Berkeley Bans Use of the Word 'Manhole' Because It's Sexist
Source – Soon, there will be no more manholes in the city of Berkeley, California. There will also be no chairmen, no manpower, no policemen or policewomen.
No, that doesn’t mean a whole city will be without committee leaders and law enforcement. It means that words that imply a gender preference will be removed from the city’s codes and replaced with gender-neutral terms, according a recently adopted ordinance.
The city voted Tuesday night to replace gendered terms in its municipal codes, like “manhole” and “manpower,” with gender-neutral ones like “maintenance hole” and “human effort.”
The item passed without discussion or comments and was not controversial, said Berkeley City Council member Rigel Robinson, the bill’s primary author.
“There’s power in language,” Robinson said. “This is a small move, but it matters.”
You might just assume that as an aging, cisgendered heterosexual male who works for a site that Deadspin writers to try to increase the Virtue Points they can later cash in when they’re out of jobs, that I’d think this news out of Berkeley is ridiculous. That it’s an Orwellian effort to control language and therefore thought, and that it’s the most blatant sort of pandering.
Nope. You got the wrong guy human if you came here looking for that attitude. That’s the Patriarchy talking. And I’m trying to get ahead of the curve and stay there. In my neighborhood, they were sewer covers. As in “Go out as far as the sewer cover, then cut straight toward Sullivan’s house and I’ll hit you with a pass” And that was always good enough for me.
Because we believed in equality. For too long, sewer holes were gender exclusive bastions of the male hierarchy. Like country clubs or fraternal organizations. But with human waste flowing through them. I can’t help but think of all the little girls out there who wanted to work down inside them for a living. But were discouraged from doing it due to a gender-specific suffix.
Now they’ll be empowered to, thanks to these forward thinking pioneers in Berkeley. And I like to think that I was in on the ground floor of this movement. So when the world gets saved at last and we have true justice, equality of opportunity and pay, we’ll owe it all to people throwing in extra syllables when they’re describing common everyday items, labor terms or calling for help out the window of a burning building. Thank you, Berkeley. All our problems have been solved. This was one small step for human, one giant leap for humankind.