{"id":13464,"date":"2011-03-31T10:14:16","date_gmt":"2011-03-31T17:14:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2011\/03\/31\/13464.html"},"modified":"2011-03-31T10:14:16","modified_gmt":"2011-03-31T17:14:16","slug":"good-old-kamala","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2011\/03\/31\/good-old-kamala\/","title":{"rendered":"Good old Kamala"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I've seen a surprising number of opinion pieces and quotes in the past few weeks* that refer to California's new Attorney General, Kamala Harris, as simply “Kamala.”<\/p>\n

(*I wrote this entry on December 2, 2010, but for some reason never posted it.)<\/p>\n

That would make sense if the writers and speakers in question were personal friends of Ms. Harris's, or if they referred to her opponent as “Steve.”<\/p>\n

But most of them don't appear to know her personally, and I haven't seen anyone refer to Cooley by first name.<\/p>\n

I read yet another piece just now that refers to “Kamala” and then later calls her “Ms. Harris.” But I thought to myself, okay, I haven't been keeping stats, I know this “women get called by their first name” thing is a pet peeve of mine so I'm more likely to notice it when it happens and ignore when it doesn't happen, and I'm probably overreacting.<\/p>\n

And then I moved on to my next open tab, an article<\/a> from the Los Angeles Wave<\/cite>, which was doing fine in this respect up until this:<\/p>\n

\n

Stephen Walker, director of legislative affairs for the California Correctional Peace Officers’ Association, a body that endorsed Cooley, declared himself a fan.<\/p>\n

“I have to tell you that during our political interviews, we were extremely impressed by her and it was a split vote that unfortunately led us to endorse Mr. Cooley,” Walker said.<\/p>\n

“But many of our board members were adamant that Kamala was going to win. So, I don’t think it’s a surprise, I think it’s probably indicative of the environment and society in California in the direction it’s headed.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Don't get me wrong—I'm delighted that he's a fan! But why does her opponent get to be “Mr. Cooley”?<\/p>\n

A lot of the references by first name that I've seen have been along these lines: positive, sometimes glowingly so, but oddly over-familiar.<\/p>\n

So it's mostly not the dismissiveness or condescension that I associate with using public-figure women's first names; on the contrary, it feels to me more like an attempt at showing support.<\/p>\n

But for me, these attempts backfire, because in our society, we traditionally show respect for public figures (in formal and semi-formal written communication) by referring to them by title and last name. So when men get the form of address that we consider formally respectful, and women don't, I think it sends the wrong message, albeit subtly and presumably unintentionally.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve seen a surprising number of opinion pieces and quotes in the past few weeks* that refer to California’s new…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gender"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13464\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}