In a blog on 5 July 2011, I wrote about my puzzlement as to why the
media now called all those who acted by the name of actors, irrespective of
whether they were women or men. Recently,
with delight, I came across the following comment by somebody called Denise
Gough. Asked why she preferred to be
called an actress rather than an actor, she said, “We fought to be on the
stage. We should reclaim that word. I don’t know where it came from, this fucking
notion that putting “ess” on the end makes us weak. I would be no less afraid of a lioness than a
lion.”
Hoorah for somebody who agrees with me that removing the
perfectly appropriate word “actress” seems to me incomprehensible. We don’t mind calling a daughter a daughter
or a son a son, why then have we become so squeamish about the sex of those in
the acting profession? Has the world
gone a little overboard in its attempts to be gender-neutral, to the detriment
of common-sense?
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