beth@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP (JB) (09/30/86)
[Love is a nose, so ya better not pick it...or something like that.] In article <15817@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> kos@ernie.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Joshua Kosman) writes: >In article <1992@mtgzy.UUCP> ecl@mtgzy.UUCP (e.c.leeper) writes: >>Did anyone else watch Part 1 of "The Story of English" on PBS? > >Actually, I found it fairly diffuse and not consistently interesting. >BUT: what I thought was more than simply a matter of taste was the brief >segment on feminist critiques of language. While discussing the feminist >objections to words like "mankind" and so on, the accompanying film footage >was of a women's self-defense class, in which we could hear instructions >like "now: groin kick!" This is apparently what feminism is about: women >teaching other women to kick men in the balls. Could we also here instructions like "now: kick *him* in the groin", or did you just decide that they were aiming at men? If it had been a class of men training, would you have assumed they too were anti-male because they kicked to the groin? A kick to the groin is: a) a basic move in almost all martial arts (which, BTW, have been traditionally overwhelmingly male dominated sports); b) an effective defensive tactic against an attacker of either gender; and c) not the least bit relevant to "what feminism is about" (nor is it, for that matter, relevant to the feminization of language). -- --JB ((Just) Beth Christy, U. of Chicago, ..!ihnp4!gargoyle!sphinx!beth) All we learn from history is that we don't learn anything from history.