God this is infuriating.
I listened to the first few minutes and sure enough – the male presenter talks about “people” buying sports bras and wearing sports bras. There’s some conversation with women, and we can tell they’re women because of their voices, but there must not be any mention of women.
This is so poisonous.
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15 responses to “People wear sports bras”
Of course the bad faith response to this is “YOU’RE SAYING THAT WOMEN AREN’T PEOPLE!!!”
There’s also this >>
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_bra
In isolation a (very) charitable interpretation would be that using ‘people’ means the presenter can avoid repeatedly saying ‘women and girls’ (not that repeated ‘women and girls’ would be problematic), but it’s part of a well-developed pattern, and patterns don’t develop in isolation.
@twiliter,
That’s the “bro”.
Did this pattern start with a memo from higher up, or is it completely his idea? Sometimes this stuff gets internalized and becomes a part of one’s repertoire to the extent that you might think it’s your own idea. At that point, who can tell the difference? You’re self censoring naturally. A True Believer isn’t going to need a memo; they’ll be agitating for a memo to be issued.
I’m reminded of the scene in the John Hurt screen version of 1984 where someone has been made an unperson. Winston dutifully, reflexively scrapes that face from the label of the bottle of liquor he’s just pulled out to pour a drink from. The face is gone; the face was never there.
Aren’t there dogs wearing sports bras? Speciesist!
Language itself is slowly being changed. Living in a bilingual household (French/English), it is becoming obvious in the English used by the children (directly influenced by the educational environment). A friend is a ‘they’. A teacher is a ‘they’. There is now just a single 3rd person pronoun, never a he or she. It becomes bizarre hearing the same reference in French, clearly still using il/elle, and indeed even ils/elles.
Colin @6, I tried a compression calming vest on my dog because of his anxiety about riding in vehicles. It didn’t work, but resembled a sports bra. Following WaM @4, would that make it a “dra?”
Naif, what if they are talking about several people, of different sexes? How do they differentiate which “they”? Or do they use the names in every sentence?
Iknklast,
This is how a recent conversation went
Son: Dad, can my friends come over after school tomorrow?
Me: Who is that?
Son: A, B, C, and D. Until 6 o’clock
One day passes, before school
Son: I talked to B, they are not coming over
Me: That’s too bad, maybe next week
After school, doorbell rings, I answer. A, C and D are there.
Me: Son, I thought you said they were not coming?
Son: No, I said B was not coming
If only Son had said “I talked to B, they is not coming over”…
@Naif #7.
The use of “they” was quite common when I was in High School, back in the Dark Ages (1960s). Of course, it was nothing to do with gender, just an amorphous grouping.
Q “Who did XX?”
A “They did”.
A good teacher would then ask “Who’s they?” to identify the correct party.
#3 AoS
But even in that case, he should have at least started with ‘women and girls’ at least once, before switching to ‘people’ for its brevity.
___
#4 WaM
Man-siere!
I saw a guy wearing a sports bra at the gym the other day. He was very masculine appearing and I saw no other indication that he was trying to present as female. It looked good on him!
Ophelia, if you only listened to the the first few minutes, you missed the most infuriating bit! Near the end, when the “bra professor” or whatever they call her is talking about the future of sports bra research, she says something to the effect that most of the women (she uses the word) taking part in their research are young, white, with small to medium breast size – students basically, because the research is happening in universities, and that some diversity in their test subjects would be useful. That’s when the presenter jumps in with some comment about being inclusive of “anyone who might want to wear a sports bra”. I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt when he was talking about “people buying these things” but this was such an obvious and unnecessary “it’s not just women who wear bras”, I started shouting at the radio again. It happens a lot these days.