Betty Dodson with Carlin Ross

Better Orgasms. Better World.

• Login
• Join

Search this site:

The Democratic Rights of "Man"...reading "he" in every math problem...the cultures insistence on keeping everything separate ie "women" sports, "women's" studies etc is a constant reminder that women are the inferior sex.  I never got why we couldn't we just use "they" and move on.

Betty talks about the early days of second wave feminism and the focus on pronouns (instead of being called a "woman" they argued for "womyn").  You would assume that this is just the result of 1,000s of years of male-dominated history but in fact they whole "he" vs. "she" dichotomy is a recent phenomenon:

"According to modern-day grammar books, “they” as a singular, gender-neutral pronoun (e.g., I saw someone, but I don’t think they saw me) is incorrect, since a plural pronoun cannot describe a singular referent. And so we have settled on the generic “he.” This is, we are told, the way things have always been—good enough for Jonathan Swift or Jane Austen.

Except that what was in fact good enough for Swift and Austen was “they.” As Ann Bodine argues in her 1975 article “Androcentrism in Prescriptive Grammar,” prior to the 19th century, “they” was commonly—and uncontroversially—used as a generic singular pronoun. Grammarians were the ones who inserted the generic “he” into English about 200 years ago in an effort to improve the language."

It all went down 200 years ago...wow.  And the whole "to improve the language" justification doesn't ring true for me.  I wonder what the real motivation was and who quarterbacked this initiative.  What a waste of time.