Miss Lucy Mangan’s case for using the title Miss instead of Ms (”The meaning of Ms”) is that she’s run out of the requisite adolescent fervour to sustain the practice into adulthood. Mangan’s mother clearly was not one of the ”British feminists in the 1970s and early 1980s” to whom she refers.
I grew up with the idea that Ms was the norm. Just as Mangan reverted to the standard Miss of her youth, I have chosen to stay with the appellation most familiar to me. I always tick the Ms box on forms.
Miss Bertelsmann? Sure, I hear it often enough, affectionately, or as a bit of a joke. But on a telephone account? No. An insurance form? I can’t see it. After all, I’m not 12 years old! Or, for that matter, 55 and living in the Cotswolds with my cat.
I feel I do battle enough with the superior firepower of the machinery of the world’s financial institutions — and hell, it’s an unequal battle — without being treated like an indulged child by them to boot.
As Brad Pitt’s stoned dropout so immortally put it in True Romance, when confronted by the Seriously Bad Guys with Seriously Big Guns: ”Patronise ME, motherfucker? I’ll kill you, man!”
Miss is what you are when your little brother is Master on childhood airplane tickets. Miss is not for a big girl who’s finished all her veggies.
SABC3’s Miss Match with Alicia Silverstone makes a telling point about the negative connotations of the term Miss. As one as yet unready (or unchosen) for marriage, Miss can make you feel like a Miss-take. You’re Missing out. You may have tried, but so far it’s all Miss-fired. So now you’re doomed to go Miss-ty eyed at other people’s weddings. You’re no Missanthrope, but on the battlefield of love, you are Miss Singh in action.
Feminists might argue it’s fair to disclose similar amounts of information about the marital status of both men and women when giving them titles. This works for grand reasons of feminism and equality and for the more prosaic reasons of potential partner selection to which Mangan alludes. No more craning of necks to spot bare ring fingers, girls! This is the new version of Much Ado About No Ring.
So we should either expect men to disclose their marital status in their titles, just like women, or do away with titles altogether.
In South Africa, especially, the latter option is attractive. With enforced classifications still fresh in our memories, we balk at being asked to disclose our race groups. Perhaps we should be similarly hesitant about giving away our gender — apart from on census forms and for certain medical procedures.
But even more fun would be to make up new titles. I suggest Master for an unmarried male. Muster for a married man seems appropriate — for he obviously has passed it, at least in one woman’s eyes. The conventional Mister can be kept in use as a counterpart to the Ms’s out there.