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Cameron considers this passage to be the most important of her three points
about ‘metaphorical gender’
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Her second point then moved onto
how these classifications follow no logical rules as some objects can be either
‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ due to their sound, flavour or usage suggesting that these
concepts are far more complicated than simply ‘strong’ or ‘weak’
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One
object could be considered to be both masculine and feminine depending on the other
object that it is in ‘opposition’ to; this is the metaphorical gender
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Her response is to the ‘thought experiment’ created by Jack Rosenthal which looks
closely at the way in which humans can gender words when in opposition to one
another
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These hidden genders only occur in our minds when we have two
objects in opposition highlighting how erratic and abstract this gendering is and how it
is completely constructed by our society
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There is a hierarchy between these two terms, leaving masculine terms to be the more
dominant over the feminine
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She mainly highlights how we seem to
naturally categorise words as being either masculine or feminine despite them not
originally having a gender in the English language
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She continues by
suggesting that, where possible, language should be neutralised by using ‘they’ when
talking about a specific person
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This passage mainly looks at his experiment and she expands on why it is relatively easy
to decide whether an object is masculine or feminine despite no suggestion of being
either within the word itself
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As a result the other object must be feminine
further emphasising how women have become ‘the other’; it is what man is not
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However the ‘fork’ later becomes
feminine when compared with a ‘knife’ as this object has more traits relating to
masculinity
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Many of the feminist ideas that she draws upon are about how women are

not the opposite of men but simply different, arguing that Freud was guilty of reducing
women down to those who do not have a penis when females simply just have different
sex organs
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Within the English language we have ‘hidden genders’ behind each word, although these
words initially may not have a gender it becomes quite easy for humans to choose
which gender a word has when compared to another word that is in ‘opposition’
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The association mainly comes from the way in
which we see these genders within society, often feminine is considered to be more
negative as it is ‘weaker’, whilst masculine is more positive as it is associated with being
strong and powerful
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When considering the social
construct of the term ‘masculine’ in terms of what it is to be a ‘man’, humans think of
words such as ‘strong’, ‘confident’ and ‘powerful’
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With this opposition there is
also a hierarchy between these two as masculine, and therefore men, are the more
powerful gender
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Underlying this ‘opposition’ between the two genders and how the

feminine object is usually that of weaker strength, taste or colour (depending on what
the two objects in question are), to be feminine and or female is considered to be more
negative when in comparison to being masculine
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