Pronouns and Triviality

@maxdancona,

Quote:

And changing the way language is used is not really more foolish than opposing any other social convention that people, over the decades, have found distateful or directly harmful.

^the full quote.

Another understandable misconstrual. I would categorise the sexist pronoun use as distateful. Perhaps harmful in aggregate, and as part of a wider sexism in culture, but not directly harmful in itself.

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@medium-density,

As a matter of principle, I don't care about gender-neutral language. I disagree with its implied premise that there always has to be perfect correspondence between grammatical articles and the real world. Perhaps the premise is easier for me to reject because my native language is German, where teapots have a gender and girls do not. But even in English, the correspondence cannot be perfect. If it were, why would anybody propose the number-neutral "they" to replace the gender-neutral "he"? I think it was a mistake to make such an issue of it. It's just feminists swinging their lady-dicks around.

That's where I stand on the principle of it, anyway. As a matter of practice, though, writers who stick to the gender-neutral "he" will lose credibility with some of their readers for alleged sexism. That's just a fact of life. Conversely, "he or she" kind of writers lose style points with style-conscious audiences for the clumsiness of the construct. How to resolve this dilemma? I personally try to make my language gender-neutral without rubbing my readers' faces in it. So to take your example, I wouldn't write "if someone knows he is X then Y". Instead I would write: "People who know they are X then Y". Another way around is "Someone who is X and knows it should Y", or something in this spirit. That way, stylists don't suffer and the feminist language police leaves me alone. I can only recommend it.

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@djjd62,

I didn't mean hertical. I was trying to avoid the word "hysterical". Do you know the sexist hertory of that word?

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The word history derives from the French histoire, which means story or history, depending on context. As it happens, histoire is feminine noun . . . sexist pig . . .

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@medium-density,

Hun, Set can get people's goats. Maintain your balance.

Oh, that 'Hun' was not meant condescendingly.

Criminy, you later fems are strict!

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@Thomas,

Respectfully, I don't think you're engaging with the point. It isn't that the relationship between an item and it's invented letters-based symbol is less than perfect, it's (again) a more simple premise.

The best way I can think to word the premise is this: Laypeople commonly understand "he" to refer exclusively to males, and that wherever the "he" pronoun is used this excludes people we refer to with the "she" pronoun. So in the example "The artist acts in accordance with his aesthetic persuasion" the sexist pronoun employed supports the sexist societal view that only males are artists.

To this extant my argument does rely on politics, specifically political feminism. But that's only because women are more victimised by sexism than men. Both historically and contemporaneously.

Also,

Quote:

That's just feminists swinging their lady-dicks around.

I sincerely hope this is a bad joke.

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@sozobe,

What I say, yeah!

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@Setanta,

Really? I'll believe you. So, damn, we've always been confused.

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@Thomas,

That's a classic post, Thomas. I differ on this and that as I get fem obstreporousness, being one a long time. You would too, if you were raised as me. Possibly, or maybe not. Still I get it.
I don't take Thomas's lady dicks comment as somehow horrible.

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@medium-density,

medium-density wrote:

The best way I can think to word the premise is this: Laypeople commonly understand "he" to refer exclusively to males, and that wherever the "he" pronoun is used this excludes people we refer to with the "she" pronoun. So in the example "The artist acts in accordance with his aesthetic persuasion" the sexist pronoun employed supports the sexist societal view that only males are artists.

are you one of those guys who wants to turn the standard joke into, "two guys walk into a place and something happens that's funny" so we don't offend anyone

Also,

Quote:
That's just feminists swinging their lady-dicks around.

I sincerely hope this is a bad joke.

it's actually a really funny line

1 Reply

@medium-density,

several points there..

but your laypeople point may vary among languages - I don't know. In the u.s., that is why I mentioned confusion, as (guessing) most people take his as male.

1 Reply

@medium-density,

medium-density wrote:

Respectfully, I don't think you're engaging with the point.

Respectfully, I did. I engaged it by pointing out that your following statement is wrong:

medium-density wrote:

Laypeople commonly understand "he" to refer exclusively to males, and that wherever the "he" pronoun is used this excludes people we refer to with the "she" pronoun.

The reality is different: Before feminists in the 1960s started making an issue of the gender-neutral "he", laypeople understood perfectly well that the pronoun"he" is generic rather than exclusively male in some contexts. Indeed, that's what I was taught the sentence meant when I went to elementary school in the late 1970s. So, yes, I did engage with your point. You may not be pleased with the manner I engaged it in. But then again I have no obligation to please you.

medium-density wrote:

So in the example "The artist acts in accordance with his aesthetic persuasion" the sexist pronoun employed supports the sexist societal view that only males are artists.

I disagree. Authors who wrote such sentences before Gloria Steinem's generation of feminists understood themselves to be making a generic, gender-neutral statement. They didn't understand themselves to be saying that only males could be artists. What's more, their lay readers didn't understand the text in that way, either. Construing the sentence to carry a sexist message was an invention of feminist activists. It was not an empirical finding of scientific linguists or sociologists.

medium-density wrote:

Quote:
That's just feminists swinging their lady-dicks around.

