Females have better linguistic skills and their thoughts are more amenable to unmediated expression in language. (They’re also better at using language to manipulate social surroundings - gossip, etc.) Males have retaliated with systematic, conscious manipulation of the language itself. I think it was Germaine Greer that pointed out the arch misogyny in all-male academia (until last 30 years) and how it has legitimised misogynistic concepts, assumptions and language. In fact, women have to adopt unconscious misogynistic assumptions even to function in academia, even (or especially) today. Language has been one of the primary causes/results/markers of our spiritual evolution. This makes me wanna think:
What aspects of language/communication in general are masculine or feminine?
What aspects of “consciousness” (self-representation, etc) are male or female?
What’s the significance of the fact that language developed say a few 10,000 years ago, “consciousness” 3000 years ago (enable partly by language), and it has only been the past 100 years that humans have “metarised” (use system itself to rise above/step outside system to speak about it in terms of a hopefully “higher” system) language itself, and only in the past 30 years that women have explicitly metarised about the misogyny embedded in some language?
19 June 2003
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