838447554_1e92f0be64I’m having an identity crisis. People keep asking me what I am – and it’s not just because they’ve caught me at 7am before I’ve had a chance to organise my face into something that looks like a face. Specifically, they want to know, “Are you an actor or an actress?”

When I am asked this I have a fight in my head. Feminist Briony barges up and says “I am an ACTOR. Distinguishing my title from that of a man who does the same job is SEXISM.” Linguist Briony straightens her glasses, looks up from her book and counters, “But the word ‘actress’ is just more precise!” Feminist Briony gives her a withering look. Ironically, keeping this internal battle secret from the person who has innocently asked me this question requires a giant feat of acting, so it’s lucky I am one really.

There is an urban myth that the word ‘actress’ used to be synonymous with ‘prostitute’, which understandably prompted an abandonment of the word by female actors. When people ask me which word they should use, I deflect the question with this irrelevant tidbit of linguistic whimsy and argue that we shouldn’t be legitimising this association of actresses with prostitution by boycotting the word, and should instead claim it back. But the debate is far more complex than this, and simply in reading online forums in a half-arsed attempt to ‘research’ this blog post I realise that I’m pretty stumped about it.

Whenever I refer to myself in a professional context I find myself reflexively calling myself an actor. I think this is probably Feminist Briony giving me a Chinese burn in the frontal lobe because she objects to ‘actress’ like she objects to ‘directoress’, ‘manageress’ and their ilk: embarrassing 1950s epithets created by a world that was suddenly made to handle women in positions of power but did so by giving them titles that made them sound inferior to their male counterparts. But then Feminist Briony gets a headache because if she accepts that ‘actress’ is a diminutive form of ‘actor’, she implicitly agrees that actresses are inferior to actors. And so the snake eats its own tail.

On the whole, the tradition of separating female titles from their male equivalents is on its way out. We don’t refer to ‘authoresses’ or ‘lady doctors’ any more, or even ‘air stewardesses’ (you mean flight attendants), though there seems to be little movement in the ‘waitress’ camp, and I’m fairly sure that ‘dominatrix’ will persist, simply through the often vital importance of the gender distinction when a person comes to employ the services of one. Which (awkwardly) brings me back to ‘actress’, because acting is in fact one of very few jobs in which the sex of the person often legitimately matters.

So what I propose to do in future when someone asks which word they should use to describe me, I think I shall answer, “You should use ‘actress’ because our wonderful, extensive language has given you this useful specificity – but not if you’re going to be SEXIST about it.” This, I think, will make everyone involved feel much more comfortable about the whole situation. However, I’m still not quite sure what to do if I ever win an Oscar for Best Actress.

Photo by Flickr user david.dolphin under a Creative Commons licence.