I'm usually pretty sanguine about the sort of harmless verbal tics that drive people to file complaints with the grammar police. Autumn Whitefield-Madrano tackles one of the few that really sticks in my craw.

Inevitably, when I hear the word female repeatedly used as a noun in speech, it’s either from someone who isn’t used to talking about sex and gender issues (in which case I try to look past it, assuming the person is in good faith)—or, more frequently, from a card-carrying misogynist who, intentionally or not, manages to make every utterance of female sound like he’s spitting directly onto our collective ovaries.

Source: Feministe

"Man" and "Woman" are nouns. "Male" and "Female" are adjectives. Whitefield-Madrano makes a pretty good case for why it's not just a grammar issue, it's a respect/contempt issue.

She cites some pretty hard-to-blame-on-Gloria-Steinem sources to back it up.

“Why should a woman be degraded from her position as a rational being, and be expressed by a word which might belong to any animal tribe?” wrote critic Henry Alford in 1866. The Oxford English Dictionary is more succinct on the matter: “Now commonly avoided by good writers, exc. with contemptuous implication.”

What really grates is when someone says "men" and "females," as nouns, in the same sentence. Of course that gate swings both ways -- when you hear someone say "women" and "males" in the same sentence you can be pretty confident that the hate men every bit as much as those who say "females" hate women.

Whitefield-Madrano does make a mild attempt to "rehabilitate" the word "female," pointing out that etymologically speaking "female" is not a derivation of "male" the way "woman" is derived from "man." Furthermore, the earliest versions of "female," "femella" and "femelle" not only emerged separately (the corresponding word for "man" was "masculus") it originally designated human women and was extended to other species only much later.

Fun stuff. Anyway. Good guideline to follow: directly indicating men or women as "males" and "females" is a pretty good clue to your misogyny and/or misandry. Fine if you're not ashamed to advertise it. But if you do it you are advertising it.

Well this is sort of getting to be a stuck record.  There's yet another education professional in the news (and in the unemployment office) for past or current involvement in stripping or other sex work.

Some of you may recall Sheila Addison's 2008 guest post at Kate Harding's Shapely Prose about one of her masters in counseling psychology course offerings : "Size Acceptance in a Systems Framework." She's also guest-posted at the California National Organization for Women blog, Civil liberties: Now with more privileged people.

Her not-yet-scrubbed faculty bio says

Dr. Addison heads the Couple and Family specialization, and is passionate about using family systems theory to guide clinical work aimed at supporting happier, healthier relationships. She is a Clinical Member of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, and an AAMFT Approved Supervisor. Her professional work focuses on couples, GLBT clients, families with adolescents, and those who live in marginalized communities. She practices from a feminist, multicultural, integrative family systems perspective; her work is concerned with relational justice, issues of gender and culture, the operation of power in relationships and increasing capacity for intimacy and emotion. She is the co-author of five chapters in "The Therapist's Notebook for Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Clients," and of a chapter on sexuality and supervision in "Readings in Family Therapy Supervision." In December 2008, "Multicultural Couple Therapy" will be released, which includes two chapters with Dr. Addison as the lead author, one on white privilege and one on work with minority same-sex couples. She often teaches Systemic Theory and Family Therapy, Couples Therapy (focusing on the work of John Gottman and the Emotionally Focused Therapy of Susan Johnson), and various family therapy theories such as Bowen Family Systems, Nagy/Contextual Therapy, Metaframeworks, Satir/Human Validation Process, and feminist therapy.

Source: John F. Kennedy University GSPPP faculty page

A site called Courthouse News Service says (emphasis mine)

A professor claims John F. Kennedy University fired her illegally for appearing in "a burlesque show" called the "'Hubba Hubba Revue' ... which provides political and social commentary on gender, sexuality, and body image stereotypes."

...

JFKU President Steven Stargardter fired her in a letter dated June 21, 2010, Addison says: "Defendant Stargardter stated in the letter that he was terminating Addison's employment because of her performances in a burlesque show entitled 'Hubba Hubba Revue.' No other reason was given for Addison's termination."

 

Source: Courthouse News Service

Oh, and to top it all off, Courthouse News and other sources say

But [JFK] did not fire a male professor who at the same time was doing a one-man show "which included disrobing and partial nudity on stage.

I'm sure there are extenuating circumstances that explain the different treatments.  For instance the male professor probably isn't an LGBT-friendly, feminist, size-acceptance activist... oh, wait!  That doesn't sound very extenuating!

A. Serwer of TAPPED rings the bell with this beautiful passage beginning with an anecdote about his brother’s first experience in summer camp.

When it came time to go swimming, my brother was promptly informed by one of the other kids that black people couldn’t swim.

Of course, bougie as we are, my brother had been taking swim lessons for years, and he swam circles around this kid just to prove the point. It was a formative experience for my brother, who realized his personal excellence would speak louder than anything anyone could say about the color of his skin.

Since Nancy Pelosi became speaker of the House, and shortly after Barack Obama started running for president, we started hearing some identity-specific variations of what that obnoxious kid told my brother before he got a mouthful of chlorine wake. As an incessant reminder that women don’t belong in positions of authority, Pelosi was attacked as a “man“ or peppered with criticisms of her looks or suggestions that she needed to be home doing domestic work. Obama’s intelligence provoked an existential crisis for some conservatives, who insisted he didn’t write his autobiography or legal work or he got into Harvard or even was elected president because of affirmative action.

