Is Dame Helen Mirren an actor or an actress? In the Guardian, she’s an actor, and a recent article on the subject explains why. While readers wondered why the profession of acting wouldn’t deserve the same kind of distinction between male and female as titles such as duchess and duke, the style guide editor explained: “We described Harriet Walter as one of our greatest actors. Calling her one of our greatest actresses is not the same thing at all.”
This is of course something he’s put a lot of thought into, and I’m sure there’s fine egalitarian reasoning behind his decision. The irony is that through his statement he pinpoints exactly why this is complex: if saying that someone is one of our greatest actors seems like more of an all-encompassing compliment than suggesting that they’re one of our greatest actresses, we suggest that the latter is the exception, that one can be our greatest actress without for that matter necessarily competing with male actors at all.
In a recent episode of Stephen Fry’s new linguistics show, Planet Word, he pondered how our linguistic identity affects our world view, and a guest on the show explained how the word for ‘bridge’ carries different qualities in different languages. Germans, for example, are more likely to describe a bridge as beautiful, slender, even fragile, while Spanish people tend to talk about bridges as tall, strong, and solid. Why? Because in German, the word (die Brücke) is feminine, while in Spanish it (el puente) is masculine. Further to making me want to avoid German bridges, this says a lot about our psyche. Just think about the implications of our linguistic make-up for our world view!
There is of course nothing wrong with distinguishing between traditionally feminine and masculine, and I doubt anyone would suggest that we should get rid of these distinctions altogether. What this highlights, though, is that these traditional values and properties are deeply ingrained in our culture, and if we are likely to judge a bridge by them, we are probably very likely to do the same with people. Moreover, the fact that there’s always a norm means that there’s always an exception. That the norm is more often feminine in regards to professions to do with care, physical weakness, childcare and tidying won’t come as a surprise to anyone, and I’ve argued the case for dentists and surgeons before.
I would never dream of criticising a bipolar homosexual (that’s Mr. Fry) for a lack of understanding for those deviating from the norm. In fact, I’m not trying to criticise anyone here: expressing cultural heritage through the use of our dear language is not only a necessary exercise, but one can prove very interesting. I am merely hoping to act as a spotlight on that cultural heritage. And I’m hoping that the next time you cross a German bridge, you will think about this whole thing with masculine and feminine, norm and exception, once and for all.
