Male as norm

In feminist theory, the principle of male-as-norm holds that "language referring to females, such as the suffix -ess (as in actress), the use of man to mean "human", and other such devices, strengthens the perceptions that the male category is the norm and that the corresponding female category is a derivation and thus less important. Sexist terms such as chairman, anchorman, etc., are cited as examples of how the English language mirrors social gender biases.

The idea was first clearly expressed by 19th-century thinkers who began deconstructing the English language to expose the products and footings of patriarchy. The principle of male-as-norm and the relation between gendered grammar and the way in which its respective speakers conceptualize their world has received attention in varying fields from philosophy to psychology and anthropology, and has fueled debates over linguistic determinism and gender inequality. The underlying message of this principle is that women speak a less legitimate language that both sustains and is defined by the subordination of the female gender as secondary to the accepted male-biased normative language. By regarding women's language as deficient in relation to that of men it has been assumed that something is wrong with women's language. Subsequently research in the social sciences, particularly in discourse analysis, has maintained and qualified systemic male bias.
In practice, grammatical gender exhibits a systematic structural bias that has made masculine forms the default for generic, non-gender-specific contexts. According to the male-as-norm principle the male linguistic bias works to exclude and ignore women, diminish the female experience, and rule that all that is not male is deviant and unfit to represent many social categories.

In the eighteenth-century there was a radical reinterpretation of the female body in relation to the male. Prior to this change in thinking, men and women were qualified by their degree of metaphysical perfection whereas by the late eighteenth century there was a new model established on ideas of radical dimorphism and biological divergence. Biologists used developments in the study of anatomy and physiology to change the understanding of sexual difference into that of kind rather than degree. This metaphysical shift in the understanding of sex and gender, as well as the interplay of these redefined social categories, solidified many of the existing beliefs in the inherent disparities of men and women. This allowed scientists, policy makers, and others of cultural influence to promulgate a belief in the gender binary under a veil of positivism and scientific enlightenment.
Since the eighteenth century, the dominant view of sexual difference has been that of two stable, incommensurable, and opposite sexes on which the political, economic, and cultural lives of men and women are based and social order is sustained. Contrary to modern day, "the dominant discourse construed the male and female bodies as hierarchically, vertically, ordered versions of one sex" rather than as "horizontally ordered opposites, as incommensurable." In fact, it wasn't until the second half of the eighteenth century that the idea of two distinct sexes was established and, through the politics of the day, generated new ways of understanding people and social reality. The recognition and discussion of this transition by protofeminists around the 19th century established the foundation upon which = feminists would later scrutinize gendered language, challenge the gender binary and its inherent prejudices, and develop the male as norm principle.

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