Thursday, July 12, 2012

I have to confess that I rather dislike the modern attitude of adding "girl" to the words describing activities in supposedly "male" domain, that girl programmer, girl scientist or girl whatever. Why emphasize gender? One of the best Russian poets of the XX century, Marina Tsvetaeva, has never called herself "a poetess" and was fiercely opposing those who tried calling her that, preferring the generic term: a poet. And what was good enough for a poet, should be good enough for an engineer, a scientist or a jet pilot. Isn't it?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I agree. I also wonder if most special interest groups are really necessary. I think some are, but in my opinion, most are based on the *false* believe that they are not equal to the mainstream.

Anna Nachesa said...

In fact, I find "grrlwhatever movement" counter-productive, because it helps to keep the gender problem in focus. And to me gender problem looks like one of those problems which will stay around as long as people continue discuss (and, therefore acknowledge) its existence.

Grax said...

I agree. As one of several boy programmers on my team, I prefer to just be considered a programmer. I don't keep my gender a secret so it is a bit redundant to keep mentioning it.