He/She-Man/Woman

In my list of rules for monologuing I used the pronoun “he” to describe the hypothetical monologuer. In her comment, H said that this choice of pronoun was “interesting” and asked whether monologuing is a male trait. From my experience, most monologuers seem to be male. What do you think?

H certainly wasn’t suggesting I use “he/she” instead of “he” – that wasn’t her point. But it did get me thinking about this topic. I keep changing my mind about it, as you’re about to see. Should we use “he/she” as a generic term to describe males and females?

When I was in my late teens, someone at school told me that I shouldn’t use “he” when I was writing about both males and females, because it was sexist. I thought that this was silly. Using the word “he” doesn’t say anything at all about my opinion about either sex, I thought.

A couple of years later, I started to change my mind. Someone else told me that using “he” when I meant “he or she” excluded the female. Women have been oppressed since time began, it was argued. A case was built up gradually by a few lecturers and fellow-students. I began to use “he/she” in my essays.

I didn’t go all the way, though, and start using “she” instead of “he”. Indeed, one of my lecturers was a very strong feminist and she used “she” in her books. However, she put me right off doing so too because of what she did in a lecture once. She was trying to use a projector, but the bulb had gone. She’d called for help, and in came a workman. Not well-endowed with intelligence, it took him a while to understand what the problem was, and he left without solving it to go and get a new bulb. After he’d gone, the woman turned to the assembled students – probably 250 of us – and said, “Look at that! The power and strength and masterfulness of a man!”

I was angered by this sexism and felt sorry for the chap who had been humiliated without even knowing it. So annoyed with her was I that I followed her out of the lecture and made sure she heard me telling a sexist joke behind her. I was trying to provoke a response from her so that I could accuse her of having double-standards, but, of course, she ignored me. Quite glad about that now. Think she probably would’ve humiliated me, too.

What annoyed me about her is what annoys me most about many people who have very fixed opinions: they forget about equality and tolerance and end up being very similar to those whom they’re opposed to.

Teaching a language and gender course increased my awareness of this issue. Analysis of everything, from 1950s Hoover adverts, through newspaper reports about politics, to advertising of video games revealed that women were excluded, oppressed or marginalised. Men were “normal”, generic and powerful while women were “abnormal”, subservient and weak. I advised my students to use “he/she” or “s/he”.

This brings us back to the present day. As I was writing the monologuing rules, I made a conscious decision to use “he”. One reason is because the bloke who inspired the blog entry was (obviously) a he.

The other reason is that I’ve recently taken yet another position on the “he, she or he/she” debate. In fact, it’s a position about writing in general. Anything that spoils the flow of a piece of writing, or draws attention to itself, or makes the reading of the text harder work than it needs to be, should be avoided. I have reached this position after years of reading unimaginably difficult-to-read texts: essays by students. It’s no wonder young people flounder as they try to use our complicated language if they are picked up for every last pronoun choice. The battle against 1950s gender roles (woman stays at home looking after house and children, man goes out to work expecting slippers to be warming by the fire on his return home) is surely all but over now anyway. Is it really necessary to keep saying “he/she” when it looks and sounds awful? Can’t we go back to using language in a nice way?