The Gender Experiment

For those who have any doubts about whether words of gender have power, Gloria Steinem suggests the following:

"(As an exercise) try putting the powerful in the place of the powerless (as) a great reality check. …  Many women feel invisible or aberrant when they are subsumed under a masculine term that is supposed to be universal; yet they are often made to feel trivial and nit-picking if they object.   But look at it this way:  Would a man feel included in "womankind"?   Would he refer to himself as "chairwoman," "Congresswoman," or "Mr. Mary Smith"?   If a male student earned a "Spinster of Arts" degree, a "Mistress of Science," or had to apply for a "sistership," would he feel equal in academia?   If men had grown up seeing God portrayed only as Mother and She, would they feel an equal godliness within themselves?"

-- Gloria Steinem [Revolution from Within, 1992]

A little experiment is in play on wHeretwoworldsTouch.com, which has to do with articulating gender in such a way that a neutral balance or equality is expressed as much as possible.   Many people are quoted on this website, and their gender language has remained intact as such.   The masculine bias in language probably from the get-go has been fairly unconscious and certainly without deliberate intent to harm or demean -- it's just how we learned from our elders and they from theirs and back to the days of grunts and growls.  

It's just that over the course of the last century and a half, our society has been waking up to the disparities in the world and as a natural part of its nobler development, it's been confronting them and seeking to resolve them -- racial prejudice, religious intolerance, class distinctions, and yes, a growing sensitivity to gender issues was inevitable.   Even so, it is useful to remember that in our less aware ages, genuine respect for both genders was largely taken for granted even as this was expressed in such one-sided terms as "man" and "mankind" and "he" for the [smile:] "everyman" connotations.   But in the last few decades, we have become even self conscious about this blatant bias that appears to speak for one gender more than the other.  There's been a bit of understandable grumbling on both sides of the issue, which is always a consequence of our having to reconsider old habits, but as a consequence of this new awareness, growing numbers of us strive to use a more gender-neutral approach in our communicating.     I can tell you as a woman that I find the efforts toward this effect to be remarkably healing.

Habits can be kind of cute when they're not annoying.   Psychologists tell us we tend to revert back to earlier developmental stages when we're under duress.   All the grousing and occasional "attitude" about gendered language brings this irrepressible image up of two half-asleep toddlers -- one's a girl and one's a boy, of course -- who have managed to bang into each other unintentionally on their little, unsteady feet and there's a mutually offended stand-off, and for lack of articulate finesse, they stare each other down with a mirror-perfect thumb-in-mouth glare.   So here we are!

I can't help wondering about the power of just plain old habit.  And so I decided to try out a playful idea on my website and let the chips fly where they may.   I "thought up" these little 3rd-person pronoun options, imagining I was a bit clever, only to hear that actually a linguistic scholar or communications expert, something like that, at -- I want to say the University of Pennsylvania (?) had already come up with just about the same thing!    

The language shift is fairly extant throughout the website.   The awkwardness of unfamiliarity can feel annoying at first with anything new, but I hope you will find it acceptable if not enjoyable in the spirit of playful experimentation. 

Just imagine:  at the cost of a little effort to learn something slightly different than what we're accustomed to, so much GOOD can result, i.e., a kind of psychological inclusiveness that actively acknowledges both genders.   I bet the repercussions for our children can border on extraordinary!

Share your ideas, your thoughts and feelings.  Your responses to this experiment would be welcome.   If there are enough to warrant it, many of them will be posted on this page.

Instead of tiptoeing around or ignoring altogether the he- or she-type choices, except of course where a specific gender refers to a particular person [he or she], we will use these words, specifically for third-person singular choices, or types of words:

Examples:
He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.
S/he that hath ears to hear, let hir hear.

The meaning of man's universe, his very being …
The meaning of one's universe, hir very being … 

Please use the 'contact us' options to let us know your response or suggestions!