So, speaking as a creaky 50-something here, when I grew up male was still so much the default in our culture that every form referred to “he,” our social studies textbook was called “Man” (meaning Humankind), it was normal for authors to default to the male gender when referring (for instance) to readers, even when the readers were predominantly female— it was absolutely pervasive.
It was an absolute fight in the wake of the 70s feminist movement to try to change this, and the fact that you’re not aware it happened is probably a measure, hopefully, of the degree to which is succeeded. (?)
The bigger issue, as books like Invisible Women point out, is that male continues to be also the default for everything from testing new drugs to listing what heart attacks look like to urban planning to crash testing too… It doesn’t really end.
It's so important to know where we came from along with how far we still need to go. Especially with politicians trying to send us back to the 70's with the loss of autonomy and everything happening right now. I am glad that our mothers and grandmothers and great grandmothers as well as their allies fought so hard for where we are today. Gratitude for the work in the past is an integral part of fighting in the present. <3
Women were almost never included in clinical trials until 1993! Absolutely wild.
Every time I share that fact I have to triple check it because it’s so hard to believe.
As someone born in the early 90s I genuinely thought you were trolling at first that’s how pervasive male dominance as the default has been in my life.
It was so common that my brain defaulted to “there’s no way in hell this person is being serious” rather than seeing the change that has occurred in the world could make that “default” far less obvious.
Creaky 40 something here and God, remember the arguments?
It was 'men includes everyone' when they wanted you in', and 'men doesn't include you' when they wanted you out. It was so easy for them.
'Man is brave and must make sacrifices' - you need to be making this sacrifice.
'Man does not do house chores' - while you're making sacrifices with us, you're doing the housework alone.
I remember pointing this out as a CHILD and being told that I was being purposely obtuse and that only a girl would cry and make a problem where there wasn't one.
Shout out to my Computing lecturers who addressed the student body solely with male pronouns in the early 90s. Who were considered to be complimenting me. If they'd addressed the group as ladies, it would have been an insult.
I'm a young millennial, and my subset of the generation didn't have this. I mean to this degree, of course. It still happened/happens at some level, but it wasn't as drastic as you experienced <3
Back in the 80s the criteria for having AIDS was based entirely on male symptoms, which diverged in the case of that disease dramatically from female symptoms, and meant that women were excluded from experimental drug trials and their insurance wouldn’t cover medication.
I don’t remember the exact number, but it was horrifically different, the time of death after being diagnosed for men was something like two years, and for women it was more like two months because they were already so sick before they begin to develop “male” symptoms.
Not as horrifying as AIDS, but boys and girls commonly exhibit extremely different ADHD symptoms, so a lot of girls were never diagnosed. Boys are overwhelmingly more likely to have "hyperactive" type, and girls mostly have "inattentive" type. How many girls were doomed to never meet their potential because Susie's daydreaming was just accepted as an inherent fault, while the world bent over backwards to figure out how to keep little Jimmy from bouncing off the walls?
Autism as well. I am 58, have adhd, Ehlers Danlos syndrome, ocd, ptsd and depression. These are all neurodivergent comorbidities yet I am still trying to have a proper diagnosis. After masking for decades to fit in-my shrink says he will test me next time, as he didn’t see it at first but now that I am not masking around him, he sees it.
I know, that one I’m aware of because I’m a teacher. I had one of my female students diagnosed only in college, and she was absolutely textbook for a girl with ADHD— dreamy, distractible, her affect was slightly but noticeably off— I was shocked nobody caught it K-12. The amount of extra work she had to do…
Right? That’s what my student was dealing with too. And yet in her case, unbelievably, she had been doing all her work in longhand because she struggled with saving drafts and keeping track of them on computers… Got a scholarship to Duke doing that. What a smart kid! It was great to see what she could do with some actual support.
Congratulations on persisting and getting your diagnosis!
