From: utzoo!decvax!decwrl!sun!megatest!fortune!hpda!hplabs!hao!menlo70!sytek!zehntel!tektronix!tekmdp!jeffw
Newsgroups: net.women
Title: Non-sexist pronouns (!!)
Article-I.D.: tekmdp.1902
Posted: Mon Apr 18 19:13:20 1983
Received: Sat Apr 30 00:47:39 1983


Grrr! There go, my pen's/eye's/mouth's abhorrence...

There is no such thing as a "sexist pronoun".

The only way a pronoun can be sexist is if its use implies that one sex
is superior in some fundamental way to the other. The use of "he" to
denote the universal unspecified human does not do this; "he" can be
a murderer, jackass, or other putrefaction just as easily as "he" can
be a doctor, hacker, or some other supposedly successful denizen of society.

Two other points I think are relevant to this issue:
     I'm sure that men were doing horrible things to women long before
there was language to describe what those things were. Language, at worst,
is a reflection, not a cause, of sexism in our society.
     I have the feeling that people who are literate but little else
like to dink around with experiments such as "he/she" and "womyn" so 
they can feel they've "done their bit" for the women's movement. It's
a lot less work than doing something that might actually further sexual
parity. (Sorry, the mathematical influence is too strong for me to be
able to use "equality" in this context.)

Despite my aversion to "nonsexist" pronouns, I am all in favor of
words such as flagger, fisher, etc. which are expressive without having
pointless sexual references. By the way, someone told me once that
constructions such as waiter/waitress and aviator/aviatrix are a fairly
recent introduction (within the last 100 years). Does anyone have more
concrete information on this?

                                  - Jeff Winslow