Back in '92 (or was it '96?) we began for the first time to read about the "Gender Gap." A nice phrase, almost alliterative, descriptive of an edge among female voters for, as I recall, Governor Clinton. We talked about it, the punditocracy wrote about it, but none of us thought we were observing a tectonic shift in language. But today, the word is everywhere. Senator Clinton, her partisans have been charging for some time, is being criticized "because of her gender," candidates are being urged to seek Vice-Presidential nominees "without regard to gender," and the good old American-English word "sex" has virtually disappeared.
And right up to date, in the Washington Post for Sunday, May 31, a casual search reveals a Letter to the Editor challenging a columnist for "attributing much of today's gender disparity in high-powered jobs to limits women place on themselves." On the opposite editorial page, a professor at Georgetown's Business School interprets some polling data as demonstrating "this is not a gender war." An even more recent article in the Post on "human behavior," both a professor of constitutional law and the next president of the American Sociological Association are quoted, using the handy word "gender" six times, although there is one reference to "sexism" (will this not soon become "genderism?"). And so it goes. James Thurber's "War Between the Sexes" will doubtless be reprinted as "War Between the Genders," and Simone de Beauvoir's masterful (mistressful?) "The Second Sex" can expect to be studied as "The Second Gender."
But "Gender" is not and has never been considered--except by today's journalists and the politicians they cover--a synonym for "sex." It is a useful word in the discipline of grammar, particularly in the grammar of the Romance languages, where nouns have been assigned as "masculine" or "feminine" by standards of mythology, animalism and philosophy now shrouded in the mists of antiquity (why in French, for example, is "lake" masculine but "the sea" is feminine?).
The dictionaries are clear on the point. My Webster's Unabridged offers two definitions. "1. In grammar" gives us 22 lines of type, beginning with "The classification by which nouns and pronouns are grouped and inflected," going on to distinguish among groups of languages, shows that English is now virtually free from noun inflection and "shows gender chiefly by pronoun reference." Except, of course, by political commentators. And, oh yes, "2. sex. [Colloq.]"
And even the American Heritage College Dictionary, surely the most liberal and relaxed compendium, refers to a recent trend among anthropologists to use the word to refer to "sex-based categories," although noting, rather tartly, that this distinction "is by no means widely observed." Anthropologists, stick around.
The intrusion of "gender" instead of that old standby, "sex," is, I believe, a return to the more ancient days of journalism when we were especially concerned about propriety. We return, by using "gender" when we mean "sex," to the time when obituary writers, forbidden to use the dread word "cancer," turned to "a lengthy illness," gay men were categorized as "confirmed bachelors," and a venereal disease, when mentioned at all, became a "social disease." It's the same impulse that led to the introduction of "light" and "dark" meat of chicken and other fowl, because polite hostesses couldn't bring themselves to use the awful words "breast" or "leg." But at a time in the 21st Century when a popular magazine like "Cosmopolitan" is urging its female readers (are there any others?) to find their lovers' "G-spots," can't we stick with "sex" and bypass "gender," at least for an election cycle or two?