When joining cables or bits of pipe, we often use the terms male or female connector in description of the joining part. However, many see this as outdated, offensive, and unreflective of modern attitudes towards gender.
It can be confusing for many people, particularly the young who are raised not to judge a person's sex by looking at their sexual organs. It's also offensive to penis owning women for obvious reasons.
As you can see from the photos you also get connectors called double male, double female, as well as male x female connector, all adding to gender ridicule. E. g. Not calling a double female connector a lesbian connector is clearly a refusal to acknowledge same sex couples.
I think these connector terms reinforce outdated stereotypes and should be banned.
Should the terms male and female connector be banned?
I am an engineer. I think you are not the right person to try and be making these sort of suggestions and it is also a bad one. I am assuming you didn't post this seriously but at the same time, I can't confirm that.
First: It can be confusing for many people, particularly the young who are raised not to judge a person's sex by looking at their sexual organs. It's also offensive to penis owning women for obvious reasons. That's a very bold claim there, and it is also wrong. 99% of the population does not have this problem. Even if you support non-binary or alternative gender perspectives, "male" and "female" are concrete, biological terms that do not change with someone's gender identity. A male will always be a male and have male sex organs and a female vice versa, at least in humans.
Second: There is a valid argument that this convention used for male, female, and unisex (aka sexless) adapters in piping, tubing, electrical connectors, etc. is slightly offensive, namely to women. I think it is a dumb argument, but it is a valid one. In case it wasn't obvious, a connector that goes into something is called a "male", the connector something else goes into is called "female", and connectors that don't need different ends are called "unisex" or "sexless" and can be put together either way. With the rise of women in more technical fields like engineering some of the more feminist ones have challenged this generations old convention as being offensive for being related to how human sex works. I can tell you that for the 80%+ of these fields that are being held by men, we don't really care. A man putting together a male-to-male pipe nipple together into female connectors does not think about sex or sex organs when doing it. Us engineers try to keep things simple for the layman to understand and it is unambiguous to the overwhelming majority of the human population which side goes into what else when you label them "male" and "female", that is why that convention was chosen. Every person on the planet has an innate understanding of what that means.
Now namely during 2020-2022 and I hate using this term but to keep it simple we will call it "peak woke", there was a push in engineering to stop using gender labels on connectors and change to things like "insert end" and "receptable/receive end" instead. That did not take off at all because us engineers do not have the time nor desire to redo decades of part labeling, conventions, and instructions to suite a handful of busybodies that have too much time to worry about pointless crap.
In short, this is not going to change at least for decades going forward and anyone who has a legitimate problem with this has soft hands. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
No, and I long ago stopped caring about offending liberals who suddenly have their feefees hurt over terms that have been in common use for centuries.
You'd better believe that I regularly use "master" and "slave" for items where one device controls another, despite a few weirdos being offended. Again, these are generic terms that have been in use well over a century and effectively and efficiently communicate exactly the relationship between the devices.
These sheltered, whiney babies who think the whole world needs to be changed to reflect their feelings need to have those feelings hurt FAR more often, so they learn to be much less sensitive.
I think we change nothing and anybody that is so stupid to be upset over the names of fittings which has nothing, not even a smidgen of a connection to sexual activity should be sent to a home for the mentally unstable.
Maybe time to stop searching to remain absolutely politically correct when no one can think of a better way to designate the "male" and "female" connectors, the more that these come in the most common variants: male-female, female-male, female-female (lesbian ;0) male-male (gay ;0)
Because of a shortage in words, I sometimes, for the fun also to be honest, called indeed a female-female connector, a lesbian one, and the male-male, a gay one. An image is worth 1000 words, isn't it?
No you are not going wokify engineering Purplepoppy.
Nor our peguins either. Down at my local beach there are penguins that are only 12" tall. We have called them fairies since the First Fleet.
Now the Labor gov't want us to call them height challenged penguins or if... we really must... Little Penguins because pooftas might be offended by the name Fairy Penguins. We are just going to keep calling them Fairy Penguins and enjoy woke poofta offence now Labor has pointed it out to us.
The simple fact is that things modeled on human genitals works pretty well and it has been a proven design for 2 million years. Doubtless James Watt had just had a good shag when he invented the steam engine with the pistons plunging in and out.
Nah parts named as male and female just works well. Hands off.
I disagree with you the terms male and female connectors should not be banned.
Male and females have genitals and it can not be discriminatory just because they have them.
