where's the first baseperson? via delusionalcubsfan @ flickr
I like to think that my dad’s a pretty cool dude, and occasionally he makes me smile by dropping little pearls of thought into my email inbox. Thus it was yesterday when one of our constant back-and-forth exchanges about baseball took an interesting turn. Quoth father.of.a.lesser.god:
One thing that occurred to me today is how many of the position designations and play outcomes in baseball contain the word “man”. I know that should be obvous, but it shows how deeply these things are buried.
It’s sort of like “fireman,” (In baseball a fireman is slang for “relief pitcher”.) So, come the revolution, how will we rename the first baseman? A first-base person? I dunno!
Any thoughts? Maybe a blog post on the subject would elicit a response for someone who has thought of this and has a good idea.
And so a Harpyness post was born.
Can I just say it’s kind of awesome that he welcomes/expects some kind of “revolution” in gender norms for both people and linguistics? But to stay on topic, his question did get me thinking about the importance of the gendered traits of these specific words that are strictly applied to men. Unless the Commissioner of Baseball issued a memo while I was sleeping last night, America’s pastime — and one of my greatest passions — is a No Girls Allowed area. Women can play softball, but not professional or collegiate baseball. Given that this is the case, is it unreasonable to keep the term “first baseman” with the emphasis on the -man ending? I’m not sure.
Playing pro baseball was one of my childhood dreams, one that has obviously not materialized (and never would have, even if women were allowed to participate in the sport), and I wanted to play first base to honor my childhood idol Don Mattingly. So what would I have been? Even in my daydreams — which I still have — of donning Yankee pinstripes, I really wasn’t sure what I would have been called. A first basewoman? A first baseperson? Maybe a first baser?
If the designation was to be changed (for the sake of argument, we’ll term the position a “first baser”), the one thing it would do would be to signal that there is an acknowledgment of the fact that athletic ability is gender neutral. I have to believe that, out of the 750 players in the major leagues, there is a very good chance that there are some who would not win a head-to-head battle of baseball skills against a woman. I am a baseball purist who thinks everything went downhill after the introduction of the Designated Hitter, but I don’t think that the game would be ruined in the least if we threw some women into the starting lineups. Unfortunately, given the fact that the machismo flows as easily as the Gatorade in the dugouts, I don’t see this happening anytime soon.
So this is why the linguistic aspect of it intrigues me. If there are so many other gender neutral terms within the game — pitcher, catcher, center fielder, shortstop, batter, manager, etc. — why cling to those that are left? Why can’t the term “three men on base” be changed to “three players on base”? The problem is that these things are so firmly entrenched that just switching over a designation is never that easy. Despite official terminologies being changed, the vernacular still refers to firefighters as firemen, police officers as policemen, and so on; humankind is often reduced to mankind. The idea of changing the nomenclature of a position that is exclusively applied to men may strike some as absurd, but keeping it as it stands is an implicit admission that only those possessing a certain set of genitalia are capable of playing the game.
Agree? Disagree? Have a better term than “first baser”? Leave your thoughts in the comments.
Maybe this is fucked up but lately I’ve found myself just wanting to stop trying to revolutionize language (not that I’ve been trying THAT hard) and just adopt “man” as my own. I was thinking about it in terms of my in laws who are all in the medical profession in the UK, and how surgeons there are called Mister instead of Doctor, so when women entered the profession they started calling them MISS. So you’re like a 50 year old female surgeon, and they’re calling you Miss Regent. I think in that situation, if Doctor was off the table, I would like to be called Mr. Regent instead of Miss. Just stop fucking NOTICING my femaleness all the time. Just let me be first baseman. Except I hate baseball.
@JD: The thing is that language is in constant motion, and the issue is really with who is doing the revolutionizing of terminology. I agree with the whole frustration about always having your femaleness noticed, but keeping certain terms the way they are sets up a linguistic structure where the default gendered traits are male and not neutral, which I believe does influence people’s notions of gender. At certain times I roll my eyes at the notion (like “personhole” instead of “manhole”) but in the end, I feel it’s less about having someone notice my femaleness than it is acknowledging that the default structure, linguistic or otherwise, should not be explicitly masculine.
I definitely get that Sarah and laud the effort to demasculinize language. I’m just musing that oen way to de-genderize it is to insist that we too are men, thereby stripping the maleness from the category of “men.” But I might just be on too many uppers this morning.
@JD: Yeah, I totally see where you’re coming from. I was kind of musing on a similar thing earlier this week about people who want to rebrand feminism as “equalism” and strip gender from the name of the struggle for gender parity altogether — something I would not be in favor of. So I don’t really have the answer about when gender should be stripped from a word and when it’s best to leave it as is. (And as I said in the post, I’m really not sure if it’s worth the struggle to rebrand something like the term “first baseman”.)
I think first baser sounds good.
And thinking of sports where both genders should compete/play together, I’d love to see the Williams sisters like, make Andy Roddick cry on the court.
