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> Why else would you "default" to "he" instead of "she"? Because you assume the author to be a man. I can say both from experience and personal perspective tha
by greyfade 14y ago
> Why else would you "default" to "he" instead of "she"? Because you assume the author to be a man.
I can say both from experience and personal perspective that, especially in America, it is a cultural norm to use "he" as a gender-neutral, non-normative pronoun. "They" sounds both awkward and invalid since it is taught as a plural pronoun.
I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and this is the way I and everyone around me spoke. We never used "he" exclusively as a male pronoun, especially when gender was indeterminate. Some people would correct themselves by saying, "He ... or she..." I myself have spent years training myself to use "they" instead of "he," and I still catch myself using "he" when I clearly mean to use a gender-neutral pronoun.
Please do not put words in people's mouths and assume that when we use "he" it means we think it's a man. Our subculture is different from your own. Our upbringing is different from yours. It is a fallacy to assume otherwise.
Not everyone is a backward sexist.
- roguecoder 14y agoI never intended to imply that this was a conscious assumption, but I do believe the assumption is there. Language matters and shapes our thinking, and there is no reason to think that "everyone does it" doesn't mean it's sexist. Even where is a cultural norm, it sets male up as default and women up as weird variations from that norm. It has been shown in German and Russian that the gender of inanimate nouns changes how people respond to them. Why do you think that wouldn't be true of referring to everyone as male?
- drivebyacct2 14y agoYou're missing the point too. Language is an important part of human perception, conscious and unconscious. The words you use shape reality, and using a pronoun that is specifically not gender neutral in a context has an effect, subtle or not. I'm not sure how else to convey this thought except to ask you to do some research into how language affects perception, particularly when it comes to social inequality. It's a well studied and well documented arena of sociology