Another Area of English Language
Consider now another area of our language. English has a large number of nouns which appear to be neutral with regard to sex, but actually are covertly masculine. Although the dictionary may define poet as one who writes poetry, a woman who writes poetry appears so anomalous or threatening to some,that they use the special term poetess to refer to her. There is no corresponding term to call attention to the sex of a man who writes poetry, but then we find nothing remarkable in the fact that poetry is written by men. Of course, if a woman is sufficiently meritorious, we may forgive her sex and refer to her as a poet after all, or, wishing to keep the important fact of her sex in our consciousness, we may call her a woman poet. However, to balance the possible reward of having her sex overlooked, there remains the possibility of more extreme punishment, we may judge her work so harshly that she will be labelled a lady poet. Once again, the moral is clear, people who write poetry are assumed to be men until proven otherwise, and people identified as women who write poetry are assumed to be less competent than sexually unidentified (i.e., presumably male) people who write poetry.
If the phenomenon we have been discussing were limited to poetry, we might not regard it as very significant , after all, our society tends to regard poets as some what odd anyway. But, in fact, it is wide spread in the language. There is a general tendency to label the exception, which in most cases turns out to be women. Many words with feminine suffixes, such as farmerette, authoress, and aviatrix, have such a clear trivializing effect, that there has been a trend away from their use and a preference for woman author and the like. The feminines of many ethnic terms, such as Negress and Jewess, are considered particularly objectionable. Other words, such as actress and waitress, seem to have escaped the negative connotations and remain in use. However, we note that waiters often work in more expensive establishments than do waitresses, that actresses belong to" Actors Equity, "and that women participants in theatrical groups have begun to refer to themselves as "actors." on rare occasions, this presumption of maleness in terms which should be sexually neutral, works to women’’s advantage. If someone is called a bastard, either as a general term of abuse, or as a statement of the lack of legal marital ties between that persons parents, we assume that person is a male. While an illegitimate child may be of either sex, only men are bastard in common usage. Although the dictionary seems to regard this as a sex-neutral term, a recent dictionary of slang gives the term bastard a definition as a "female bastard."
The author is sneering and nasty to some people’s occupations.