I thought of you guys when I first read this, and I'm interested to know your opinions on how language can harm, and what we can do about it. I'm aways shocked by the naysayers who insist language has no power to oppress, or harm, or perpetuate inequality, not least when they're otherwise intelligent people.

Hi, good to see you.

The article makes a fairly compelling case and I don't think there is any doubt (or at least there shouldn't be) that language can be used as a tool of oppression. There is a difficulty with the specifics that are used as examples.
The problem is that if an unidentified assailant rapes a woman then how can it be reported without using the passive? You can make sentences like the one I just used but you are forced into using phrases like "unknown assailant" and I'm not convinced that it's much better. In this case the passive isn't being used as an agent avoidance strategy it's used because the agent is unknown. Nevertheless in any specific case, say a report of a particular rape in a newspaper, the active voice, using this kind of phrasing, would certainly help move the blame where it belongs.

The article that is quoted at the end though is about rape and violence against women in general and I can't see how the active voice would do anything but reduce the impact. If we take up the challenge attempt a subject-restored version of the text the only subjects we can use are things like "people", "someone", "assailants" etc. The reformulation is rendered just as vague about agency as the passive voice.

I'm not convinced that

For many of us, what some men across the world subject some women to or force them to do, simply because of their gender, is

has more impact than

For many of us, what some women across the world are subjected to or forced to do, simply because of their gender, is incomprehensible.



In fact in this particular instance I think the distance between the subject and the verb phrase detracts from the force of the sentence.

Of course the restored subject could just be "men" but I have a problem with that because it gives the impression that it's all men, which of course it isn't.

The article could be rewritten far more powerfully but not, I think by simple active-passive inversion.

Away from the specifics of this particular article though, language in general and the choice of passive to suppress a known agent can certainly be used to focus attention on the victim rather than the offender (I purposely chose NOT to use the words subject and object there) or to give the wrong idea that something just happened and was nobody's fault. This isn't just seen in oppression of victims, it's a standard political strategy as well. "Mistakes were made" is the most common form, rather than "We made mistakes."

So. Can language be used to oppress. Certainly it can. Can the passive voice be used this way? Yes, as can any other formulation that avoids attribution.

I could write more but I have to go out in a few minutes. Sorry if its a bit incoherent. I wrote it in a hurry.

As I said, nice to see you. Maybe we can get together with Suman when I'm back from my summer job.

Bob

Hi Bob .

Your post is coherent enough - I'll let you off (especially as mine is likely to be a bit ineloquent as I'm in a rush too!). I agree that people can use the passive voice to try to escape culpability in many other aspects; it just appears from the research that the effect is particularly bad when it's done in terms of sexual violence.

I have a problem with that because it gives the impression that it's all men, which of course it isn't.

The comments deal with this pretty well, and probably better than I could, so I'll just say briefly that I think that men's hurt feelings are less important than the need to get out there just how prevalent such violence by men on women is, and to recentre it onto the men and away from the women - even if it makes some other men feel ucomfortable. Hopefully such discomfort will encourage them to be active in fighting rape culture to show that they're not like that, since merely sitting back and thinking it helps nobody - and of course, silence is often interpreted as complicity, which helps perpetuate the problem.

(This isn't a go at you Bob, as I'm sure you know me well enough by now to work out, but there are people on this site who don't know me at all so I thought it pertinent to state it.)

Anyway, back to the passive. On the flip side, it can also be used to be polite when making a complaint; to distance the error made from the person to whom one is speaking: for example I might say "My debit card was sent to the wrong address" rather than "You sent my debit card to the wrong address". Even when the person understands the 'you' to be impersonal, it can still grate to hear it 100 times a day, so I try to use the passive when making initial complaints to businesses, especially when speaking to someone who most likely had nothing to do with the original problem.

MS Word still seems to hate the passive, despite the fact that it can add to what one writes, and when used well it doesn't detract from the meaning at all. I like being able to use both when I write.

And yes, it'll be good to see you both again when you get back

As another woman's voice on this, I agree completely with the article and am surprised that I haven't thought about it before. For me there is a huge difference between the first and second here:

quote:

For many of us, what some men across the world subject some women to or force them to do, simply because of their gender, is incomprehensible.

For many of us, what some women across the world are subjected to or forced to do, simply because of their gender, is incomprehensible.

I have found, at least in the U.S., that sometimes women can be their own worst enemies with rape cases, particularly date rape cases. So I don't think this is a gender specific problem at all.

Related to the passive voice harming victims, I see it in health care as well. The quote "mistakes were made" is often seen in health care, again to whitewash the situation, rather than to say, "The nurse (or physician) made an error." The whole movement toward errors being a systems problem supports this attitude. While some errors are due to systems problems, many are due to individual mistakes and should be acknowledged that way to patients.

We so appreciate seeing you again, Cat, and enjoyed having you on our chat.

The whole point about the passive voice is that it does allow subject and object to be distanced. That can be a good thing - equally it can be a bad thing as this article demonstrates.

Language is a tool and like any other tool can be used for good or for evil. That does not mean that the tool itself is a bad thing; it might, however, mean that some of its users are.

quote:

MS Word still seems to hate the passive, despite the fact that it can add to what one writes, and when used well it doesn't detract from the meaning at all. I like being able to use both when I write.

If you go into the language tools in Word you can alter your preferences; you just need to uncheck the "passive sentences" box.

Saying that the passive voice deletes the subject is incorrect and just serves to confuse the issue, I think. What the passive voice does is allow the thematic agent to be unspecified. The agent is the thing or person that brings about a state of affairs. In some clauses the agent and the syntactic subject line up, but in other kinds of clauses, like passive clauses, they don't. In some men force some women to to do something the agent is some men, which also happens to be the subject. But in some women are forced to do something, the subject is some women, and the agent is unspecified.

There are active sentences where the agent is unspecified as well, for instance:
The book fell off the table. (who pushed it?)
I'm afraid. (Who's scaring you?)
The bread cuts easily. (Who's cutting it?)

Dislike of the passive voice seems to be tied with the connotations of passivity, helplessness, etc. But it's just one syntactic structure that is used to eliminate the agent, and it's not the only kind of syntactic structure that is used to do so.

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passive

passive

Discussion of the passive construction in English brings up one of my favorite grammatical topics, ergativity. It turns out that the subject of verbs can be split into two kinds, the subjects of transitive vs intransitive verbs. These are usually referred to by A and S respectively. The object of transitive verbs is referred to as O. Why divvy things up like this? Well, it turns out that about a third of the languages in the world are what are called ergative-absolutive languages. The other two thirds are called nominative-accusative languages. The NA languages mark S and A with the nominative case and O with the accusative. Hence their name. EA languages, on the other hand, mark S and O with the absolutive case and A with the ergative. EA languages include Georgian, Basque, and Maya. Here are some examples of both:

NA, Latin:

1a. Mater filiam amat. (The mother loves her daughter.)
1b. Filia amatur. (The girl is loved.)
2a. Filia matrem amat. (The daughter loves her mother.)
2b. Mater amatur. (The mothger is loved.)

Just as in English, the A of a passive sentence can be specified or not.

1c. Filia ab matre amatur. (The girl is loved by the mother.)

EA, Basque:

3. Gizona etorri da. (The man has arrived.)
4. Gizonak mutila ikusi du. (The man saw the boy.)

(In the Basque examples, gizon == man, mutil == boy, -ak == erg, -a == absolutive.)

Just as NA languages have the passive voice to make the the object (or more properly patient) of a transitive verb fill the A (subject or agent) slot, EA have an antipassive voice which puts the A into the absolutive case.

[Addendum: More information on antipassives (link).]

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