An Extra-Long Post Which the Reader is Invited to Read at His or Her Leisure

I don’t generally claim to be in touch with the youth of America—nor would I generally bother to bring this fact up; it goes without saying. But, I’ve recently signed on to write a weekly article for a friend’s multimedia website (and don’t worry, I will be shamelessly plugging it once it starts) and trying to come up with my angle on the thing—the website is generally pop-cultural and oftentimes comics-oriented—has reminded me of my out-of-touchness. And don’t you worry, faithful of mild interestlings, for surely come up with a weekly topical article should not adversely affect my typical atopical of mild postings. Case in point:

The influence of Richard Dawkins on my own intellectual outlook is not to be underestimated—I generally credit my having read The Selfish Gene with launching my interest in science at large, and certainly of the evolutionary-hyphenated way of interpreting the world. And though I quickly tore through the books of several other related authors (in order: Diamond, Hofstadter, Dennett, Pinker) who now own similar shares of my intellectual background as Dawkins, it will be Dawkins that owns the central place of influence. Which is not to say that I worship (ha) the ground he walks on—Dawkins as polemicist, generally, is less interesting to me than Dawkins as the popularly-accessible scientist. In fact, Dawkins’s explicitly-designed atheist tract, The God Delusion, is certainly the biggest (perhaps the only) let-down of his output (especially since most of its material was a rehash of ideas already made available by A Devil’s Chaplain). But an earlier let-down, and the first that I encountered, is in Dawkins’s preface to The Extended Phenotype, where he writes:

I announced that the book was a work of advocacy, because I was anxious not to disappoint the reader, not to lead her on under false pretences and waste her time.
The linguistic experiment of the last sentence reminds me that I wish I had had the courage to instruct the computer to feminize personal pronouns at random through the text. This is not only because I admire the current awareness of the masculine bias in our language. Whenever I write I have a particular imaginary read in mind… and at least half of my imaginary readers are, like at least half of my friends, female. Unfortunately it is still true in English that the unexpectedness of a feminine pronoun, where a neutral meaning is intended, seriously distracts the attention of most readers, of either sex. I believe experiment of the previous paragraph will substantiate this. With regret, therefore, I have followed the standard convention in this book.

What disconcerted me about this when I initially read it, and what continues to bother me now is not so much the sentiment expressed, but the way that it is dismissed. It is difficult for me to read Dawkins’s claim that half of his imaginary readers and half of his friends as well are female as anything but sarcastic (or, more kindly, self-delusional). It may be the case that his process of writing is so rigorous as to include his weighing a given passage against imaginary readers of both sexes, but this seems to skirt the issue regardless—that Dawkins’s own “linguistic experiment” happens to be using a feminine third person pronoun to replace “reader” should not shift our focus as readers; that is, Dawkins seems to set himself up here for an explaining away of his pronoun situation by unfairly weighting his example towards the “reader,” for it is certainly the case that he also uses the masculine pronoun to replace any other nonspecific person as well (e.g. “scientist,” (and wouldn’t that shift our own perception of this passage!)).

The pith of Dawkins’s argument, in fact, involves the actual readers of his book, not the imaginary ones, for it is the concern of “seriously” distracting his readers of both genders that motivates Dawkins to stick with the status quo. We are left to take Dawkins word for it—that his “experiment” of a single (already shown to be problematic) sentence inserted at random into his preface is enough to demonstrate the seriousness of the distraction presented by any attempts to overthrow the patriarchy. Dawkins’s stance, then, is that randomizing his pronouns would be too much a distraction, even for the female readers who would be the ones most benefited, apparently, by his mixing up of his pronouns. Not mentioned, conspicuously, would be the option of shifting entirely to feminine pronouns throughout—except that, of course, the male pronoun doubles as the neuter in English.

Dawkins, to my mind, is correct to point out the issue, and correct again to explicate his stance on the issue, but to come up with some faulty, dare I say haughty, quasi-experiment to ground his argument is problematic and offensive. I do not have at the moment the wherewithal to look up a greater spread of texts on the gendered-language debate, especially as it stood in 1981, but its hard for me to believe that the argument for randomization was ever given much credence. However, a fully committed switch to feminine pronouns would certainly be readable and not distracting, especially if the same space in the prefatory matter prepared the reader for the stance being taken by the author.

We can compare Dawkins’s approach to the issue to Tom Robbins in his Author’s Note to Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976):l

Throughout this book I have used third person pronouns and collective nouns in the masculine gender. To those readers who may be offended by this, I apologize sincerely. Unfortunately, there are at this time no alternatives that do not either create confusion or impede the flow of language; which is to say, there are no acceptable alternatives. Here’s hoping that when and if I publish again, there will be.