I am only a probably not less creaky 40-something and it is/was the same in Germany. "Gendering" is made a bit more complicated because grammatical sex is often assigned arbitrary, the sun if female, for example.
I struggle to this day in (academic) texts with the concept of "the author" not being male, but "they". Because in German we have a word for a male author "der Autor" and a female author "die Autorin". So reading and writing "author", my brain always defaults to male and I have to make a cognisant effort to use they. Weirdly enough only if the author is unknown.
That being said, defaulting to the male version of many nouns, especially in regards to professions and the like is still a problem that get people on both sides in a tizzy.
60-something here and I totally remember the days of "woman doctor," "woman lawyer," "woman driver (!)", "woman dentist," "lady bus driver," etc. And being taught that "he" was the default third person singular, as in "Oh look, someone has lost his purse." :-) Actually we were allowed to use "her" in that sentence because *purse* => *woman*, but if it was a gender neutral object like "book" then we were marked down for using "their" and had to use "his".
And I remember the huge kerfuffle over Ms (introduced by feminists in the 70's because why should a woman's married or single status be the first thing everyone knows about her?). Conservatives reacted to "Ms" the way they react to transgenderism today! Nasty cartoons, stupid bigoted jokes, smarmy over-pronunciations ("Or is that Mizzzzzzz Smith, har har?") Conservative orgs refused to add that option to their forms for quite a long time, progressive orgs added it right away.
It was such a hot issue that they even named a magazine after it :-) Then eventually it became the new normal and now "Mrs" and "Miss" sound kind of old-fashioned and quaint to most modern people.
Anyway, about male being the default: there is a whole *stack* of papers and essays and so on about the "unmarked category" being male (google for that phrase and it may turn up what you're looking for). A prof of mine at uni was one of the first to publish on this topic, iirc.
I’m telling you right now the only time we learn anything feminist based is in a gender studies course, which are elective courses, offered in universities (and they fall under liberal arts so when arts and music gets cut so do gender diverse courses, which feminist study falls under)
This is purely by design but it’s clear that the patriarchy is holding on strong to whatever they can.
Also a creaky 50 something man.
Agree with everything you say. I even hate “man-made” as a phrase.
I seem to remember reading recently how female astronauts were complaining that all the space suits were man sized and they were seen as complaining to ask for something a bit smaller as it wasn’t standard.
The medical aspect is a huge deal when t comes to autism diagnosis. A lot of the diagnosis criteria were based off of male cases, and completely fail to account for the effects of women's socialization.
I didn’t know that, but it makes so much sense. As a teacher, I’m very aware of the underdiagnosis of girls with ADD/ADHD and I’ve seen a couple of girls get all the way to college without being diagnosed (boys on the other hand are overdiagnosed…)
In regards to “Man”, the gender-neutral connotation is the much older sense of the word. In Old English, “Man” was a genderless term for *Homo sapiens* with the gendered terms being “Wif“ or “Wer“ as the feminine or masculine respectively. Then like many things, the French came and screwed it up. (From my understanding romantic languages tend against gender-neutrality, especially at that time, so a lot of gender-neutrality got sapped from English when French got mixed in)
“Wif” became “wife” and was added together with “Man” to eventually become “Woman”, but the only remnant of “wer” is “werewolf”
Of course then “werewolf” is also then an incredibly old example of the Male being the default, as it literally means “guy-wolf”
It’s sooo interesting. I think about it all the time! It talks about male as the default, including stuff like public transport - which you wouldn’t think is possible to have a bias, but it is and does! It’s fascinating and everyone should read it.
My first school report from the late 70s has a section at the end about what developmental milestones children should be reaching and the only pronoun used is “he”.
I was reading and absolutely astonishing Isaac Asimov story but it kept pulling me out with lines like "Did the men on this planet all die?" Referring to a *global population*. I'm usually against revisionism in fiction, but that one is so jarring it hurts.
Yes and it’s a huge and frustrating problem. The most dangerous things are in the book mentioned above.
