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Summit Essays

• Verbal Plunder: Combating the Feminist Encroachment on the Language of Theology and Ethics
  I don't like being ripped off. The more valuable something is to me, the more I hate to lose it. As a historian of theology and a literary critic, I value words and their meaning, and I value tradition. I won't give them up without a fight. If someone wants to steal something from me and I can stop them, I will. This essay is my way of saying that I've had enough, and I'm not going to take it anymore. Not long ago, a small and vocal band of feminist thugs tried to pull off one of the greatest acts of verbal plunder in the history of the Western world. By means of a linguistic subterfuge that prohibited any term that happened to strike them as sexist, they tried to abscond not only with one- third of all our generic personal and possessive pronouns (no more he and his, for example), they also tried to swipe any and every descriptive term beginning with the letters m-a-n. And because crime breeds crime, they fell quickly from larceny into slander by identifying as sexual bigots and chauvinists anyone, past or present, who failed to pay homage to their idiosyncratic rules of usage. As much as I hate to endorse anything to do with Freudianism, it seems to me that some feminists suffer from acute pronoun envy. But I will not be bullied out of my words or my heritage by the verbal, philosophical, or cultural heresies of those who are dedicated to undermining the great tradition that brought us the good, the true, and the beautiful on one hand, and redemption and hope on the other. I know what that mob of word Pirates is up to and I want to tell them to keep their hands off my legacy and to stop spreading lies about my friends. Anyone who thinks that Jesus, Dante, Petrarch, Michelangelo, or Milton were sexist because they did not speak, write, or paint according to rules propounded in the latest feminist manifesto had better think again. Some people not only have no respect for their own language and tradition, they have none for anyone else's. They smear those who, in ages past "spake full well in language quaint and olden," people whose verbal art and commitment to truth I am unwilling to abandon, condemn, or reshape in some generic mold of feminist design. I do not trust the minds and methods of feminist teachers who, by means of their anachronistic slurs, bear false witness against the past and its towering figures. Nor do I want them teaching my children. I will not entrust my descendants to those who abuse my ancestors. Wisdom, beauty, and truth are hard-won things, the gaining of which took generations. To overthrow them or to undervalue them simply because those who discovered them do not worship at the altar of one's own linguistic special interest group is both insupportably arrogant and reckless. More than fifteen hundred years ago, in his monumental City of God, Saint Augustine understood the principles by which modern propagandists operate: if you want to undercut an opponent's argument, simply compromise his language. This is done best by stealing your opponents words and making them your own. When you do so, your opponent is forced either to stop and explain what he means every time he uses the words you co-opted, or else to find a whole new set of unfamiliar terms with which to advance his case. Either option is doomed to failure. Neither audience attention span nor media sound bites are sufficiently long to accommodate his necessarily lengthy and labyrinthine efforts at reeducating the populace to his newly acquired taxonomy. By stealing his language, you have stolen the verbal flags and banners around which he can rally people to his cause. Without those flags and banners he is speechless. By pilfering his verbal arsenal, you have left him without weapons and without defense. That is precisely what the feminist word thieves are trying to do. They have taken traditionally generic terms of representation like he, his, and mankind and redefined them so that they can be understood only as sexist or gender specific. In much the same way that weasels suck the contents out of eggs, the feminists suck the content out of words. Then they go the weasels one better. Rather than leaving the empty shell of a word behind them, they proceed to refill that mangled word with a definition of their own choosing. For example, according to one prominent feminist handbook, the "only acceptable nonsexist usage" of the word man is in reference to an adult male. But that is a feminist weasel word, one from which the feminists have sucked out its prior meaning and replaced it with one of their own. According to my Webster's Dictionary, the word man is not fundamentally a male word. In fact, the concept of maleness does not enter until the third definition. Contrary to the self-serving assertions of the feminist verbal revolutionaries, traditional usage is ideologically patriarchal in neither definition or usage. For my money, Noah Webster is a far better guide to language than Gloria Steinem, Betry Friedan, or Starhawk. My point (if it is not obvious) is this: rather than having a command of language, the feminists want to command language. Read my lips: I'm not buying it. I will defy all who insist on taking the language and literature of Western tradition to the verbal veterinarian in order to have them neutered. Not all changes are progress, and neutered language is one change that is not. Neutered language is no improvement. It is not more accurate, more picturesque, more powerful, or more communicative. Neutered languageis not preferable. None of us is better off because standard word usage has been castrated. Feminists insist on rejecting traditional verbal usage because they think it is exclusivistic and that it leaves out half of humanity—namely women. Their response to this imaginary impropriety is to represent the hurnan race in neutered language—which merely succeeds in eliminating all of us because human beings are not androgynous, and they are not neuter. If you look carefully, you will discover that much feminist language is not inclusive. You also will notice that a great deal of feminist language (and the ideology that accompanies it) is not neutral, it is overt feminist sexism. I don't know about you, but I've had enough of books like Jesus as Motber. If any change is needed now, it is to have feminist language and literature spayed. I intend to be a recruiter for, and a frontline warrior in, the resistance movement determined to stave off the feminist encroachment upon legitimate verbal conventions, and I intend to be an environmental activist in the fight against semantic pollution. I will stridently oppose all those whose verbal fetish is exposing the supposed genitals of standard English. I, for one, will not be party to the humorless, even unhuman, triumph of feminist androgyny. I will not sanction the willful blindness of those who insist upon seeing only the imaginary sameness of all things, because things that are all the same, whatever else they might be, are not human beings. Have the feminist word bandits never learned that grammatical gender is not the same as sex? One does not make a sex statement when one calls the race man any more than when one calls a ship or a nation or liberty she. Genitalia are not in question. Sex and grammatical gender must not be equated. If you insist on equating them when the author you read or the speaker you hear has not, you will misread or mishear. In that sense, some feminists can misunderstand in seven languages. Their verbal fetishes make it inevitable. In their monomaniacal quest to expose the verbal genitals of every great writer, they miss the beauty, truth, and power of the world's finest works of verbal art and, in the process, make themselves beggars and complainers at the great feast of language and literature. Their ill-conceived sexist jingoism does little else than make them whistlers, hecklers, and foot stompers in the rhapsody of words played out for us by the finest verbal performers of all time. I am scandalized by their audacious efforts to teach the old Muses new words and by the manner in which they pretend to stand in ideological and artistic judgment over them. Great words and great works judge us, not vice versa. As a grammatical category, the concept of gender first reached maturity in Ancient Greece, where it seems not to have developed as a reference to sex, but rather as a classification of kind. Must I remind feminists that while there are only two sexes, Greek has three genders (a distinction of which the Greeks were well aware and heartily endorsed)? Furthermore, the same nonsexual character of grammatical gender is repeated in modern language. In German, for example, the word for girl is grammatically neuter while the word for turnip is feminine. This does not mean that the Germans confuse their women with their vegetables. Such ideas are laughable to us because when feminist propaganda is not blaring in our ears we easily understand that grammatical gender is a semantic classification and that a semantic classification is not the same as biological sex. You must not impose a sexual orientation upon words where one does not exist. If the words man and mankind were really male words, then it should be the men, not the women, who ought to be offended by the use of allegedly male terms to refer to the race indiscriminately. By employing a masculine word for a generic meaning, our culture would be demonstrating that it thinks nothing at all of defacing or erasing maleness. If generic words really were male words, then masculinity is being defaced every day by everybody-and no one seems to object, least of all the fe