Perhaps Robbins has the advantage because his note appears before a wildly discursive/digressive piece of popular fiction as opposed to a serious work of scientific prose. Without recourse to “experiment,” Robbins is simply able to appeal to the novelist’s need for style. He can “apologize sincerely” and let his readers judge for themselves, and thus avoids the trap of being arrogant in the manner of Dawkins. It is Robbins’s hope for “acceptable alternatives” in the future that makes his appeal for the same essential stance as Dawkins that makes it additionally sympathetic; he is not against the overthrowing of the patriarchy, just unwilling or unable to do anything about it himself (and less cynical about it than Dawkins). One is left, instead, to wonder as to whether or not Robbins should be more active in his pursuit of alternatives (I’ve read a couple of Robbins’s later novels, but unfortunately don’t recall anything about his pronouns).

What is interesting about both of these, then, coming from as disparate genres (except for their shared “popularity”) as they do, is that they must interface with the same issue. Enter (and who didn’t see this coming…) Douglas Hofstadter. By the mid-80’s, Hofstadter had issued what amounted to an apology for using masculine-biased pronouns in his Gödel-Escher-Bach, and further written as convincing an argument for de-masculinization as I’ve read (unfortunately the family copy of Metamagical Themas lives with someone else (Chapters 7 and 8 are the two at issue here), so I don’t have the text on hand to quote from), and furthermore has committedly written in gender-neutral terms ever since. For instance, from 2007’s I Am a Strange Loop:

When I was fourteen years old, browsing in a bookstore, I stumbled upon a little paperback entitled “Gödel’s Proof”. I had no idea who this Gödel person was or what he (I’m sure I didn’t think “he or she” at that early age and stage of my life) might have proven, but the idea of a whole book about just one mathematical proof – any mathematical proof – intrigued me.

We’ve discussed I Am A Strange Loop to some extent on this blog before. As is often the case with this book, as I’ve mentioned before, there is as much to be gleaned from Hofstadter’s unstated assumptions as from what he wrote. And I will also mention that reading this book, one does notice that it is written gender-neutral (though, again, when I was reading it I was already well aware of his stance on the issue so was probably prone to noticing), but it certainly is not distracting, and most definitely not “seriously distracting”—the extent of my distraction went something like “Oh, this is written gender-neutral. Cool.” And then I went back to reading.

What Hofstadter takes as given, in his brief aside there, is that the “he”-bias is learned (this is appropriately taken as given). This helps to anchor our interpretation of both Dawkins’s and Robbins’s stances; they both learned the “he”-bias, and whether concerned with style or readability, are unwilling to unlearn their biases or re-learn (or invent) a new solution. But here in this short passage, we have the implied narrative (an end note, in fact, references the reader to Metamagical Themas) of Hofstadter’s own success in un“he”ing his language (which he seems to accomplish mostly through avoiding sentence structures that lend themselves to needing such pronouns in the first place, or using “one,” or “he or she,” or whatever when he needs to).

Though I’ve already successfully detached myself from teaching college-level essay writing (opting for some computer-hacking instead (still waiting for my tab)—which you’ll surely be linked to from here once that (an online literary journal) exists on the internet as well), but in my single year embedded in the front lines in the battle against college-entrance level sub-mediocrity, the pronoun issue came up several times. It does seem that feminism has seen some amount of success on this issue—professors and theorists alike are still concerned about the matter, and, in fact, “he” as the default pronoun is no longer a given. But along with this, a different problem has arisen, which is surely the sort of style-problem of which Robbins, at least, was wary: “their.”

In language, both written and spoken, “their” is being used more and more as the pronoun for gender-neutral, singular, nouns. “Their,” of course, is plural, and the resulting language is hideous and schizophrenic (and I must admit that it took some amount of work to expunge this particular habit from my own (especially spoken) language—though I’d generally claim that I’ve been successful in that project). It’s also the kind of thing that I didn’t have time to teach in my college writing class – there were plenty of other even more fundamental problems to deal with, and barely enough time to teach the core curriculum (I, of course, am thus assigning this problem to all other situations of other people that are/were similar to my own).

So the solution I would give to the problem explicated above is now given as education at an early level. If some of our best writers and stylists are either so committed to “he,” “him,” and “his,” or had to be so pro-active in adjusting their methods, what chance does the everyperson (ha ha ha) have? Yeah, like education is gonna get fixed anytime soon. So the question, then, since this (misusing “their”) seems to be the only solution available, is whether it is better to have people, rightly concerned about gender-bias in their language, misusing “their” writing off the issue to the future to solve and standing by the default to the masculine? As someone who likes to think that I consider my own style when I write, it’s hard to see (I don’t see) “their” as better than “his,” but at the same time I cannot believe that the masculine default reads better than a text riddled with “person”s, “one”s, and “he or she”s. One certainly mustn’t argue so strongly, though, for his or her own’s masculine bias. Or at least apologize for it (I don’t know that Dawkins has ever returned to the subject).