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October 8th, 2007
12:55 am - Is 'man' chauvinistic?
A lot has been made by shrill political-correctness groups over the use of 'man' to mean 'human'. The idea is that the term 'man' excludes women from the group of humanity, the implication being that the female is unimportant.
The English word 'man' comes from the Old English man or mann, from Germanic roots, which mean exactly the same as the contemporary words 'human' (from the Latin humanus) or 'person'. There is no gender distinction in the Old English man - it was applied to both sexes. In Old English, the words for 'man' (i.e. adult male) and 'woman' were wer (as in 'werewolf') and wif (as in 'wife') respectively. The modern word 'woman' is derived from wifman: I'm unclear whether this literally means 'wife-human' or 'woman-person'.
A similar thing can be seen in non-German languages. The French for 'man', for example, is homme which is derived from the Latin homo, which in literary Latin again meant 'human' (in Vulgar Latin it meant both 'human' and 'man', but literary Latin had the word vir for 'man'). The French word for 'woman' (femme, derived from the Latin femina, meaning precisely 'woman') has come to mean 'wife': exactly as the Old English wif, meaning 'woman', has become 'wife'.
To further confuse the issue, 'human' in the sense of a person without specifying gender is OE man, but 'human' in the sense of literary Latin homo appears to be cognate with OE guma. Guma survives today only in the form 'bridegroom' (brydguma, literally 'man of a woman being married') which appears to imply a male meaning to the word. This may be explained (although I admit I'm stretching here) by the idea that although the word is technically non-gender-specific, male chauvinism in that time was even more of an accepted fact than it is today: while brydguma was common throughout Germanic languages, Gothic took a different tack and went with bruþsfaþs - 'bride's lord' (for interest, compare faþs with 'father': 'father' comes from Old English fæder and transformed the d to a th in Middle English, but this is similar to how bryd meant the same as the Gothic bruþ...). Perhaps in a world where the woman was to all intents and purposes considered unimportant it made sense for a technically non-gender-specific word to be functionally male.
That confusion aside, I'd contend that this casts aspersions on the idea that the use of the word 'man' to describe issues that affect humans as a whole is discriminatory. This does, however, come with the usual disclaimer that I'm a complete amateur at this stuff ;)
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April 10th, 2007
06:26 pm - Goosey gets a new look!
Not so much before and after shots, unfortunately; more in-between and after. You can pretty much spot the difference between the two - a more natural skin-tone, a more natural nose-line, more blue eyes and getting rid of that horrible yellow local light. Actually, although you can't see it so well in the second picture, the inverse radioactivity symbol I use as my avatar's belt-buckle now casts a blue light. Which doesn't make sense since the actual object is still yellow, but hey, this is Second Life, laws of optics be damned!
Speaking of optics, these shots were taken with the lovely 'sniper-scope' zoom functionality in the software (which changes the FOV instead of the distance between the camera and the object, as the 'regular' zoom does). That makes for a nice striking image, but doesn't really let you see what this new look entails. What you can see, even from these shots, however, is a certain femininity to the avatar's look. This is a male avatar. I can tell because when I go to edit the av's appearance, I get a radio button for gender, and it's quite firmly set to 'Male'.
I don't know why I'm more open to androgyny online than I am in real life, but I can (and will, in a minute) hazard a few guesses. I know what it's not, and that's a deliberate attempt to deceive someone or to misrepresent myself - even when I play Cat in AO, I make no secret of the fact I'm male 'IRL'; though I try not to make a big deal out of it, either. Oh, and it's also not a sexual fetish; I'm simply not interested in cyb0r kthx.
What is it, then? Well, any, all, or none of the following:-
- Simply, in a world where I can choose my own appearance in minute detail, I'm going to be able to pull off an androgynous look better than I can in real life.
- As a symbolic statement, it's not so much "oooh, look at me, I'm so different" but quite the opposite: being 'of a plural gender', being 'everyman/woman', having the best of both worlds. As Torley (who, incidentally, has male, female, and hard-to-tell avatars) would logically put it, it's "being an AND person, not an OR person". That's something I can definitely identify with.
- I don't spend all or even most of my time in first-person mode. That is, no-one's going to have to look at my avatar as much as I do, so with that in mind, it might as well be something I find aesthetically pleasant. I find femininity more visually pleasing than masculinity, which might go some way to explaining why I'm straight (or perhaps vice versa).
- Perhaps the most plausible of all: Sephiroth was pretty feminine, and Sephiroth was cool!
There are probably more, but I don't want to labour the point and start sounding like I'm trying to defend it. As far as I'm concerned it's not something that needs defending, and I'd find it difficult to make a contrary opinion worth my time. (Says the guy who even bothers commenting on FSTDT...) I think the idea that using an opposite-sex avatar somewhat sleazy and only ever used as a way for dirty old men to interact with 13-year-old girls is definitely a very narrow view. As long as it isn't used with an intent of deception (and even then, it depends on the intent of the intent of deception ;)) I'm all for it.
Anyway, this was supposed to be a picture post and I got carried away, so... more pictures!
More FOV fun. LAND OF TEH G14NTS!
I own a small amount of land in the Whiskey region. It's permanently snowy there. I love it ^_^ I'm currently working on building a nuclear-bunker-styled thing there, although it's not much of a haven from nuclear fallout, since the signs on the outside indicate a biohazard and 'Danger of Death' inside.
Not that the shelter would do any good, after critical exposure to the beeps and beats at Club Reactor.
Those were pictures. Hope to be updating more often again.
- Goosey
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