other message was that all labels have the potential to divide, and each of us should acknowledge that nobody is immune to unconscious bias. After all, things such as the recipe books you mentioned are equally offensive to all genders.
I hope you find this message clearer.
Andreas, I think I have spotted the part that caused this misunderstanding. Because I said “dear men”, you thought I was asking males to consider feminists as their allies against transgender people?
Not what I meant at all, and the rest of my message should have cast serious doubt on this interpretation. But then, you did give me the benefit of the doubt in the end, for which I thank you.
Signor Andreas, sono sorpresa e ammirata delle sue conoscenze linguistiche. Magari la prossima volta le scrivo in italiano. Chissà che non riesca a spiegarmi meglio…
Ma ho sbagliato a usare l’appellativo ‘signor’?
I agree.
To clarify, I wholly agree with most ideas that are presented under the label “feminism.”
Historically, over the decades, there have been countless feminist thinkers who promoted various ideas. I support most of them. I oppose only a few of those ideas.
Firstly, there exist TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists). They believe that trans women are actually just men who want to dress as women in order to rape women in toilets. They believe that trans men are delusional, misguided, and probably also mentally ill women who have no clue what they truly are. They use feminism as a shield to abuse trans people. They pretend to want to protect cis women from being raped in toilets by trans women, but that’s just an irrational excuse to abuse trans people.
Secondly, there exist SWERFs (sex worker exclusionary radical feminists). They patronize sex workers and believe that all of them are abused victims and incapable of speaking for themselves. They tend to lobby politicians into criminalizing sex work. As a result, sex workers’ working conditions and safety tremendously decreases (working in a legal brothel with security guards among their staff is safe; working alone on the street while hiding from police officers is dangerous and likely to get you raped, beaten up, or killed). Moreover, there exist plenty of sex workers who themselves are activists and capable of advocating for themselves. But no, SWERFs prefer to ignore their voices and patronize them instead.
I totally agree with most feminist ideas: equality, equal pay, women’s rights and so on.
It’s just that I am very disappointed about some of the nasty things (abuse of trans people and sex workers) that are promoted by people who claim to be feminists.
Of course, TERFs and SWERFs are a small minority of feminists. Unfortunately, their voices are disproportionately loud. For example, in Latvia the loudest feminist organisation are absolute SWERFs who are adamantly lobbying local politicians into criminalizing sex work. After reading their publications, I noticed that they hardly ever write about actual problems (non equal pay, outdated gender roles and expectations, etc.) and only focus on making sex workers’ lives more miserable by turning them into outlaws who are forced to hide from police and thus have zero legal protection.
Of course. Rigid gender roles and expectations are harmful for everybody, both cis and trans, men and women and those who are neither. I want a society in which every person was free to choose for themselves how they want to live and what forms of gender expression they like.
D’accordo, adoro la lingua italiana.
In English I am fine with either “he” or “they” as pronouns. If it were possible, I’d certainly prefer gender neutral options for words like “Mr” and “Ms.” In practice, most languages don’t have any gender neutral options (in Latvian we don’t even have a gender neutral pronoun like the English “they” never mind honorifics). When no gender neutral alternatives exist, I prefer the masculine version.
There were no gender neutral options in Italian, right? At least I don’t remember my Italian teacher mentioning anything some years ago. Then again, in English “they” became an officially recognized gender neutral pronoun only recently, so maybe there are similar recent improvements also in other languages.
@ maat
Also, I should clarify the reason why I misunderstood your point. When I wrote in the original post, “Yet nowadays, when a trans person like me writes about how I want my cookbooks not to refer to me with words reserved exclusively for women, transphobes and self-proclaimed feminists will yell at me about how I am erasing women,” I was thinking about TERFs. I didn’t explicitly state that I meant TERFs with my words “self-proclaimed feminists,” but they were the ones I was thinking about.
And then you wrote that I should consider feminists my allies.
So basically, I was thinking about the transphobic subset of feminists and you probably thought about feminists in general or the non-bigoted feminists.
Lesson: when we talk about “feminists,” it’s useful to specify which ones we mean.
Of course I do consider feminists, with the exception of the bigoted ones, my allies.
Yes, some shout very loud indeed, and, unfortunately, many don’t realise they do not represent the majority.
For me feminism is synonymous with equal rights for all.
In Italy, and in Europe generally, there have been many debates on how we can adopt a gender neutral language. There have been various proposals and many have been implemented.
You have probably seen it already, but here is a link to the 2008 guidelines published by the European Parliament:
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/cmsdata/187102/GNL_Guidelines_IT-original.pdf
However, while there have been welcome changes, they do not accommodate people who do not identify with any gender. Personal pronouns remain the main problem in romance languages.
One suggestion was to replace all final vowels with an asterisk, which I find visually and musically unacceptable. Alternately, to replace them with the vowel ‘u’. Better than an asterisk, but it would still destroy the musicality of the language that to me is extremely important. It would be like composing a symphony using a third of the notes. I do hope we can come up with something better.
Glad we cleared up the misunderstanding.
I hadn’t seen those before, thanks for the link.
Yeah, we have the same problems in Latvian. For example, in Latvian “pavārs” refers to a male cook and “pavāre” refers to a female cook. Recently some people have proposed “pavārs/e” that looks weird in written text, doesn’t work with spoken word, and ignores people who don’t identify with any gender. On top of that, plural forms for masculine and feminine nouns are different in Latvian, so we cannot really rely on those as a replacement. Nor is it possible to just say something like “the cooking staff” in Latvian.
Andreas Avester, how does Latvian deal with mixed-gender groups of people? In Hebrew any group that has at least one male person and any number greater than zero of other people of any gender is considered to be plural masculine, so plural masculine forms are considered gender inclusive. This is notable when plurals are used in instructions such as recipes. (Instead of ‘chop the vegetables’ in singular feminine imperative form the current use is ‘we chop the vegetables’ in plural masculine, implied present tense.) I’d rather have a third gender, both singular and plural, for these things because I dislike the implication that the default human is male, but it is an improvement over the implication that certain activities are inherently feminine.