#maidism

Maidism began as a project here out of frustration with how much of the English language derives from masculine language. What started as frenzied hacking each head of this hydra upon discovery has cohered into a linguistic style that others have taken inspiration from and contributed to. This post collects those scattered principles into a single accessible location, to be updated over time, useful for whether you want to maidicize your everyday speech, reference it for creative fiction, or just think it's neat.

Maidism has one modest goal: the total feminization of the English language. Rip out masculinity root and stem, refuse to settle for "gender-neutral" language. Above all, have fun and be yourself, that's why I do this, and always question knowledge you've taken for granted, both in and outside the realm of etymology.

The day before, someone I hadn't spoken to prior said "redditrice" in conversation with me

a good example in in my dialect when you are referring to yourself and somebody else you ALWAYS need to use Accusative Pronouns (at least if your using and) for example you would have to say me and her, not she and i which is ungrammatical, you arent allowed to use the Nominative there

other examples would be the fact the Dative case is completely dead, its last Pronoun "Whom" has left the language its extinct and with it the Accusative form for that set is also dead leaving only the Absolutive and Possesive, when you are using that set you can only use the Nominative

the same thing is happening with the few remaining gender suffixes the inflection is collapsing further, the -ster suffix has rapidly dropping productivity and -maid has a rapidly decreasing productivity as well

what would more sense is to flip it around such that the feminine modifyer word is over at the start and forms a compound, this feels more natural and doesnt try to resist existing changes so your not trying to halt a Glacier

I get this kind of response a lot that I'm trying to re gender binarize English and it's always odd to me. I don't want feminine suffixes alongside masculine ones, I agree that we should have an English without differing gender language, but instead of the current status quo with most feminine language removed and masculine language treated as standard, I instead use feminine language as standard.

Here's a practical example. We used to have actor and actress, and actress has partially fallen out of favor, because feminine language and femininity as a whole are treated as secondary and degrading. But, actor hasn't really been made any more meaningfully "neutral," which you can observe via the fact that if someone says "actor" without prefix, she always means a man, and people will instead commonly say and write "female actor" now. I'd like the opposite of that, if men are to exist at all

Put simply, even true "neutrality" (which most "gender-neutral language doesn't achieve) does nothing to combat male defaultism. It's why there was a trend of universal she is writing for a time, it takes active willful assertion of femininity to actually break away from masculine defaulting. What I write is part of that trend, though taken further than most.

We know that -er/etc is considered masculine and -ster/etc are considered feminine, but we view it as men creating a language where you *have to tell people explicitly if someone is a woman*, to point out that she is Other and Different and Lesser, as an act of shutting women out of neutral language, and therefore we actively fight being called things like maid, hostess, actress, etc, because we don't want to have our gender pointed out as relevant to our work or ability. To us feminine language exists as an act of othering, not as a natural "opposite" of "masculine" language, and we have fought to get rid of this othering categorization by making sure that -er/etc will no longer be only for men but have room for everyone, no more questioning of women including themselves in the "default".

Men have always gotten the relaxed and neutral for themselves; the permission not to shave or dress up to be an object to gaze upon, the inclusion in society without question, power handed to them instead of taken, the simple default endings to words. The dressing up of femininity that extends to language -tress, -ster, -ette, often denoting a belonging to the male counterpart like a duchess being the wife of a duke instead of the female equivalent of a duke, the othering and objectification, that is something we try to get rid of. We try to take up the neutral space we're barred from.

If someone called me a translatress or translatester or something I would feel as if they are trying to other me from my occupation and unnecessarily pointing out my gender, and I instinctively feel on guard, because gendering as feminine is not actually about identity but about othering

In a world with only women I imagine it would not exist, because there would be no reason to other, but I also imagine that masculine words wouldn't exist, all endings would just be neutral, unless they other people based on some other factor. Maybe there'd be class based grammatical othering?

Also I am not writing this as an attack, I think your ideas are interesting, it just makes me feel very complicated feelings when it looks from my perspective like people are trying to undo the work we've been doing to include women in the default and neutral, seemingly leaning into the idea that othering language is unproblematic and neutral in itself. But I know that that is probably not what you as a feminist is trying to do so it'd be best to open my mind and close the gap between us

I fundamentally don't view being a woman and the highlighting of womanhood as degrading or othering and have a firm opposition to the strain of feminism that seeks to more or less abolish womanhood as a means of evading misogyny. It's throwing the baby out with the bathwater and I take the stance that womanhood must be more firmly asserted rather than further obscured.

I've been reading Ursula K Le Guin lately, who uses "man" and "he" as gender-neutral, which was grammatically correct and the proper way to write at the time. And that's the logical endpoint of erasing feminine language to not be othered, we may as well just all call each other he, the way so many say "man" and "guys" and "dude" and so on and call it neutrality.

Even with truly neutral language that isn't just using masculine language universally, I dislike it because for the majority, neutral automatically translates into masculine. It's why there was a push towards using she universally a while back in writing, so that at the very least the audience reading has to remember women exist, and why I think universal they is a step back.