Sex in Literature

[Peg Herring]

Dishonest title, I suppose. My topic is pronouns that signify sex, (and if you're a speaker of many foreign languages, nouns as well). Why do we have such trouble with them?

Part of it is some weird need we have to delineate male from female. Does it really make that much difference, once you've identified a person, which pronoun is used? Wouldn't "it" work as well and eliminate a lot of suffering? I think we could get used to "it". (And you foreigners: why does a chair have to be masculine or feminine, anyway?)

Part of pronoun choice is a person's generation and what she was taught. Being a child of the Liberation Era, I use female pronouns when speaking of myself in the abstract, e.g. "A writer has to watch her pronoun usage." Others were taught that male pronouns function for both sexes, and that's fine too. Some of us were taught to do the clumsy "he or she" thing every time, which quickly becomes cumbersome to the writer and irritating to the reader. "He or she has to watch his or her pronoun usage."

None of the examples above is wrong, of course. Wrong is attempting to cover both sexes with a plural pronoun that follows a singular subject, as in "A writer has to watch their pronoun usage." Admittedly, this gets strange in English, with constructions like "Everyone has to watch his pronoun usage" being correct but not really looking that way ("one" being the key to pronoun choice, and "her" being as acceptable as "his", of course). We find it done incorrectly so much on television, in print, and in conversation that only the most careful people continue to care.

Another thing that's wrong, but oh, so convenient, is the growing tendancy to attribute things to "you." It's wrong because I can't tell you what you do or don't do. "YOU have to watch YOUR pronoun usage" is contrary to the old saying that all "you" have to do is die and pay taxes. It's sloppy, and yet we all (well, most of us) slide into second person at times rather than do the whole "she/he/they" thing. For one thing, "you" doesn't change from subjective to objective case, and it needs no change to become plural, except in the South, where "y'all" is more than one, and in the Midwest and many port cities, where "yous" is prevalent. "You" is easy to use, a sort of catch-all pronoun,despite the efforts of America's English teachers.

There are even some novels written in second person now, they tell me. "They" would have to tell me, because there's no way I can see myself reading such a thing. A reader doesn't have to accept "your" pronouns, after all.

[B.R.Stateham]

Oh shit. . . I'm back in college again. Damn! I forget to bring a pen!!

[Jack Getze]

Me, too. I came here thinking Loomis was going to rip a funny line....

[Jon Loomis]

I feel cheated...

[Peg Herring]

I can dig it, he can dig it, you can dig it, she can dig it...

[Pepper Smith]

Oddly enough, the use of the word 'they' or 'their' instead of a specific gender pronoun is a very old one in the English language. This is a problem that's been with us for a very long time. (I read that recently on a copy editor's blog, but I don't recall which one.)

[I. J. Parker]

Webster's accepts "you" in the meaning of "one." Sometimes this creates ambiguous meanings.

As for gender pronouns: I think if the context makes it clear that both genders are meant, either "he" or "she" works. It's when the whole passage sounds as if it involves only female authors (and it isn't clear that the speaker refers to herself), then there may be a problem.

Certain foreign languages use illogical gender-related pronous to refer to equally illogically gendered nouns. In German (which has three genders because there is a neuter also), the cat is female, but the dog is male. The reason for this lies in the history of language. English is a greatly simplified language grammatically, perhaps to make up for the fact that it had to accept multiple vocabularies (Germanic, French, Latin, Greek) into it's make-up.