Ingrid Robeyns at Crooked Timber heard from a friend of hers in Italy that his children’s school gave the following (translated, I assume) directions for picking up kids for an early dismissal: “Today Mothers should pick up their children at 2 pm rather than 4 pm.” Ingrid writes, “If I ever were to read such a note, I would be outraged that the school would assume that it could only be mothers who would get the kids from school; he, as a father, was outraged that the school assumed that there would be no fathers picking up the kids from school.” And, sure, that is some pretty crude sexism there, but is the primary feature of the note that it is outrageous, or that it is really bizarre and anachronistic?

Such overt expressions of gender stereotypes tend to be self-conscious efforts to demean women, like the “iron my shirt crew” from the New Hampshire primary. By contrast, the sentiment behind the note to mothers seems both utterly earnest and completely unaware that it relies on a badly distorted image of the way modern families function. Reading it is more like observing an animatronic recreation of 50s mores behind glass in a museum than an encounter with real-life, full-blooded misogyny.

Aggressive, self-conscious expressions of sexism and misogyny seem to me incomparably more heinous than the school note. Likewise, far more heinous — and also far more insidious and probably concretely worst of all for women — is not the reinforcement of some ancient, obsolete stereotype, but new and emergent encodings of sexism in the discourse of reproductive freedom, rights for sexual minorities, gendered double-standards for young men and women making choices about their sexual and romantic lives that did not exist a few decades ago, and so forth. With that phenomenon real and pervasive (oh, I read Feministing every day, even if I don’t always agree), I find it difficult to get worked up about whatever inspired the octogenarian veteran of the Army of Salo (I’m guessing) to address himself (I’m guessing he’s a he) only to his students’ mothers.

Apropos of linguistically encoded gender distinctions, some of you may have noticed that I generally use “she” as a default pronoun in hypothetical or unknown third person singular discourse. That’s a convention in philosophical writing that, from what I can tell, really began to take off in the mid-to-late 90s. (It may have begun in other disciplines or spread to other disciplines, I just don’t know). At this point, deviation from that convention is pretty rare, and mostly occurs in the writing of some old timers who are resistant to change for some reason or other (it need not be anything sinister; some people are just dogmatic prescriptivists about usage and won’t bend or compromise any norm they were taught). Indeed, seeing a default or collective “he” in a recent philosophical paper looks slightly wrong to those of us trained in the argot since the switch happened. I resisted it quite a bit at first, simply because I’d never seen it before and it initially felt artificial and forced, but I gradually warmed up to it, began using it more and more until I used it exclusively in philosophical writing, and then I figured I might as well just make it a rule for all my writing.

There is a case to be made for using feminine pronouns as defaults in hypothetical or incompletely informed descriptions apart from any payoff in terms of increased gender equity — which I assume would be negligible but possibly >0. First of all, it beats by a mile the non-option of trying to convert “they” into a singular pronoun, which is grammatically wrong, of course, and if it succeeds, will succeed in destroying some of the richness of English language inflections. Assuming the dread singular “they” is to be avoided at all costs, our remaining options are “he,” “she,” and “it.” Equity argues for the last, but the problem is, again, that adopting “it” is not English, since “it” simply cannot refer to human beings (at least those older than a few months — one sometimes hears a baby referred to as “it”). This feature, or rather bug, is not present in  other Germanic languages with neuter genders, by the way. (E.g., in German, one word for “girl” is mädchen, which becomes neuter because of the -chen suffix. The nominative pronoun for mädchen is es, i.e. “it.”)

So those are the language cards we are dealt as English speakers. The only grammatical and connotatively sensible options are “he” and “she.” Using “he” by default has two unwelcome consequences; first it can age one’s writing voice by more than any other expression this side of “bully” and “by jingo,” especially for those of us who do writing that involves a substantial amount of hypothetical reasoning; second, and again the effect is magnified for those of us who use hypothetical constructions over and over again in our writing, a relentless string of default “he”s can give off the unintended impression that one is deliberately trying to provoke some sort of feminist reaction. The two effects amplify one another. If they are intentional, they are something like the linguistic counterpart to the classic move of overeducated conservatives of dressing up for the World’s Fair of 1929, bow tie, braces and all, for completely causal affairs — there is no overt message, nor even a covert message in the ordinary sense, but there is a very, very subtle, but none the less deliberate note of counterrevolutionary subversiveness and taking delight in the almost undetectable discomfort that causes liberals.

That leaves “she.” To be sure, “she” feels slightly unnatural at first. It is never used in such a way in any of the literature we are brought up in. But then again, it suffers from no immediate fatal objection like “they,” and unlike “it,” in any case involving a human being in which the identity of the referent of a pronoun is unknown, it’s an even money bet that “she” will be correct. (Slightly better than even money, actually). So “she” is a viable alternative to “he.” Any lingering sense of unnaturalness in using “she” and its inflected forms as defaults will, I can promise, go away with just a little practice using it. So the remaining objection is tradition simply for the sake of tradition. Perhaps people who put far more stock in tradition than I do might find that a moving consideration. But weighed against the disadvantages of using “he,” deference to tradition hardly registers for me.

Now, one final alternative to adopting “she” uniformly is to alternate between “he” and “she.” That’s a compromise some people will find attractive, and though I disagree with it as a matter of taste, it’s better than any option except, I argue, just “she” — and no doubt there are people whose taste cuts in favor of the compromise over “she” or “he” alone. My objection to the compromise is that it produces schizophrenic, somewhat clownish writing, that overtly tries to be and is a blunt pander to readers. Moreover, it requires keeping constant track of which word is on deck, and in cases that are not uncommon at least in philosophy, nested hypotheticals can become a confusing mess very quickly.

That leaves us, finally, to consider the virtues of only using “she.” Now, any reader unfamiliar with the flipped convention cannot fail to take notice of it. Especially in discourses that involve extensive use of default pronouns, the repetition of the feminine defaults can foster a dramatic tension between the author and reader — “where is she going with this? what is her point?” the reader might think — that further pulls the reader into the text. Moreover, unlike the alternation, using feminine defaults in any context (except perhaps some feminist writing) is the opposite of a pander: it is a direct challenge to readers’ received wisdom that connotes a supreme self-confidence and authoritativeness, and demands of the reader that she live up to the author’s standards.

Finally, there are the tonal qualities of “she” and its inflected forms, evoking a clean, crisp, modernist aesthetic that throws the composition into stark relief against any crowd of compositions employing inferior packages of default pronouns. The minimalist, forward-looking elegance of feminine defaults is especially pronounced in contrast to the bowtied, penny-loafered, rococo bloat of masculine defaults. Perhaps most impressively, the freshness and freedom from baggage feminine defaults enjoy affords them a kind of precision in their semantic interplay that no other package of default pronouns can compare to. A writer using feminine defaults in her composition has the equivalent of a very fine scalpel at her disposal as she constructs descriptions requiring default pronouns and carves out referents for them. A writer using masculine defaults, on the other hand, is attempting fine carving with a machete. (To complete the analogy, using “they” is like setting the whole construction on fire without assigning the defaults any referents, and alternating “he” and “she” is like pairing a fine engraver with a committee of mediocrities and letting the latter make most of the cuts.)

I won’t try to proselytize for “she” again. But I can promise making the switch is something like switching from PC to Mac: you’ll be thrilled about it and never look back, except to wonder why you didn’t convert sooner.

Tags: language