This might not work in every situation but here’s what I’m thinking (if it wouldn’t be too confusing): There’s three on base, pitch count is one and one, and now kithkin, first base for the new york mets, has just hit a grand slam! I think that in general we could remove the person of those positions by just dropping -man or -person without too much confusion.
w/r/t the broader argument though, I think that Sarah’s right and this is less about femaleness being noticed than masculine pronouns being default. Then, even if they’re calling you Mr. Regent, your femaleness will certainly be noticed anyway, I would imagine. Ideally, being Ms. rather than Mr. Regent just wouldn’t be a big deal and wouldn’t serve to otherize.
Here’s some food for thought:
As we learn language, we also learn culture. A psycologist studied this by asking people to describe a bridge. She noticed that German speaking people saw feminine traits for a bridge (a feminine word in their language) and Spanish speaking people noted masculine traits for a bridge (a masculine word in their language). I don’t want to go into the whole thing here so listen to the last segment of the 4/10/09 NPR: On Science podcast for more information. http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=510286
Keeping this in mind- if we continue using masculine words like baseman in baseball isn’t this teaching people that baseball is a male oriented thing (and discourging girls and women to take part)?
@Alyssa: Thank you for the podcast link! I remember hearing about that study on another website. I think your last sentence kind of encapsulates my thinking: it wasn’t that long ago that women were barred from being firefighters or police officers, and their presence in bodies such as Congress were entirely negligible. So the terms “policeman” and “Congressman” and “fireman” were bandied about in front of girls and women who wanted to reach for those professions, casually indicating that they were a male-only zone. I’m not under the illusion that there is a broad consensus to open Major League Baseball to women, but I think that it’s worth an examination as to why the -man suffix is affixed to these kinds of professional positions without a second thought.
I LOVE “first base for the NY Mets” solution! It’s almost poetic.
Yah, have always hated the implication, in gender segregating sports, that women are inherently weaker than men.
“Oh, but you wouldn’t actually want women to compete against men! They’re just in different classes, physically. But women are more flexible.” (elementary school PE teacher quote)
I know that softball and baseball are different, but does anyone know the nomenclature used in softball? First/second/third basewomen? Three women on base?
(Also, I hate baseball. I’ve tried to like it many times, but I just can’t. Sorry, s.o.a.l.g.!)
@Kivrin: I do not know the precise nomenclature used in women’s softball. I tried googling it but really didn’t come up with anything. And I will forgive you the very, very grievous sin of not liking baseball.
“I was kind of musing on a similar thing earlier this week about people who want to rebrand feminism as “equalism” and strip gender from the name of the struggle for gender parity altogether — something I would not be in favor of.”
I agree, for the simple fact (from my view anyway) that feminism is not about equal rights it is about rights for women. To me “equalism” is a fallacy.
While we’re talking about pro sports, I’ll just point out that the NFL has no language or provision anywhere in its charter that specifies anything about gender.
@Hill Rat: This is true. It is still an inferior sport when compared to baseball!
@sarah.of.a.lesser.god
Baseball is better on the radio, that’s about it.
Are you sure women aren’t allowed to play in college baseball? Check out this article on USABaseball.com, which notes: “… Christal Fitzgerald, an Australian who was the first international female to play college baseball in the US and is currently the only woman playing college baseball, now in her third season at Daniel Webster College.” DWC is in the NECC, whatever that means; I don’t follow college sports.
I’m learning German now, and I find it interesting that while nouns are more explicitly gendered (Angela Merkel is Bundeskanzlerin, not Bundeskanzler), babies, children, and girls (but not boys) are neuter.
When talking about men and women’s sports everyone always goes on about “how each are different physically blah blah blah and that’s why men sports are better” and I always really wish that women had a team sport that was invented for them, that showcased what physical advantages that women have over men. And it would be awesome and the professional version would rival the nfl and nba in profit.
The same difficulties apply in cricket as in baseball. Batsman is often used for both sexes, though batter is also substituted for a person who bats, and this seems more likely to apply to women I think. But if you use the terms batsman for a man who bats and batswoman for a woman who bats you still have the problem that there is a fielding position called ‘third man’. These things are complicated.
@x trapnel: Women are not allowed to play in baseball for colleges that fall under the NCAA umbrella, which is the standard collegiate league for all athletics, both male and female.
As a non American one of the terms that has always bemused me is ‘freshman’ applied to both sexes. How on earth do women tolerate this? In the UK we merely have first year students, second year students ecetera. The term fresher is applied to a new student, as in ‘freshers week’ but not really applicable thereafter. It is a while since I left college but I don’t think this has changed.
@Katharine: “Freshmen” is definitely one of those male-centric terms that is used without a second thought. I went to a women’s college, and they had the good sense to use the term “first-years” or “firsties”. Makes a lot more sense, even for coed colleges.
J.D. Regent’s suggestion to de-genderize the word “man” has this on its side: it’d be a reclamation of (much) earlier usage. Whether, after several centuries of genderized usage, it’d be effective, is anyone’s guess.
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