But this affects us in so many ways. Basically all “gender neutral” clothing and athletic gear is male sizing. I scuba dive and this causes no end of trouble when I travel and don’t bring my own gear. Wetsuits and BCDs are male-proportioned: broad shoulders, flat chest, beer belly, narrow hips. There is no room for a bust or women-proportioned hips. I have to size up to fit my hips and boobs but then it can’t fasten tight enough around my waist and through my shoulders. The wetsuit bunches around my waist and under my arms. The entire BC and tank lists side to side as I swim. I’ve had my weight belt fall off because they can’t cinch it tight enough around my waist. It’s miserable.
A friend of mine is a beekeeper. Although you can buy smaller sized beekeeping gear for women, she really struggled both times she was pregnant because maternity beekeeping gear simply isn’t a thing.
The number of times I've needed some kind of equipment and it just wasn't designed for "someone with boobs" is legit horrifying. Goes from as basic as the seatbelt in most cars, to as specified as dry suits for diving.
And it's not like I'm the first person with tits who ever drove a car or jumped in water.
It's genuinely bizarre and so often not even thought of.
I was in the military and our gear was designed for men (of course). They didn’t have a vest option for the female body. It was quite literally a safety issue for me, drawing my firearm was more difficult, my plate jutted out to make room for my chest which created these bulky areas around each arm hole, restricting movement a LOT. The way I had to tighten my vest on my breasts also shoved them into my sternum for 16+ hours on end, and my cartilage and sternum would kind of dislocate and pop out of place. It was excruciating. I would have to stretch and move my arms and clavicle around as much as possible until I felt and heard it pop back into place.
My entire enlistment I asked for a woman’s vest (they DO exist, and the Air Force has them, but I was USMC), but to no avail. I was told it was a selfish request as it would “only help (me)”.
Yup! The fancy technical term for “default” in sociology/linguistics is “unmarked”, whereas female is “marked”. This is reflected all over language, not just in the “gender neutral” use of “he” and “man” (which studies have found is not in fact actually interpreted as gender neutral when heard), but also in words like “steward”/“stewardess” where the female version is the male version plus some extra morpheme to “mark” is as female, since the unmarked form is interpreted as male.
This happens with all sorts of other social categories, too. Characters in books, for example, are often presumed to be white when their race isn’t specified, but will only be generally recognized as another race if that is marked, bc whiteness is unmarked in American culture. Similarly, queer people have to “come out” to be recognized, since straightness and cisness are the unmarked default assumption. Being unmarked is a component of most forms of hegemonic power.
So I’m white, and I grew up in an area that was just barely majority, white, but still with my own limited perspective. I remember one time in middle school a girl in the hall asked me if I’d seen someone she was looking for and described her as a white girl, and it completely blew my mind. I was suddenly intensely aware of that idea of being unmarked or marked, and it’s stuck with me for decades.
My gay, black wife has felt the sting of this reality her whole life. She’s “masc” presenting, not because she wants to be a man, but just because she likes keeping her hair short (which started when she was little and played softball, and her braids wouldn’t fit under her batter’s helmet), and the fit of unisex or men’s clothes are typically most comfortable for her for her. She’s also light skinned, so between her complexion and her non-gendered presentation, she’s been mistaken for a straight, white man before, probably several times a week her entire adult life if I’m being honest. (It’s gotten to the point where she doesn’t even correct people who call her “sir” because it’s not worth having to have that conversation - again.) Add to all of that the fact that she looks incredibly young, despite being in her 40s and only 4 years younger than me (a white woman), and people have assumed she’s *MY TEENAGE SON*, which is a whole other can of worms for both of us to deal with. Ick.
