My favorite example for people who think grammatical gender has more than a passing correlation to social gender.
That being said there is actual built-in sexism to grammatical gender in some areas, e.g. job titles (un chauffeur = a driver, une chauffeuse = a prostitute).
“penis” is masculine while “bite” is feminine, too
I would argue that “chauffeuse” for feminine drivers and “chauffeuse” for easy girls should be considered different words, homonyms, likely with separate etymologies. A feminine driver should be called a chauffeuse, and theorically an easy boy could be called a chauffeur. It will not happen because nobody uses the slur this way, but that’s unrelated to the grammatical structure of the language. Wouldn’t call it built-in.
Words meanings always slide around and we have markers in some of them that determine whether the word describes a man or a women. Since we treat women and men differently, it’s not surprising that the feminine variant might end up with different connotations than the masculine one. But the words in question do not have gender, they inherit the gender of who they describe. It’s a different thing, unrelated to the assignment of genders to objects
To be clear, I am not defending the idea that you should give gender to things, nor that you should change the suffix in all the words that refer to women. I think it’s stupid and I wish we didn’t even have pronouns in the first place
Well, that’s because chauff-eur/euse means neither driver nor prostitute, but “heater”, as in “someone who makes hot”. One heats the steam engine, the other their clients. The sexism is not built in the language or the gender system, but in the patriarchal culture.
My favorite example for people who think grammatical gender has more than a passing correlation to social gender.
That being said there is actual built-in sexism to grammatical gender in some areas, e.g. job titles (un chauffeur = a driver, une chauffeuse = a prostitute).
“penis” is masculine while “bite” is feminine, too
I would argue that “chauffeuse” for feminine drivers and “chauffeuse” for easy girls should be considered different words, homonyms, likely with separate etymologies. A feminine driver should be called a chauffeuse, and theorically an easy boy could be called a chauffeur. It will not happen because nobody uses the slur this way, but that’s unrelated to the grammatical structure of the language. Wouldn’t call it built-in.
Words meanings always slide around and we have markers in some of them that determine whether the word describes a man or a women. Since we treat women and men differently, it’s not surprising that the feminine variant might end up with different connotations than the masculine one. But the words in question do not have gender, they inherit the gender of who they describe. It’s a different thing, unrelated to the assignment of genders to objects
To be clear, I am not defending the idea that you should give gender to things, nor that you should change the suffix in all the words that refer to women. I think it’s stupid and I wish we didn’t even have pronouns in the first place
Well, that’s because chauff-eur/euse means neither driver nor prostitute, but “heater”, as in “someone who makes hot”. One heats the steam engine, the other their clients. The sexism is not built in the language or the gender system, but in the patriarchal culture.