Enduring Prejudices of Gender Woven Into Chinese Language

A visual analysis of language can get pretty silly.

Take the example you cite, 姦, which you render as "womanwomanwoman". On the contrary, a faithful rendering would be be
WOMAN
woman woman
that is, one big fat woman lording over two small petite women. Should we then infer that "rape" , "defilement", and "adultery" is about the hierarchical and power struggle of tiny women over big mama?

As nonsensical as a string of womanwomanwoman.

For those wanting a full examination of sexism in the Chinese language, see also: http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp074_chinese_sexism.pdf

Of course the language would be biased, since it originated and evolved out of a historical and current male dominant culture. Another good example: the chinese word for the mother of the husband is "nainai" literally translated as "milk milk", a good moniker for a mother. However, the chinese word for mother of the wife is "waipo", literally translated as "outsider." There are many such examples of the sexism and male chauvinism embedded in the Chinese language, which of course reflects the culture.

Seriously?

MENdacious, MANipulative, MANiacal, MANure, imperMANent, oMENous, torMENtor...

I see (literally) that the English language is biased against the male gender!

Typical example of cherrypicking evidence to support a biased viewpoint. You cannot mention jian (a relatively rare character no longer used in mainland China) without mentioning the far more common character for "good", which is composed of woman + child. In general, Chinese is far more gender-neutral than Western languages. They never use "man" to refer to people in general, it's always "person". They never say "mankind", it's always "humankind".

I wonder how much the author understands Chinese or language nothing at all. 姦 is never used alone, it has always combined with another word. In Hong Kong and Taiwan, the word is purposely avoided in terms of rape. 强暴 is the way to say. There are many ways to address the uniqueness and problems in Chinese culture, picking on the language with limited, and sometimes misleading examples, is not the proper way. I'm glad the exhibition was canceled.
By the same token, "ladies and gentlemen" in pelite English has nothing to do with gender equality. It was used when women had no property right, voting right, not even the right to love freely.

That is yet another fine example of "Western Idiocracy" and "Gender Idiocracy"

Why should any culture change it's language just to satisfy some one who does not even try to understand a foreign culture or language but simply attempts to press his own ideology upon others?
Gender ideology has become just another type of fascist ideology that attempts to conquer the world like p.c.

It has become a replacement for religion for those who have a yearn to place themselves above all other on the basis of being no more than another egoist nutshell.

Yes, there is sexism around the world and certainly also in China, but to request that a culture should change it's language just because of some fascists is simply not acceptable.
Had those gender activists any understanding of what they are requesting, they would have to ban themselves from this planet.

Where those gender fascists when it comes to tackle real problems like the rape culture and subsequent legal handling in Arabic culture?
Where are those gender fascists when it comes to tackle real problems in this world?

Gender bias is deeply embedded in Confucianism, itself the philosophical cornerstone of Chinese tradition. It is a tradition that should be abandoned.

The author should dig a little deeper on the development of Chinese before superficially taking the 女 (woman) stem and apply her current day thinking. In the early days of written Chinese, human societies switched from a matriarchy to a patriarchy. That’s why a lot of Chinese words has the 女 stem, especially last names. And really hard to find a word with 男 (man) stem.
Words are innocent. It’s the mind that’s evil. Should we say that’s all good, 好, which is woman + man.

The Chinese Language isnt unique in gender prejudice. Mankind has been gender prejudice since the caveman...so has religion. Beyond language and religion, as a group, the Chinese who have left China/Taiwan have moved to break the gender divide. The overseas Chinese woman today is the one in charge.

“In everyday language, how many Chinese speakers are aware that, in every set phrase with male-female gender reference, the male always comes first?” Good question. And what about English? Starting with, "I now pronounce you man and wife," invitations to the couple are addressed to Mr & M(r)s, not M(r)s & Mr; then they become father and mother; we speak of men, women and children, not of women, men and children; and so on.

Yes, I know some of this is considered politically incorrect, but that is now. Traditionally this is how it has been, hasn't it? "O wad some Pow'r the giftie tie us To see oursels as ithers see us!"

You cannot blindly apply (your own understanding) of American feminist "politics" to an Ancient culture / tradition. The Chinese had a very meticulous and advanced interpretation of the world which was communicated through language. If you reflect further, I think you'd find the Chinese relatively undisturbed by this characteristic of their language. I really wish someone would take this article down.

Please also consider the following:
In Mandarin Chinese, the (spoken) pronoun for a male or female is simply one word (i.e., "ta", not the sexist he/she).
In order to get the start of a higher education, one still tries to get a "Bachelor" degree. Women today must still accept a (single) man's designation and accreditation.

