Modern languages ​​were formed not so long ago, in the last few hundred years. Although their roots lie in proto-languages ​​that arose 1000+ years ago. That is, languages ​​were formed when patriarchy was in full swing. And, of course, this could not but affect the vocabulary, grammar and other features.
At all times, designations are given by those who have power. To name means to objectify. What we have named is already a little under our control. These are natural phenomena, plants or animals that we deal with - this is how we learned to recognize them, study them, and then defend ourselves against them and use them to our advantage. Everything is clear here. The most interesting thing begins when we designate social phenomena: individuals, their groups, their activities.

People are more or less equal intelwctually (yes, there are IQ 90, 100 and 120, but there is a huge gap between humans and other species in this regard) and generaly, ALL people can give designations to each other. We can come up with dehumanizing definitions for our enemies, but they will do the same to us. Resisting other people's designations and creating your own is part of the information war, no less important than direct physical confrontation, because this is a war for the minds of people.
If the enemy accepts the definition of himself that we have invented (that is, projective identification), this means that he is completely defeated and colonized. That is, deprived of the opportunity to resist in the spiritual, intellectual field.
Actually, this is what happened to women.

Simone de Beauvoir in her book "The Second Sex" noticed an interesting pattern: between the warring groups (nations, classes), as a rule, a certain parity is maintained, because both of them designate one another as "others". Whereas in gender relations this only works in one direction: men designate women as "other" and come up with a variety of definitions for us in their interests; while the women themselves do nothing of the kind, moreover, they also completely adopt the conceptual system of the enemy, thereby completely losing any subjectivity in the formation of the social hierarchy.
We call ourselves what men call us.
This fact alone shows what a deplorable state we, as a group, are in. Because if this happens to a nation, it completely disappears from the political map of the world and merges with the conquerors. Women, too, have kind of disappeared from the political map, and the only things we have in common are physiology and experiences of oppression. Thanks to feminism, women began to have their own definitions for males and their actions: harassment, abuse, mensplaning, etc. However, we still live in a male symbolic system that has evolved over thousands of years, and in fact we use its loopholes. Because patriarchy is fixed in such trifles that you did not even suspect.

Everyone has probably heard that in many languages ​​the word for a male human is simultaneously used to refer to any human (gender neutral). For example, man in English, mann in German, uomo in Italian, homme in French - hence "humanism". (It is interesting that the word "woman" comes from "wifman", which literally means "woman-man", that is, a female person). Moreover, it is already known that initially these words were used precisely in the meaning of "human being", and only then, in the course of changing the language, they began to be identified precisely with the male gender. That is, when the basic vocabulary of European languages ​​was born, patriarchy probably did not yet exist at the institutional level.
Sometimes the devil is in the details like pronouns. In French there are two words that can be translated as "they" - "elles" and "ils". "Elles" is derived from "elle" - she, "ils" - from il (he). That is, there is a word for many women (or feminine objects) and another word for men (masculine objects).
But what happens if we are talking about mixed groups? There, "ils" is always (!) used even if there are a hundred women and only one man in the group. The masculine gender is completely grammatically dominant, and this is hardly a coincidence. The Polish language is even worse: there is the word "oni" (means men and mixed groups) and "one" (groups where there are women, children (!) and inanimate objects (!). With just one pronoun, women are objectified and equated with children (disenfranchised subordinate beings) and objects.
In Russian and Slavic languages, the masculine form is used by default when speaking about the actions of an indefinite person. But the main pain of the Slavic languages ​​is feminitives. If, for example, in Italian word formation allows you to simply change the ending -o to -a and get a feminitive (il comesso - seller, la comessa - saleswoman), and in some cases it is enough to simply change the article (la regista - director, il regista - director), then in Slavic languages we use a pile of suffixes, which, as a rule, emphasize the secondary nature of the feminine in relation to the masculine. Tkach - tkachikha (Russian), likar - likarka (Ukrainian), kolega - kolegyně (Czech), prezydent - prezydentka (Polish), etc.

And right now, when a huge number of feminitive neologisms are being invented, when you can choose the most pro-feminine and independent of the masculine form, for some reason "avtorka" and "politikessa" (instead of masculine forms: "avtor" and "politik") are becoming popular. The last word is actually hilarious because in this case it is very easy to form a beautiful form from the root, and not from the male suffix - "politessa". And whenever possible, it is important to create feminitives from the root of the word, and not from the masculine form of the profession name (although it takes a couple of minutes to think). Some of them are already made this way: "khudozhnitsa" ("artist", masc. - "khudozhnik"), "razboinitsa" ("robber", masc. - "razboinik"), "gostia" ("guest", masc. - "gost"), "shveya" ("sewer", no masc. form), "aktrisa" ("actor", masc. - "aktyor").. And the ideal word formation, from my point of view, is in a pair of "vedma" (which) and "vedmak" (whicher) (feminine form in -a, masculine derivative of it). Unfortunately, the simple addition of -a at the end for feminine forms now sounds strange and unusual, although this opens up great opportunities for the formation of beautiful and strong-sounding feminitives. I personally like this form most of all, it sounds a bit in the Italian manner, although, by the way, many other forms also came from it, for example, "aktrisa" (actress), "direktrisa" (headmistress), "avtrisa" (this is what you can replace the "author"). This is a matter of taste, but I consider it important for our self-awareness that feminists should not be warped masculists, because we are not the "second gender", but the first and main one.
What else can be done for the language? You can deliberately break the rules by using the feminine form as neutral. If I were French, I would use "elles" for mixed forms, but they may have already thought of it themselves - in France feminism is at a very high level. As for the words for people, I am glad that women here come up with neologisms to bring in the feminine forms. Some languages ​​were more fortunate, for example, in Ukrainian the words "lyudina" (person), "detina" (child) and so both are feminine. In general, this is a huge space for creativity, the only thing that can stop is the fear of coming up with a cringe feminist, but now is the time when feminitives for many professions (and not only) are created almost from scratch, and you can make your contribution by promoting the best with your point of view option.
The main thing is to create your own designations, without looking back at the male reaction. They will criticize, ridicule, freak out, but this is just a form of gaslighting. They are unhappy that their right to form a system of notation is called into question. And it’s good that it’s unpleasant, let this be just the beginning.


Author: Philosopher's Stone of Artémis
Translator: Yulia N.