Though I can understand how some people would find these terms highly offensive and sexual, and should not be openly on sale especially where children would view them, because when joining the fittings together it replicates the fornication act.
I would suggest these items are put under the counter and sold only to adults over 21.
I understand your point of view. However, history has shown that men seem to mix sex with work related terms because it is easily understood by even the least cerebral. It even made it's way in business practices and descriptive vocabulary. How, do you describe an aggressive young business man? "Up and comer" . That term was used in the cattle breeding industry to describe a bull that was not bashful. One who when put in the corral with an ovulating female was up on her rump and cumming. Our whole lexicon is full of it. I guess you could label the connectors donating and receiving. that is actually a tough one.
Those terms are not outdated. When they are used, everyone understands what they mean. Men have a plug that is designed to fit into a woman's socket. Male and female connectors. The people who don't like it are those who want to do away with the definition of woman and references to female.
Gender confused people are not on a newly evolved level. Nobody cares if they don't understand gender or are offended by words. They and their recently invented ideology will soon die out.
by the way, there is no such thing as a penis owning woman.
To ban stuff does not make it disappear. It only moves into grey zones.
Connector fittings luckily have little self conscience. So we don't risk that a female (or male, for equality) fitting believes that it is as good as a male (or female, for equality) fitting. We will end up with leaking bathrooms.
In this context other details play in, and need to be re-vocabularized:
Size - Imperial vs. Constitutional
Material - do colours count?
Unpopular products - i. e. Made in China, India, Uganda and such
As you are at it, I look forward to see your suggestions for this:
Heck No. Most of my career has involved working with male and female connectors. Do you have any idea how many people get them mixed up? It's always a struggle to properly educate them, but once they get it, they remember.
I probably shouldn't say this, but the way we teach others to remember which one is which is to use the d*** abd c*** words. 😐
No, at one point in the 70s people advocated calling it "personhole cover" instead of "manhole cover". Policing language to that degree leaves the impression you are not a serious person. Objecting to slurs is understandable, policing the boxes at the hardware store is just annoying.
At work I use connectors like these all of the time for up to 400A power connections. The one on the left is male, the one on the right is female. New hires constantly get this mixed up, until I tell them the male connector is uncircumcised. Then they have no problem.
Hey, some of those connectors you've depicted are hermaphroditic... some with bonus sets of soft / hardware too. Three ways and splitters are being left out of the discussion? So what do you propose? something along the lines of innie / outie?
I'm a liberal and this is the most ridiculous question lol. I don't think this is an issue for you or anyone else in real life. You are allowed to be offended and everyone else can also just continue on with calling these male and female parts. We're talking about cables and the reality is biological male and female parts make it very easy to describe these parts. If you'd like to come up with other terms to call them feel free.
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Anonymous
(45 Plus)
1 mo
You know what we should do. Change the outdated laws on divorce where it favors women. Talk about offensive. I bet you don’t want to change that. Get out of here w that nonsense. It’s usually only women who are crying about things like this. Most likely women aren’t the ones who are changing out these male n female parts, it’s usually the men.
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1 Reply
Opinion Owner
1 mo
You might want to define your definition of what’s a feels first because unless I’m wrong, some of those images aren’t labeled correctly. Unless they identify as trans.
They certainly are badly named. Maybe something such as reciever part instead of female.. shortened to R or RP, and insert or plug part instead of male.. shortened to IP or PP. Something like that.
Using receiver & insert/plug either alone or with another term and all shortened.
PC talk for pipe fittings and electric connectors? Just who is this offending? Seems excessive. Can't believe this is micro aggressing a host of people.
Plug and socket is the only PC thing I can come up with, but the original was not created to offend, but to illustrate and keep what goes into what clear.
People are offended with everything nowadays... I don't get it. I also don't see a problem with calling these parts "male and female" No matter what the society accepts and thinks about "genders" there will always be a male - female - none or both. and we all know what a male part looks like, and what a female part looks like, let's not pretend like we don't :D
These terms have been around forever so they better not get a job in plumbing or electrical and even mechanics where the terms are used most often in the trades
They would say yes. These people get off on destroying culture because they can call it progress, even though it's not actually doing anything positive.
For the same reason John Money, the Paedophile, changed the definition of gender by sexually experimenting on castrated boys. Neither identified as girls once they grew up & later ended up committing suicide, but it was reported as a success to the media anyway, as it was an attempt to prove that gender is a social construct.
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