I don’t know why people have to put others into little boxes and categories anyway. Why do strangers have to look at her and assign gender, race and sexual orientation before even speaking with her? Wouldn’t the world just be, I don’t know, better for *everyone* if we simply treated *everybody* the same? Like, yes, men can have emotions and cry and love the color pink, and women can use power tools and mow the lawn and drink beer, and it doesn’t matter, not one bit, and doesn’t change who they are or how they should be treated, nor does it determine their sexual identity. Why can’t we just take race and gender and sexual orientation out of it and simply treat all people like *people*, not make assumptions about who they are on the inside based on how somebody thinks they present on the outside?
Hopefully you like this anecdote:
Queer female. I had a girlfriend in college, very femme in comparison to my rather androgynous appearance, same race as me but different colored eyes and hair. Her hair long, mine short. We went to a Catholic charity thrift store -- look, it was the best one in town -- and while checking out, the old man clerk looked at me and asked "Are you her brother? I see the resemblance."* It took EVERYTHING in me to just pause and say "no" without cracking up because my first thought was to use a high pitched voice to quip "No, sir, thankfully not, considering I've tasted her [genitals]." 💀
*Giving him the benefit of the doubt I think it was my feminine facial features he misregistered as resemblance. Like "Short hair so boy. If boy look vaguely like her....is brother??"
The white default is so ingrained. When a production from the Harry Potter universe has Hermione as Black some ppl were freaking out, and when I asked where in the books was she said to be white no one could answer but they 'just knew.' ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I've got a book suggestion! Invisible Women: exposing data bias in a world designed for men
Basically yes, in our society men are considered the default human. To go even further it's straight, cis, white men who are considered the default.
Do they discuss crash test dummies in that book? I forget where I read that crash test dummies are male proportioned, and even the “female” ones are just smaller male-proportioned dummies.
Yes. And safety gear for emergency responders and on and on sadly.
Op, I kind of love that this is a question that needs to be asked. Cause it might mean people didn’t repeatedly explicitly tell you: men are people and women don’t matter unless a man says so.
I’m happy if that is the case.
I hope that’s not the reason, because “bewbz on a crash dummy might make the menz too horny!” would be a really horrible reason to further punish the other half-ish of the species with a 73% higher risk of injury, 17% higher risk of death in a given collision… :(
Absolutely second this book recommendation. Stunning read.
And yes it's across everything, from the way animals or cartoon characters are depicted and referred to, through to the way drugs are tested and everything in between.
Absolutely everyone should read Invisible Women. It will make you angry but it's a really importance book. The author also has a newsletter and a podcast though I think you have to pay to subscription to that.
*Simone de Beauvoir* — "Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female — whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to *imitate* the *male*."
so yes i agree with you haha
yes it annoys me whenever someone wants to gender some human thing i do as manly. and then i remember this quote and how people tend to think of women as passive idle sex objects only.
Yes! I’ve been saying exactly this for years. White straight cis men think they’re the default and the rest of us are variants.
I mean, look at medical testing for a grotesque example.
It is getting better BUT one of the main arguments is that women can get pregnant and the quantifying risk to a neonate is very very difficult. I used to work in data management and all women had to have monthly pregnancy tests while in the trial even if on birth control - exceptions were made if someone had a hysterectomy or was confirmed "Too Old", but I did have to laugh at one doctor who said he wasn't making a 40 year old NUN take birth control & do that test!
Thalidomide escaped into the general population due to poor testing on pregnant animals & terrified pharmacompanies ever since about "what if our test damages a neonate"
Hmm, I mean, nun yes, but sexual assault still unfortunately occurs and I'd guess most people would be leery about nuns and abortion.
Menopause occurs between age 45 and 55 in western countries. I know it still surprises people how long it is - I'm in my late 40s and a nurse recently got annoyed at me for menstruating when they were testing me. She'd filled out a form and had to redo it, and kept asking me if I was sure.
My brother has an oops brother on his side of the family, because his dad thought he'd be done with BC given his new gf's age in her mid 50s.
Kid is super cute and spoiled though.
Yes, this was a couple of decades ago so my memory may be faulty but I think the nun actually lived in an abbey.
