> Get all the positives and mark it as that, without the negatives.
Seems that simple for me.
Aspire.
But people do negative things that are sexual in nature, and other stuff relating to sex and gender.
For example, some DO have sex in a negative fashion (such as when you include routinely having sex with married partners or with STDs that you don't disclose, stuff that causes damage) Or, some people ARE militant and intolerant of members of an opposite gender for various reasons.
It's not entirely unreasonable to have negative, gender-specific or sex-specific labels when those categories are the ones along which people are doing negative behaviors.
I guess you could just still use gender/sex-neutral terms anyway, as a concerted effort, but it doesn't feel very natural, and even if it might theoretically be helpful to always abandon any gendered neutral term, it doesn't seem like a realistic goal.
As long as they aren't completely one-sided (as in their equivalent of the opposite gender is hardly ever used) AND false, negative terms related to gender aren't necessarily the biggest problem.
Neonivek, you understand that the best way to handle sexism that adversely affects men is to deal with the more prevalent and more harmful sexism that adversely affects women, right?
I'm not Neonivek, but this argument sounds absurd. You can and should address more than one kind of related prejudice at once, if more than one exists at once, and there's no guarantee that any prejudice is just going to go away on its own without direct address. Nor is this fair or just to the victims of said prejudice that you are deigning to ignore.
"Women are strong". Women are thus equal to men, who are also strong. The 'in control' part would fall away as part of this.
This is a nice example of how it DOESN'T automatically take care of itself, contrary to the intention of this example.
Two people can be equally strong and yet one still completely in control of the group... do you see how you jumped across two concepts? Strength =/= leadership, control, or power.
Additionally, this assumes that everybody out there is solving logical syllogisms before they speak or think things, which is simply not true.
People are dumb and believe contradictory things all the time without thinking twice about them. I have no problem believing that a large chunk of the population could be taught that women are strong, nod yes and sign their name to that, and then a day later, still go around anyway giving strength-requiring tasks to men, and then if you question them, saying "Well I gave it to him because men are strong."