Never Walked In High Heels

              Sometimes academics have far too much time on their hands.

              A typographical error on my part allowed me to discover the word ‘womyn’ in Wikipedia yesterday. As with any of my experiences with Wikipedia this leads to what I call ‘justifiable and educational procrastination,’ aka spending hours clicking on links to learn about things that are utterly unrelated to my life. Its an addiction without a 12 step program.

              It seems that the term ‘womyn’ was a product of feminists in the 1970’s wanting to remove the ‘man’ from ‘woman.’ It comes from the branch of feminism that seeks to correct the inherent biases in language because the word ‘woman’ suggests that female humans are a subset of male humans.

              This emphasis shift to gender neutrality rears its ugly head for me as a writer all the time. Several of my friends have vocalized their disturbance that I use the word ‘he’ to refer to an editorial person. “Why not use ‘he or she,’ or better yet, just use ‘their.’” Has anyone ever tried to write in iambic verse or with an ear for cadence while using the term ‘he or she’? It’s cumbersome, clumsy, and sounds absurd. Take the line from The Merchant of Venice when Portia describes any monarch with “His sceptre shows the force of temporal power.” Say that out loud. Now just try to say “His or her sceptre shows the force of temporal power,” without sounding like a legal document. It just doesn’t work. You wouldn’t tell a painter that every time he (or she) used the color red he (or she) had to put the color blue next to it. Why would you exert that level of control over a writer?

              And using ‘their’ isn’t an option because its just wrong grammatically. If you doubt me, refer to your middle school grammar books.

              Which brings me back to the neologism of ‘womyn.’ The fact that there is a little red line on my screen telling me there’s a spelling error every time I write ‘womyn’ tells me there’s a problem. As a writer, I am a firm believer that words mean something. It is because of this opinion that I hope to be careful about the words I use. And while language is a wonderfully flexible thing (Shakespeare, it is said, introduced 1,700+ words into the English language), the fact is the entire basis for the argument of the existence of the term is unfounded.

              ‘Woman’ is not a diminution of ‘man’ as some might suggest. The word is germanic in origin where ‘man’ and ‘mann’ have two distinct meanings. In German ‘man’ is a gender neutral subject (as in mankind or human) whereas ‘mann’  means someone of male gender. Oddly enough my spell check seems to like the word mann much more than womyn.

              If you want to be egalitarian about it, here’s what I propose. Get rid of the word ‘woman.’ (This is the point where all my female friends look for the biggest rock that’s nearby to throw at my head.) Just stop using the word. You don’t need it. Then use ‘man’ to mean anyone regardless of gender. Then use the scientific words of male and female if you need to specify. As science can tell you, using these terms doesn’t denote any superiority of one over the other, it signifies biological difference. That’s all.

              I have now spent some hours contemplating the use of the word ‘woman’ and am surprised at how much time can go into a debate about a single letter. And the thing is, just as in any schism, those who want to be insulted by the spelling of a word will always choose to be.  In this way, 200 years after changing the spelling to womyn there would no doubt be a faction demanding that men and womyn are exactly the same and we should, therefore change it back.