Hey so a female horse is only a "mare" after it's given birth for the first time, before then it's a "filly" Same with a female pig (which goes from a "gilt" to a "sow"), or a "heifer" becoming a "cow" Do you make this distinction with humans? Why or why not https://twitter.com/BelleSanders_/status/1223043368986431488 …
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Replying to @arthur_affect
In Nordic culture, this linguistic distinction used to be a power and responsibility thing, not a reproduction thing. A farm "needed" a male and a female head, but the two didn't need to be spouses, just related. If there was no man, an unmarried woman could hold the male role.
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Replying to @BCowcatcher @arthur_affect
Sex/gender words refer to social status, not biology or physical ability to reproduce. While these cultures are violently sexist, transgressing gender roles are social-religious transgressions; until early modernity, there is no concept of "natural", and that's slow to catch on.
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Replying to @BCowcatcher @arthur_affect
Not long ago, anyone who was dependent on an employer could be referred to as a "boy" or "girl", regardless of age. Norwegian is not that different from English - wasn't that the case there too?
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Replying to @BCowcatcher
In America this was heavily racialized -- calling a Black man "boy" regardless of his age was a way to remind him of his permanently inferior status
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Replying to @arthur_affect
Oh, of course. Over here, you stopped being a "boy" or "girl" by changing your social status - your own household, becoming independent of the household "father" and "mother". 19th c, the pseudobiology of race and gender assigned vast numbers of people to permanent dependenthood.
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Replying to @BCowcatcher @arthur_affect
(Incidentally, I wonder if that's why Mike Pence keeps referring to his wife as "mother" - it's an old fashioned Scandinavian thing that everyone refer to the senior woman in the extended family as "mother".)
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Yeah it's an old fashioned thing in American culture too
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