I sincerely hope this is a bad joke.

It's an intentional pejorative. The intended message is that I do not hold the feminist language police in quite the esteem that you do. Doesn't that come across?

1 Reply

@djjd62,

Quote:

are you one of those guys who wants to turn the standard joke into, "two guys walk into a place and something happens that's funny" so we don't offend anyone

No. And I don't see the equivalence between that and what I've been talking about, which is quite specific and fairly modest in scale. I wouldn't dare not laugh if a joke was funny, for example...

But there's nothing funny or otherwise useful about using these sexist pronouns, other than as a kind of lazy shorthand. They exclude people and prop up harmful discriminatory narratives.

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@Thomas,

Yeah, yeah, but you get two girls together, and they mysteriously become feminine. So do a couple of boys, if I'm not mistaken.

How's that for discrimination?

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@Thomas,

Well however we want to word this we're clearly lacking some mutual understanding with regard to what people nowadays think "he" means. I think most people, certainly of younger generations like mine, regard the use of "he" in the general sense to be antiquated, if we're even aware that it exists. And we're not aware in most cases.

The politicisation of the meaning of that pronoun was necessary in my view, to expose the inherent sexism in thinking "he" refers to men and is therefore good enough to refer to all of humanity.

If you don't think this generalised meaning is an artefact of a sexist culture then we probably won't find common ground in this discussion.

I took your "Feminist lady-dicks" comment to be indicative of a wider disdain for feminist activism, a disdain I've come to distrust as misogynist in many cases (though I don't presume as much in your case). At the very least you'd have to admit it was coarse.

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@ossobuco,

ossobuco wrote:

several points there..

but your laypeople point may vary among languages - I don't know. In the u.s., that is why I mentioned confusion, as (guessing) most people take his as male.

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@medium-density,

You keep saying things that aren't true.

Quote:

Laypeople commonly understand "he" to refer exclusively to males and that wherever the "he" pronoun is used this excludes people we refer to with the "she" pronoun.

This is bullshit (or should I say bull/cow-****). There is no fluent English speaker who doesn't understand that "he" and "his" can refer to people of indeterminate gender. Go to any second grade classroom and say, "each student should sit at his desk", the girls will sit down.

Your claim that people don't understand this basic point of English, or that the common use of "he" to refer to individuals in a group of mixed gender, is just ludicrous. We all understand this.

You are making a political point. The idea that anyone is confused by this, or excluded by the use of "he" as a gender-neutral pronoun, is nonsense.

Quote:

Don't worry lady, that's a man-eating shark!

1 Reply

@maxdancona,

Quote:

There is no fluent English speaker who doesn't understand that "he" and "his" can refer to people of indeterminate gender. Go to any second grade classroom and say, "each student should sit at his desk", the girls will sit down.

People may very well be able to make an inference as to what a teacher means in that scenario, but that doesn't mean they understand "he" to mean "every person".

Though I won't spend too much time arguing about what a majority of people think, since none of us are really privy to know such things. It's only my impression.

There is a political dimension to my point, yes. Why should that be to my detriment here?

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Some of all this is not about language so much as to gain our presumption that we were ok for brains and could have brain lives - I'm speaking as someone turning nineteen in late 1960. Pre women getting to be lawyers and doctors much.
Maybe that was different in Germany.

It's hard to remember back. I think I took the use of he and him and so on as completely ordinary and meaning him. At the same time, I had probably been taught that as a grammar point. That was probably good, as women could be saints.

My first take, and I tossed the book, from B. Friedan - I stopped on the page that said you didn't have to obey your husband (what I was taught), because I thought you did.

I have changed greatly, and I am busy laughing about the now ok words on this thread.

So, if I don't mind the present confusion, I'll say it laughing.

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@medium-density,

medium-density wrote:

The politicisation of the meaning of that pronoun was necessary in my view, to expose the inherent sexism in thinking "he" refers to men and is therefore good enough to refer to all of humanity.

Believe it or not, I kind of agree. Although feminists had no basis in any science for stigmatizing the gender-neutral usage of the pronoun "he", it was a stunning PR success for their cause --- which, overall, changed society for the better. I don't like this particular method by which feminists obtained their success, but I can't deny it was effective marketing.

medium-density wrote:

If you don't think this generalised meaning is an artefact of a sexist culture then we probably won't find common ground in this discussion.

When Germans refer to "a teapot" as a "he", do you think they are sexualizing a sterile object? When Germans refer to "a girl" as an "it", do you think they deny that she has a gender? If your answer to these questions is "no" --- as I think it should be --- why are you insisting that English writers who refer to "an artist" as a "he" must be asserting that women cannot be artists? Languages and societies simply do not interact in the way you naively think they do. That's not a matter of opinion, it's a fact.

As to my lady-dick comment, of course it was coarse! So what?

2 Replies

Pronouns and Triviality

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