It's a puzzle why women now want a sex change
http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/its-a-puzzle-why-women-now-want-a-sex-change-2297038.html8/14/10
I've always been bemused by this desire of women to turn themselves, semantically speaking, into men. 'Twas never the other way round. Gary Cooper, Errol Flynn, John Wayne, Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt have never demanded to be called 'actresses', nor did John Barbirolli ask to be a 'conductress'.
Now don't get me wrong. I can see the misogyny of dictionaries that always put the masculine first ('actor, actress'), but if I'm reading a film or theatre review, I like to know straightaway -- if an actor's/actress's first name is 'Jo', for example -- whether they are a man or a woman. As it is, the moment I read 'actor', my eye skips down the paragraph to find out their sex. If feminism had been a Tudor conviction, what would we have called the men who played women in Shakespeare's plays -- since all female theatrical roles were then played by males?
