I realize that it has been a while since i've posted anything. So much has gone on and I can't wait to tell you! Hence the reason why I haven't posted; i've been busy.
Academically I am no longer a trapped, pesimistic, evil-in-training, journalism student. I have changed my concentration to communications. Now it's about rainbows and butterflies and genuinely being nice to people. Much more my pace though my masculine appearance would disagree.
Soccer is still going strong and we're making our transition from repetative winter training to repetative spring training. More info. to come as no events will change or occur.
Love life is good. Enough said.
My main issue I want to express is my recent learning of gender studies and the inequalities not only supressing women but holding standards even too high or dangerous for men. OK well this is not a life-and-death example but here in po-dunk La Grande, OR, the situation is worth talking about.
I have never taken a gender course until now. I know, 21 and I'm just learning something. One of my goals we reflected on now that we're toward the end of our term, is to have more gender respectful or gender neutral language.
Now my job as a News and Features editor for our campus paper comes in handy with this goal... or so i thought.
Editing nights are never fun because we're there from 6 p.m. to midnight or later. However this is a forced opportunity for me to get homework and things done. While editing our stories, I remembered my gender goal and without further thinking I changed "freshman" to "freshwoman." This made since because I was quoting a first-year female student.
Key Fact: I am the only female editor of seven editors. Grant it only six of us were there that night.
My editor (male, also not a student but EOU alumni) said that I was wrong by changing the title, but didn't have a better reason as to why it should not be changed other than it's not the way things are according to APA editing style.
So our argument went something like this:
Chief editor: "Freshman" is a title of class. You wouldn't change sophomore, junior or senior.
me: no because they don't have gender discriminitory language in them. Let's run it this issue and see if either people notice or if our advisor says anything.
Chief: No i'm not going to do that. It doesn't need to be changed and that's final.
me: we change "police man" to "police officer" and "mail man" to "post carrier" why not change "freshman" to "freshwoman"?
chief: because it sounds funny and no one else uses it. You don't see people in sports broadcasting change to gender neutral terms?
me: that's because there's mostly men who work there
chief: the women who work their have that opportunity too
me: like i'm trying to change things now
Layout editor: but sports places are dominated by men (proving my point)
Arts and entertainment editor: oh like changing "mankind" to "humankind" (again, proving my point)
chief: no i'm not going to change it. You can have your gender professor write a letter to the editor and you can write something but It's not going to get changed.
Not only was he so adiment about not changing something so small but he did not have a good reason for not changing it. I would have settled for a compramise of "let's run 'freshman' this issue, you can do more research and we'll discuss changes for next issue." that sounds pretty fair to me. But the "no we're not going to change it because i said so and that's the way things are" is not good enough for me.
Now the next day I brought this issue up in my gender class and most had agreed that there was discrimmination and that something should be changed whether it be changing to "freshwoman" or "first-year students" for the non-traditional students sake.
More examples of changing language to become more politically correct:
Mentally retarded is out, replaced with mentally handicapped, which is even getting flak for not being PC enough.
Low-income, not poor.
Servers, not waiters and waitresses.
Undocumented workers instead of illegal immigrants.
Points to be made:
Freshman is a term used when at the time education was reserved for men. EOU has a 60:40 ratio of women to men.
When interviewing someone you learn to spell their name correctly, their perspective of the story, and how they influenced the story so when gathering that information you're most likely to catch their class and beable to decide on referring to them as "freshman", "freshwoman", or "first-year" student. Or get rid of "freshwo/man" altogether and simply use "first-year student."
Food for thought, pressure for diamonds and all that. Thanks for reading.
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