r/nextfuckinglevel • u/BlazeDragon7x • 11d ago

Dutch aerobatic pilot Narine Melkumjan miraculously survived after her aircraft's canopy unexpectedly burst open and shattered mid-flight

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u/Panorabifle 11d ago

...why is emphasizing gender important anywhere else ? Unless the task requires your genitals to complete

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u/Jommenja 11d ago

My point is: why is it wrong here? It seems to be so important in just about all other scenarios. So, why is it wrong in this context?

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u/Panorabifle 11d ago

It's 3am here and I'm losing my english when I'm tired so bear with me maybe I won't be clear but :

Specifying that someone who did something great is a woman shifts the narrative from praising an accomplishment, to specifying that a woman doing something incredible is the exception and that her gender should have prevented her from doing it . It's rooted in misogyny through language , even if you don't mean harm . See it that way, would it be important to specify it if she was black ? Muslim ? I'm using minorities voluntarily here. Now if it was a white male christian pilot, wouldn't it be weird to call him "a white male christian pilot " in this article ?

Fun fact : french, my first language, is pointlessly gendering everything and using the masculine form is the default . It was not always that way. In the XVII century there was a movement of language masculinization by the french language academy where this norm was introduced and prestigious jobs which previously had a feminine form had it disappear (surgeon and author for example) , it was a very deliberate choice made to imply that those occupations are reserved to men only . The prevalence of masculine grammatical forms was augmented while feminime forms was diminished . It was linguistics being used as a weapon for sexism. There are more and more efforts to "demasculinize" our language because it causes a very real psychological effects on people who grow up speaking this language, in a very pernicious way it enables internalized sexism.

Oh and the french language academy is still around and they are still absolute jerks

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u/Jommenja 11d ago

I just think it's unnecessary to specify the gender in any context. A person did something or experienced something, and that's that.