Let’s talk about pronouns. Just the other day I was reading a very interesting essay called, "Consider the Lobster," by David Foster Wallace about the morality of boiling them alive. It was the first time the school’s curriculum actually enthralled me. There was one part that caught me off guard – the sentence was, “It is, at any rate, uncomfortable for me, and for just about everyone I know who enjoys a variety of foods and yet does not want to see herself as cruel or unfeeling.” Do you notice something off about that sentence? The writer insensitively uses the pronoun, “herself,” completely disregarding the masculine sex. I myself am male, and so when I read this I felt that while the subject matter very much applied to me, it made me feel like the article was addressing only women. David Wallace basically gave a big middle finger to his male readers.
The reason I got irritated by this is that it isn’t that difficult to include both pronouns in a sentence that applies to both sexes. You could very easily say, “Herself and himself,” or since it’s a general message to all people collectively, you could just say, “themselves,” that way no one would get offended. But of course you have to slip a feminist-lingual equivalent to a middle finger in there in retaliation to an oppressive patriarchal society, don’t you? A society that’s been so focused on men for so long that our default pronoun usage is masculine.
For the longest time the overwhelming majority of any writing was by men for men. So of course the majority of pronouns used would be ones directed to an exclusively male audience. I'm going to reference a well known passage in the Bible as an example:
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”
Matthew 5:27 & 28
Even in a more modern translation, it is evident that the speaker's instruction was directed toward men, because in that time, gender roles were strictly enforced and women had other civil duties they were to perform.
What perplexes me even more about this exclusive feminine pronoun usage in that particular article previously mentioned is that the writer, David Wallace, was a man. It's odd because whoever is writing anything, the writer usually tries to be aware of his or her audience. They will try to visualize themselves in the readers’ position, reacting to their work objectively. So for example, if the writer is a man, he’ll visualize himself as the reader, and thus he’s more inclined to refer to his readers with a masculine pronoun because it’s what he would use for himself. The same goes for women, which is why when I’m reading something I know has been written by a woman, I am more inclined to let these things slide, if she does it once. If she repeatedly does it then I get irritated – and I get the feeling that people do it for this reason.
I can imagine that this is how women feel when they’re reading articles and the writers refer to their readers only with masculine pronouns. I visualize the women reading these hypothetical articles getting frustrated, feeling excluded from the dialog. It’s the same way I feel, as if my entire sex has been dismissed from the material. Some people justify the use of exclusive feminine pronouns to address an androgynous audience by referencing the countless and overwhelming cases of the opposite, (using simply masculine pronouns) throughout history to the point when it has become habitual within society today. But by playing the women-used-to-be-oppressed-therefore-it’s-okay card, one exposes his/her hypocrisy. It isn’t any better of someone to address a heterogeneous audience with one exclusive pronoun or the other. Throughout this entire article and all of my own writings, I use all-encompassing pronouns to address my audience so no one feels left out. It doesn’t take much. Even the, “s/he” is better than just, “he,” because it’s at least acknowledging that some of the readers might be female. This is what everyone should do. You can’t justify doing something wrong by referencing that same thing being done against you, because by your own admission you are in the wrong. It is hypocritical. Whether it’s discriminating women, or discriminating men, it’s still discrimination.
There is something to be said about pronouns in the case of transgender people. The whole transgender movement is one that interests me very much, and so I will write a more extensive series of articles on that in the future.
