I love me some nature documentaries. I just got done watching a three part series from the always informative BBC on the Galapagos Islands, called Galapagos. I must say, it wasn't the BBC's best work. The information was repetative, often disjointed, and not very well presented (in terms of script, not necessarily the narrator herself). It was beautifully filmed, thank goodness, but I was a little disappointed. That disappointed turned to shock and, yes, a little bit of dismay, during the third episode. There was a fairly long and pretty awesome land iguana fight, explained as two females fighting for prime nesting turf.
I'm fairly confident we've all seen a nature documentary or two, and know that fights are almost always explained with pretty grandiose verbage. I mean, they're brawling. And these two were really going at it, lots of neck biting and thrashing around. It was very exciting. Grandiose language was more than fitting for the scene. Except that it was described as a "cat fight"...CAT FIGHT?! Never in my fairly extensive repotoire of nature films and books have I heard a vicious territorial battle, bloody and everything, described as a "catfight". Except when talking about cats fighting. Actual cats. And then it's two words: "cat fight".
The term "catfight" is defined as fighting between two women. According to wiki (yeah yeah not a scholarly resource, but they've got a reasonable pulse on colloquial terminology), a catfight typically involves "scratching, hair pulling and shirt-shredding AS OPPOSED to punching or wrestling" (emphasis my own). So if there is actual wrestling and hitting (and, I assume, pointy toothed biting), it isn't a catfight. Referring to a territorial battle as a "catfight" delegitimizes the true violence and struggle such turf wars entail.
Yes, I'm nit-picking a bit. It was one word in three hours of programming. But sitcom vernacular has no place in an otherwise intelligent program. While I didn't think the script was great, nowhere else did the language veer off from scientific, traditional nature documentary discourse. Here's what I'm really getting at: Such word choice in a nature documentary is an indication of just how deep the roots of institutionalized sexism have spread. Now, as off-the-wall as the remark sounds, and I know it's a bit ridiculous, one can't deny how bizarre and out of place the narrator's/script writer's description of the fight was.
I was a bit distracted for the rest of the documentary by these thoughts, but also by an important and potentially lucrative realization: If only someone would pay me to find the often subtle traces of sexism in just about anything, I wouldn't have to worry about the stock market taking most of my grad school fund.