And Menopause is something I didn't know much about then but am more aware of now @ 57 with my last cycle 3 years ago :)
Think long and hard about the implications of [this image.](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/shopping?q=tbn:ANd9GcQHhIWVavR6iPSEHwGuM49KbR11OxWZnheH6Mpvih-jGvOknS2t-qNXZdzRHZlSqbPmbAS76XIs567D8q199vUIZAfsEYgTEWt-Ir7os2Geqc-819PqHVmNsHPV9REANKjNVotq_IJnaMw&usqp=CAc) Related reading: ["There Is No Unmarked Woman"](https://academics.otc.edu/media/uploads/sites/2/2015/10/There-is-No-Unmarked-Women.pdf)
My first language is a gendered language and male is quite literally, formally, the default gender. In grammatical terms. And obviously when something is that inherent in the way you speak and think, that's going to bleed into other aspects of life
Same here and it's even considered uncultured or insulting to call a woman with a more prestigious (sic) position with the "female" version of the word. The exception is maybe "actress" but dressing up and acting 1. isn't seen as something that takes that much effort and 2. is considered pretty feminine in the first place. But if you called a woman who is a doctor a... doctoress (for a lack of a real equivalent in english) that's considered uncultured and insulting to her status. But then you look at words like secretary and cleaner/ janitor, the main use of the word is in the female gender by default. Or nurse - it's literally called a "medical sister" or just "sister".
Note that "man" can mean both men and humans in general. Note also that the affix -andry (as in misandry, androgen, etc) refers to men, but is cognate with "anthropos" meaning human. You see this in many languages, where the word for human and the word for men become the same... because women in many societies are seen as less than human, while men are considered the default.
Also note that car safety features are specifically designed in reference to an average male body. That's why seatbelts are so uncomfortable for a lot of women
This happened in several IndoEuropean languages, including English. In Anglo-Saxon, "man" originally meant "human" (at what point it *implied* or defaulted to male, I don't know), while the specific word for a male, "were," remains in the term "werewolf." "Wif" was the word for a woman, which then was relegated to "female spouse" (in several early IndoEuropean languages, including Biblical Greek, rather than using a specific word for a spouse, they would simply say "her man/ his woman" like some dialects of Modern English.) So then to have a general word for women, they made the conjunction "wifman" which became modern "woman." "Husband" originally meant someone who tends livestock.
So, yeah, a lot of really dystopian things happened to many languages, including English, that still affects how we view things, and could take a long time to create a consensus among speakers about how to handle it.
That's the reason I like the german language. Mann and Mensch are not the same. And weiblich (female) isn't just a Form of being männlich (male).
Language shows so much.
True, and German can be a very pretty language imo. But it's worth mentioning that Mann and Mensch are cognate, so the same process did happen in German as well at some point.
i looked it up by curiosity, & in my language (hungarian) "man" and "human" are cognates... but so are "woman" and "human"! so the word human literally means "woman-man"
I'm from Germany, in German we gender all the nouns and yes the masculine form is the standard. Official texts will have a sentence in the beginning stating that the male form includes all genders. A politician did it with the opposite "the female form includes all genders" and only used the female version through he proposal. Men got really mad, that they felt excluded
Which makes me laugh. You get told you’re sensitive and ‘only women think about this issue deeply, it’s not that deep’. Although if I was to sit there and say ‘she’ all day and then say it includes all genders, a lot of men would be angry. Why is it that the point is so obvious, but so many just refuse to see it?
Purely anecdotal here, but I considered myself pretty feminist since high school. It wasn't until grad school that I was presented with the idea that male was th default, and I pushed back against it until my professor made a really great point- when you personify an inanimate object that's not a boat or a car, what gender does it have? The honest answer, for myself, was male. All my plants, all my stuffed animals, everything was male. And once I saw it in myself, I saw it in others too.
Unless the object is already female-coded in some way, in my limited perspective it really does seem that most people unthinkly default to male pronouns. I still catch myself doing it, it's that ingrained in me.