Not to question the existence of sexism in China, but from a linguistic point of view, this fuss about the word jian is a bit off the mark.
In the first place, the word denotes illicitness, falsehood, disorder, and so forth, rather than 'rape'.
In the second place, there is nothing in the spoken language to associate this word with women, and it must be remembered that spoken language is prior to written language. Even in the written language, there is an alternative characters used to write this same word that has no 'woman' element: it comprises a phonetic element (indicating pronunciation) and a 'heart' radical. So it is possible to say this word and write it down (in that alternative form) without thinking of women.
That said, there is no denying that the standard form of the written representation of this world with such negative connotations is three 'women' elements.
One could propose that this _character_ at least grants agency to women, even if the _word_ connotes treachery and deceit without any particular gender associations. But that would show how silly it is to build a case for anything on the basis of how a word is written.

At least the Chinese characters for "everyone" actually mention both genders, eh? In English until recently we said "mankind" to refer to "everyone", and masculine-inflected words were used universally for mixed genders.

Admittedly, using a character showing three women to mean "evil" and "sexual misconduct" is worthy of a seventh-grade boys' locker room and not much else.

Still, it does seem like many languages -- certainly not just Chinese -- give pride of place to the masculine forms of words.

Without a deeper dive into the origin of the language, this is like an attempt at reading tea leaves.

Written Chinese characters are as much visual as they are tonal. Most Chinese characters are complex characters, possessing one part that denotes the root (identifying an element - whether it refers to a person, plant, metal, earth, water, fire) and a second part that denotes the sound.

The character for woman 女 is used as the root for the word for mother 妈 (女 + 马), the second part, being the character for horse, is used to denote the sound "ma". In no way should it be interpreted to denote that the woman is a horse or the mother is a female horse.

Mandarin Chinese has four tones and, in most cases, the order of words follow the order of the four tones to be more pleasing to the ear. The phrase for parents 夫 母 (fu mu) follows the first tone - third tone order whereas 母 夫 goes in the opposite order.

Undoubtedly, there are certain practices which may appear to be gender biased (genealogy records are kept only with names of male descendants) but is understandable and not any different from many other cultures (the genealogy records in the Bible also traces only the males in the family line).

Perhaps a more logical explanation of the reason for the character for rape to be composed of three 女 stems from the fact that all rape victims (in the days when the word was first constructed) were known to be women?

Wow. This article is not even factually correct. The three women character means adultery - not rape. I.e. a man with three women. Rape needs to be 強姦 or qiong jian, forced adultry. Yes in ancient times women were second class citizens. That's why only men can be priests in Catholicism and could not vote in the US until recently. The man character "nan" shows a field with the power radical or field labor. How great. We men work the fields and the women with their seductive beauty have the babies. Is that sexism?

Same can be said for Korean.

"Father-mother" to denote parents = 부모
"men, women, old, young" to denote everyone = 남녀노소
"rape (強姦 in chinese)" = 강간

This is silly beyond measure. Enduring prejudices of gender are woven Into nearly all languages, so why pick on Chinese. In fact there are counter examples as well. The character 人rén means people/person. A man (male person) is 男人 nánrén, a woman (female person) is 女人 nǚrén. So 人 is basically gender free and gender is assigned equally by the addition of a gender specific adjective. But in English man traditionally has been applied to both sexes as in mankind, chairman, etc. Only recently have those terms been made gender neutral such as "humankind" and "chairperson." the term "woman" actually means a man's wife. And female, derived from the Latin femina was altered to reflect the dominance of males in society, thus becoming female. So English has these and many other enduring prejudices of gender woven into it.

When I see the character "jian" ("3 women" mentioned in the article) it doesn't make me think of women at all - it is a just a convention, just like when I see the letter A I don't think of an ox's head.

Languages evolve and the meaning of words change, particularly with
languages with long history like Chinese, which has about 4000 years
of written records. So the original meaning of words don't reflect the
current state of the language or the society. The Chinese character of
man/mail consists of two characters of "labor" and "field", so it could mean originally peasant labor, or more like slave labor. But that could
also be misleading, as we need to look into the older forms of the word.

Who considers the etymology of a word when speaking colloquially? To read prejudice into the roots of the examples quoted here is an overreach, especially when translating between two such very different languages.

Such a big amount of fuss over nothing...

I think this may top sexism everywhere: "What is woman, a necessary evil, a thing of shame, a wicked work of nature covered over by a shining varnish."
--St. John Chrisostom

Consider that the ideograph for "woman" is close to that for "man" but with a pregnant abdomen.

When you are done with Chinese, why don't you explain the English word of "sinister" and how women in the Christian cultures were truly demonized?

Sinister = evil = left = women

Sexism in China exists. Who knew? But even then women in China on average have more power than other places, like India and the Middle East where women have to wear a hijab over their heads. Gender equality is a common theme in communist countries.

On the other hand, in America we have a significant number of people who believe that women should be forced to have abortions and be paid less than men. Gender inequality is a common theme in capitalist countries.