Sunday, November 11, 2007

Equality Is Still The Big Lie

Frequent writers to ‘Letters to the Editor’ encounter more things that others wouldn’t normally see. We understand our letters sometimes need to be edited for spelling and a host of mistakes we writers make and we are mostly grateful for the changes. What we don’t understand is when certain editors decide to become social engineers in linguistics.
There seems to be a concentrated effort in today’s media to neuter any reference to mankind unless it is to display a negative side to men. Words in the media have changed to a neutral, non-gender flavour as if sitting on the fence was a virtue. Even some of our churches have jumped on the feminist bandwagon quietly removing as many references to man or father as they can. I still haven’t figured out what the hell a ‘humankind’ is. Maybe it’s some kind of demonic human created by the liberals.
My library contains some of the finest writers of the past and present and along with 12 dictionaries none of them avoid the male gender as much as today’s media do.
In some of my letters I use the term ‘chairman’ in my signature, yet many of the editors remove the ‘man’ part and replace it with ‘person’ or simply make me a chair. I am neither. Neither am I a ‘spokesperson’. If I speak, I speak as a man. Surely you wouldn’t send a spoke or a chair to do a man’s job.
On the other hand, women continually use chairwoman or spokeswoman in the press. I have no problem with that but why aren’t men allowed the same right? This would be no surprise coming from a feminist editor but most editors are men. Even feminists don’t like traitors.
It may seem a minor matter but it seems to be a disturbing trend that we let get out of control, leaving us with a generation of boys with no male identity and men who question their definitive role in society at a time when we need more real men.
Linguistic castration is one way to feminize men but not nearly as effective as teaching our young boys in school that homosexuality is a normal alternative, as our education system is doing today.
Fortunately there’s still a fast buck to be made from Batman and Superman or they’d quickly replace them with She-man, hero of humankind.

Ken