I've been watching Emily In Paris! Only two months late, but it takes time to run out of literally anything else to watch on the internet. It's amusing enough in its cliché-drenched way and every bit as feather-light and disposable as Lilly Collins' entire filmography to date. The series can't seem to decide whether the eponymous Emily is a well-intentioned imbécile or a secret marketing genius à la Don Draper. Emily's ignorance-as-secret-genius makes its first major appearance in the second episode, 'Masculin/Féminin', in which our heroine realises that the French word for vagina, le vagin, is gendered masculin. This sets off her American outrage alarm and naturally, she solves this perceived injustice by posting about it on Instagram.
This brainless posturing from Emily is realistic enough as a sequence of events until the episode's final scene, where none other than Brigitte Macron posts her approval, sending Emily's post into the viral stratosphere. While the show's writers probably intended to depict Macron as trendy and au fait with American declarative activism, their ignorance about the origins and meaning of grammatical gender paint her, a former teacher, in a less than complimentary light.
As befitting people who view the world hyper-literally, activists appear to believe that noun gender means the language is coding a noun as male or female. When Emily posts her disgust that 'the vagina is not masculine', she seems to believe that French people have reached the conclusion over 1200-odd years that women's genitalia is, in fact, male. Unsurprisingly, it's rather more complicated than that.
In the simplest terms, gender is a way of grouping certain words within a language to make that language easier to learn. Masculine and feminine are far from the only genders across the world's languages: it is thought that the earliest gender classification was to differentiate animate from inanimate. As languages developed, categorisations became more diverse. Some, such as French, stuck with masculine and feminine; others included a neutral gender; some have tens or hundreds of genders, sometimes themselves separated into groups; other languages have no gender at all. To put it simply, the concept of grammatical gender has no relation to biological sex, even if some genders in some languages use familiarity between certain words and perceived sex characteristics as one form of classification. Macron, being a former teacher of French, would know this.
Because languages develop and evolve over long periods of time, there's no hard and fast rule for how to determine the gender of any given noun with perfect accuracy. In French, however, you will get it right far more often than not if you stick to the idea that a word ending in an unaccented 'e' is most likely gendered feminine. As with how numerous female names evolved out of male ones by adding a vowel on the end (Paul > Paula), this is plausibly related to how language evolved its words for 'man' and 'woman' over time.
In Old English, 'man' simply meant human and had to be prefixed with 'wer' or 'wyf' to determine whether that human was a man or a woman. Hence, werewolf meaning 'man-wolf' - the logical female equivalent of a werewolf is therefore, superbly, a wyfwolf. The term 'midwife' also has its origins in this Old English style, describing the person assisting a pregnancy as being 'with [the pregnant] woman'. The use of 'man' in the neutral human sense persists in terms such as 'mankind', 'workman', 'manslaughter', etc. Such terms are not, in fact, the devious calculation of a patriarchy determined to oppress female existence in all its forms, but an entirely innocent connection to the long, rich, chaotic history of language.
Over time, as the utility of differentiating between the sexes in language waxed and waned, 'man' was refined to mean both the masculine and neutral (just as he/his are both the male and neutral pronouns, etc.) while a prefix was added back ('wo') when needing to specify women. The French word 'homme' also has a neutral origin, coming from the Latin 'homo', meaning 'human' (as in homo sapiens). Where a vowel was suffixed to male names to form female equivalents, 'e's were added to the end of French words to, as a broad rule, make them feminine. In this case, Emily's confusion might have abated had she noticed that the French word for vagina, le vagin, doesn't have an 'e' on the end. Hence, masculine.
(As an aside, for those who have wondered why one man joining a group of women changes the pronoun from 'elles' to 'ils', it isn't because of 'masculine dominance', but because the presence of both sexes diversifies the group and thus adopts 'ils' in its neutral or default form, not the masculine.)
There are, of course, exceptions - and quite a lot of them. The evolution of language over centuries is a fairly haphazard process. In fairness to our flustered heroine, Emily could point to the fact that certain French nouns do appear to have had their gender determined by characteristics perceived as shared between human biological sex and the object described by the noun. For instance, 'maison' (house) is feminine despite not ending in an 'e'. It is likely that this came about because women were associated with staying at home. I called Emily an 'imbécile' earlier, which ends in an 'e' but is gendered masculine: that could be (pure speculation here) because it has long been bad form to insult a woman in public, so a person being called an imbécile would, in ye olden days, almost always have been a man. In our more evolved times, however, I am free to be publicly rude about our heroine and her linguistic ignorance with complete impunity. Le triomphe!
Contrary to how Americans like Emily or activists demanding the adoption of a hideously ugly 'neutral' version of the French language (the same kinds of ignoramuses who think they're being tremendously provocative by saying 'Latinx' instead of 'Latina', 'Latino', or just 'Latin') perceive things, language does not evolve politically. It slowly shifts and refines to suit whatever form is most convenient for people at the time, softly guided by forms past to keep things in some broadly comprehensible order.
Gender is not about determining things as male or female, but making language a little more ordered and easier to remember - even if the compound effect of hundreds of years of messily created exceptions can have the opposite effect. What sticks and what doesn't is not always predictable, just as nobody will ever be able to explain why Emily's basic-as-anything selfies and captions gain her hundreds of new followers with every post. The broad strokes might make a certain kind of sense (Americans have a romanticised delusion of Paris which Emily's posts encapsulate to an embarrassingly trite degree) but nobody will ever be able to say for sure why one thing catches on but another, similar thing does not. What is for sure is that were former schoolteacher Brigitte Macron ever to see a post like Emily's, she'd less likely signal enthusiastic approval than be a typical French woman by rolling her eyes before getting on with her day.