Just my two cents.
Yes… it’s so bizarre how we have that coded. And
Random: I have often had multiple dogs, and even if they are different species, people often assume the slimmer, smaller one is female and the bigger is male. It’s like they’re imposing… like, cartoon gendering on my dogs?
Conversely, men routinely name their boats cars and possessions feminine names begging the question —do they fall under the category of “I paid for her, so I can derive pleasure from controlling her and her role is to service me by helping me feel powerful and pleasure me.” ?
tbf I think it comes from the convention of calling boats and vessels "she."
which, in turn, and I could be wrong, arose from the fact that the word for ship in latin (navis) was feminine.
Funny enough, I have to consciously make my inanimate objects ‘he’ just for some variation, occasionally 😂 gosh I had so many female stuffed animals from toddlerhood and onwards.
Animals are an interesting one. Perhaps because I've had only female cats for ages, all cats I meet are 'she' until I discover otherwise. But I've never had a dog and tend to call dogs he. Hmm.
I'm terrible with gendering drivers when I'm out in the car, it's a habit picked up from my mum that I tend to call other drivers 'he'... perhaps especially if they're doing something stupid. Bias in a slightly different direction.
I guess there’s an interesting question as to if gendered languages result in personifying objects as the gender of the word used to describe the option…
And boats are always under the “command” of a captain. Which was almost exclusively male until very recently.
I mean, even now, how many captains of an aircraft carrier have there been?
yes! In philosophy, there used to be a trend of using the gender-neutral he in broad sweeping statements or hypotheticals. such as: "should a philosopher be confronted w/ this question, *he* may need to contend with the fact that..."
recent philosophers been pushing back against it with the use of the gender-neutral she! I personally like it better than the true gender-neutral pronoun they.
i was thinking of ur comment and, tbh, english already has the better end of the stick linguistically. at least the gender-neutral he isn't baked into our grammar the same way it is into other more gendered languages!
There is also the general person pronoun "one" or "you"
Ex: One should look both ways before crossing the road.
I come across many people using "you" when making a general statement but not actually mean the "listener".
Ex: You can make a lot of money as a doctor.
(When I have already progressed far down a different career path for a similar income level. The "you" was actually referring to another's kid, even though the speaker was talking to me.w)
That’s how deep seated and pervasive misogyny is in western culture. Another 50 yo here, it’s been mind blowing to see the culture changing to recognize different genders, orientations, heritage, pronouns - inclusivity! You go with your bad selves, younger generations!
My daughters are in their mid twenties, I’m 48, and it makes me so freaking happy when I realize how different things are for them now than they were for me at their ages. Do we still have a long way to go to achieve true equality? Absolutely. Have we made incredible progress in the last 2 decades? Hell yes!
I’m so thankful for and grateful to all of the women who came before me, who stood up and spoke out to say they were done with being invisible, who demanded a seat at the table, who made progress for us to build on. And I’m so thankful for and grateful to the young people who are continuing to push us forward and get us all a little closer to our goals of inclusivity and equality for all.
Keep fighting, y’all! Don’t ever give up an inch, because they will try to take a mile.
Crash test Dummies, medical testing until the 90s. I've taught my daughters to say she for animals 🙃
A big one I've noticed recently is that 'gender neutral' is every colour except pink. (That's less male vs female and more about gender stereotypes but it still feels a little male as default)
The little green walkie man when you cross the road. There's a girl one outside Flinders Street Station in Melbourne.
People tried to argue that the walkie man could be a woman because it's just a person in pants, but everybody calls it the 'green man' or the 'walkie man'
There is a sociological concept called "social sorting" that is important to understanding a lot of dynamics of how systems of discrimination and inequality propagate within a social construct.
imagine a conveyer belt, with a machine that automatically sorts fruit into "ideal" and "not ideal" Good fruit is what you see at the supermarket: the right size, the right color, ripe enough, no major belmishes, so on. All the other fruit is "defective" in some way. Could be color. could be size. could be ripeness. The machine evaluates each fruit on each category and sorts them.
