This happens every time I go for a routine test to a neighbourhood medical centre; without asking, they add a Mrs before my name in the bill. Each time, I have to patiently explain to the baffled person on duty, that firstly they cannot assume every woman is married; and secondly that all women use their husband’s surname. The surname I use is my father’s, I tell the bored young woman (usually a female), so it cannot be prefixed with a Mrs, please use Ms.
Their computer does not seem to have that option. Even government and bank forms now give you a Ms choice. Does this medical centre exist from the last century? The young woman scratches out the Mrs with a pen, writes Ms and hands the paper back with a sour “Bas, happy now?” expression.
The other thing that gets my hackles up is vendors in the market, cabbies, security guards calling every woman over the age of, say, twenty “bhabhi”. They decide she is too old for baby and too young for aunty, so bhabhi seems safe. “Why are you forming a needless rishtedaari?” I snap when I have the time and energy to.
They don’t understand what the problem is – why shouldn’t a married woman be called bhabhi, and why shouldn’t a woman in her twenties or above be married? My theory is that this is the patriarchal way of diminishing a woman; she cannot exist without being attached to a man; she cannot be madam or memsaheb, because to their mind, that would give her an identity of her own and the man does not think she deserves an independence from familial bonds. To him, bhabhi means the woman, who, in his home does the domestic chores, and in the lewd videos he watches on his phone, a woman who invites lust – Savita Bhabhi, for instance.
There is a problem in the language of patriarchy, especially when for centuries male has been the default gender in many languages. So the people who form the Aam Aadmi Party do not seem to think that it excludes women. Why could it not have called the Aam Nagrik Party?
We use terms like common man, countryman, layman, chairman, when there are gender neutral terms like common citizen, compatriot, layperson and chairperson in use. Some may snigger and say that this is taking political correctness too far, but they don’t object to visually impaired for blind, speech impaired for mute or differently abled for handicapped, which, activists working in these areas now insist on to give a sense of dignity or inclusiveness to them.
Language has to evolve to take in changed social circumstances, and by now, gender sensitive or gender neutral language should come naturally to the educated, but even today in the mainstream media, we find terms like eve-teasing and fairer sex being routinely used. Women are not just married, they are married off like an unpleasant duty being performed; a woman will be referred to as widow of a dead man, but a man is seldom widower of a dead woman.
David Shariatmadari writing in The Guardian, lists words referring to women that had a different meaning but have changed to mean something entirely different and invariably negative. For instance, ‘mistress’ was the female equivalent of ‘master’ but has come to mean a woman with whom a man is having an affair. ‘Madam’ was the female equivalent of ‘sir’ and is now mostly used to refer to the owner of a brothel. ‘Hussy’ once meant the female head of a household and is now used for an aggressive woman.
A ‘governess’ was like a ‘governor’, a woman of importance, and was reduced to mean a woman who is employed to look after children. A ‘courtesan’ was a female courtier, but has come to denote a prostitute. ‘Spinster’ was a person – male or female – who spun yarn, but is now used as a derogatory term for an unmarried woman. ‘Tart’ was short for sweetheart, and now means a flirt…or worse.
What is the male equivalent of ‘old maid’? Why doesn’t a man ever ‘remain on the shelf’? Why is ‘bitch’ spat out as an insult, but not dog? Men also spend hours eating, gossiping and gambling, but who calls their group a ‘kitty party’? A ‘vixen’ is a nasty woman, but a fox is wily person who gets grudging admiration. Men also grumble and find fault but why do only women ‘nag’? Why is a young man called ‘dude’ and a young woman ‘chick’?
Hillary Smith, writing in whitmanwire.com, “I attended a workshop on patriarchy and gendered language. It made me realise how casually people, including myself, use language that perpetuates a patriarchal system. We don’t even realise we are doing this because these concepts are so ingrained in our words and our speech. We don’t think about what we’re actually saying. Take the phrase “you guys” for example. That is a perfectly harmless phrase, right? It’s a casual form of acknowledgment among both females and males. But wait; if it’s a form of acknowledgment among both females and males, why does it only address males? Why isn’t it “you girls”?
Well, think about how grossly wrong it would feel if someone came up to a group of both males and females and said, “Hey girls”. That would feel extremely weird, right? That is precisely the point. The fact that a masculine phrase represents both genders but a feminine phrase can only speak for females proves how deeply embedded the patriarchal system is in our speech and our psyche.” Needs thinking about the next time we speak!
Deepa Gahlot is a Mumbai based columnist, critic and author.