When I was a kid, I had these health books about where babies come from. Okay, fine. On the very first page, before any of the explanations about sex and fetuses, there was this disclaimer:
“The writers of these books wish to make it known that in all example situations, the babies will be referred to as ‘he.’ No offense to our female readers is meant. It simply seems inhuman to refer to a baby as ‘it,’ and since no acceptable alternatives as yet exist, we shall default to the masculine pronoun.”
I was about ten or so. I almost threw the book across the room.
Life as a girl was not treating me very fairly. I had joined Brownies (the precursor to Girl Scouts) in hopes of learning to build a fire, tie knots, cook outdoors, set up a tent, maybe get in some hiking, fishing, camping, swimming, canoeing. I was a big tomboy. My Girl Scout troup spent ALL of their time in the school basement, making arts and crafts, singing really boring and asinine songs, and baking cookies. The boys in my class who were in Cub Scouts were learning all of the cool stuff. I was pissed. I think I decided to leave Brownies around that time, and I was acutely aware right around then how being a girl could suck. It didn’t help that despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, the prevailing notion among the kids at school was that my career options were limited to teacher, nurse, nanny, or possibly librarian. I was pissed. And now this book tells me there is no acceptable alternative to “he” as a pronoun.
At ten years old, my very first thought was, “what the fuck is wrong with SHE?”
I’m still kind of mad about that. Somebody more lately gave me a copy of “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,” and that book — a “feminist” book — had the same not-really-an-apology right on the first page. This time I did throw the damn thing across the room. Fuck that. (It didn’t help that I’d already tried to read Tom Robbins, and really didn’t like any of his other books, either.)
Other writers are starting to get it. The White Wolf gaming company uses “she” as their random example pronoun more often than “he.” “Your character can do anything she wants to within the context of the game.” “The Storyteller is the final arbiter of all rules, she has the final say.” I read a book about quantum physics that took a similar approach that frankly delighted me. “The large hadron collider takes two particles, whips them around to near the speed of light, then smashes them together. An astrophysicist can then observe the results of the collision, and through that observation she can learn more about how the universe began.” Our astrophysicist is a woman! Excellent.
What I don’t get is why it took so long for this to become an acceptable alternative. Those health books were from the mid-eighties — I would have thought the bra-burners would have nailed some sense into peoples’ heads by then. You don’t want to call a baby “it,” fine, I get that. But seriously, on a subconscious level, every picture of every baby in that book was a boy. Hammering home the ridiculous idea that sons are more valuable, more worthwhile than daughters. Oh, the baby is a girl? Never mind, we don’t want a picture of her for our book. Writers are SUPPOSED to be thinkers, movers and shakers, people who introduce new ideas to the public in informative, well-thought-out and interesting ways. There are several pronouns — he, she, it, they, us. How was that so obvious to my ten-year-old self, but not to a group of adults who felt the need to include that stupid apology in the first place?
I recently took a writing workshop where this came up. One woman put her hand in the air and said, “Can’t I just use ‘he,’ and know in my heart that it could be a woman?” The instructor said, “No. I know women who will stop reading.” I said, “And I’m one of them.” We didn’t have time in the workshop for me to go into the whole story, but the bottom line is, out of respect to my ten-year-old self, I will not tolerate that bullshit.
End rant.