The passage of yesterday’s health care bill isn’t due to the efforts of just one person. But it’s fair to say that the health care reform bill could not have passed the House without the political skills of the first female speaker of the house and the first black president of the United States. Conservatives won’t abandon the use of tribalist and sexist attacks against them, but these will recede into the fog of history, in which the relative diversity of the Democratic leadership at this moment speaks louder than words can say about the stubborn leftover myths from America’s past.

He said it here.

It’s not that sexism or homophobia or racism is dead (um, for instance no.) Nor is it the case that society’s gone all color- and gender-blind. (Also no.) And I expect I’ll be long after my time before anyone can say honestly and accurately say “nothing more need be done.”

But just as it would be foolish for anyone to rest on their laurels it would also be a huge mistake to deny that laurels have been deservedly won. The first and either second or third* most powerful politicians in government right now are not now and never will be dead white males. And in the face of amazing and incredibly procedural conservative opposition on the one hand, and unbelievable progressive timidity on the other, they’ve pulled together vote after vote on bill after bill.

If you’re not old enough to remember, say, the Johnson or Nixon administrations, when civil rights and women’s rights were entire novelties last night’s HCR vote, and tomorrow’s signing ceremony, might feel somewhere between water under the bridge and/or a major disappointment. That in itself is a measure of how far it’s possible to go in just a handful of decades!

I’ll repeat, while it’s important not to rest on one’s laurels it’s also bloody important to acknowledge when laurels have been won. And not so you can say “whew, I’m just sooooo grateful.” Not at all, at all. But so we can look for the next big hill, grin like a little kid, and say “again, again!”

* Depending on whether you consider Speaker of the House or Senate Majority Leader most significant.

Jessica Valenti Julia Serano of the, um, mainstream feminist website Feministing raises the alarm about proposed revisions to psychiatry’s main reference, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or DSM.

...do you happen to be attracted to, or in a relationship with, someone who is differently-abled or differently-sized? Or someone who is gender-variant in some way? Well congratulations, you may now be diagnosed with a paraphilia!

Seriously.

[Contributing author Ken Zucker and Ray] Blanchard and other like-minded sex researchers have coined words like Gynandromorphophilia (attraction to trans women), Andromimetophilia (attraction to trans men), Abasiophilia (attraction to people who are physically disabled), Acrotomophilia (attraction to amputees), Gerontophilia (attraction to elderly people), Fat Fetishism (attraction to fat people), etc., and have forwarded them in the medical literature to denote the presumed “paraphilic” nature of such attractions. This tendency reinforces the cultural belief that young, thin, able-bodied cisgender women and men are the only legitimate objects of sexual desire, and that you must be mentally disordered in some way if you are attracted to someone who falls outside of this ideal. It’s bad enough that such cultural norms exist in the first place, but to codify them in the DSM is a truly terrifying prospect.

Another frightening aspect of Blanchard’s proposal is that any sexual interest other than “genital stimulation or preparatory fondling” is now, by definition, a paraphilia. In his presentation, he claimed that paraphilias should include all “erotic interests that are not focused on copulatory or precopulatory behaviors, or the equivalent behaviors in same-sex adult partners.” Copulatory is defined as related to coitus or sexual intercourse (i.e., penetration sex). So, essentially, all forms of sexual arousal and expression that are not centered around penetration sex may now be considered paraphilias.

She said this, and a lot more, here.

Quite a (dry, bitter) mouthful in my excerpt, above, but Valenti has more in her post. Read it and weep.

Or, possibly, not weep. A lot of ordinary, mundane worries, fantasies, and interests show up in the DSM — worrying that you forgot to turn off the stove, losing sleep over finances or politics, and stuff like that for instance — but is technically only a problem when taken to extremes. There’s a point on the way to the airport where my partner almost always remembers something we forgot and wonders if we should go back for it. That’s not crazy — not least when, sometimes, it’s something we really should go back for… like my wallet. Instead it’s a quirk. If she were instead immobilized and unable to leave the house because she obsessively catalogued the things we might otherwise leave behind then one of the DSM diagnoses would kick in and treatment might be sought, approved, and (assuming her insurer agreed… a big assumption) undertaken.

But still, as Valenti points out, perfectly functional people are sometimes saddled with DSM disorders. And some of the proposed “disorders” are actually nobody’s flipping business if conducted in privacy on one’s own or with other adults who decide they want to participate.

Interestingly, there’s been a lot of pressure to back off the so-called gender identity disorders that umbrella transvestism, transgender, and transsexualism. Valenti doesn’t mention whether those are still in. (The tactical and strategic reasons for keeping it in, including insurance mandates for sex reassignment, possibly makes this more complicated than it might be.) But adding being attracted to trans-men and women seems like upping the ante: it seems… disordered to attach a disorder to someone who’s something it’s not a disorder to be.

And along those lines I’m more than a little uncomfortable with designating attraction to the aged or infirm. Not least because, last I heard, it’s not a disorder to be aged or infirm. In which case you’re really aiming to screw up the lives of otherwise perfectly ordinary people by… scaring off or nailing their prospective partners.

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This is not, incidentally, an abstract issue. I’m fairly confident the bill died in session (as most, um, quirky bills do) but… well, remind me to post about the (now dead-in-session one hopes) Massachusetts bill “protecting” anyone and everyone over age 60 by adding “and anyone older than 60” to all child sexual assault statutes!