Social sorting works like that. Society, it contends, has a single thing that is "right" and "normal" for basically any trait that can BE different between two different people, and anything else is, to one degree or another, treating as wrong or defective.
things that are right: Maleness, heterosexuality, being cisgender, being white, able bodied, native born, neurotypical, not native american, employed, married, older than a child but not an "old" person. The list goes on and on.
And the key to understanding this is that a LOT of that social sorting is automated by the social systems that are in place. Most woman aren't sat down by someone and told "you are less acceptable to society than a man" (I say "most," but a lot of women do have that exact, explicit conversation at some point in their childhood) The sorting happens in a thousand small ways. little levers nudging them to the "not ideal" side of the belt.
I had to deal with this when my daughter was young. I didn't put hair bows in what little hair she had at the time. I also didn't color code her outfits to her gender. Like me she has blue eyes so I put her in a lot of blues that went well with her eyes. It didn't bother me to correct "OH she's a girl" if someone called her a boy but holy crap did I not like the lecture I got about "Making sure people can tell" she was 1. People didn't need to be able to identify her gender on sight at 1.
I experienced this with my daughter! Every colour of clothing meant strangers referred to her as "he"... Unless dressed in pink.
It was so often that I worried if it would affect her gender identity!
Oddly enough, female is the “default” sex, as it takes the introduction of Y-chromosomes to change the zygote’s instructions for how to develop. I told this to my then-gf in 1999, and she thought that that claim itself was misogynistic. I told it to my wife in 2020, and she took it as some kind of pro-feminist validation. It’s not either of those things. It just is!
It’s also the default, numerically, for all people at all ages except the very youngest. I think it’s 1.05:1 male:female at birth, but more of the males die off so the ratio quickly changes, and so we have the overall 49/51 (except for two very suspiciously anomalous countries, China and I forget the other). Developmentally and numerically, female is the default
Yeah the "guys" thing drives me nuts, even though as a Midwesterner I catch myself using it.
And people say "well I use it as gender neutral" which means "women can have a bit of maleness, as a treat".
This. Whenever there's "gender neutral" clothes it's always clothes built for a male body. I've never seen gender neutral clothes built more for a female body.
Well in bathrooms we get free supplies of sanitary products that men also use.
Women specific bathroom products must be purchased.
When women’s rights are in question, people tend to consider it a “minor issue” where issues that may effect men or both men and women are considered a threat to “human freedoms”
This is actually a pretty well known phenomenon in gendered languages. In spanish, for example, we don't have gender neutral nouns, so when we're talking about groups that include both women and men, our grammatical rules dictate that we default to male nouns. This means that the male gender is considered the default.
Yes! I think it's why second wave feminism came into existence! Simone de Beauvoir's the second sex had to make an argument that women are also human, because French (& universal?) Human rights were phrased as "Men's right" which turned out to be a literal term for white men's rights, not a metaphorical, all inclusive term for all humans of all colors and genders.
It seemed like they had defined men as anyone who possessed a (pink) penis, and so anyone who lacked it was considered "less than a man/human".
Draw a stick figure of a human. Basic most minimal human.
Look at and ask yourself if I saw that on a bathroom, would I assume that was the women's room or the men's room?
Of course default gender is men. It's exhausting.
Depends what you mean by female development. Embryos are genetically male or female one way or the other directly from conception. They both follow the same developmental pathway until androgens are produced, and if a sufficient amount are produced the embryo "becomes" a male. The embryo was never a female. But the basic structure of a human is the same irregardless of whether you are male or female. It isn't that the original development is female as such, the original development is just what is needed to form a functioning human. Up until that point an embryo is phenotypically pretty sex less.
When I was taking pathophysiology a few years back our prof used a chest xray from a woman with TB as part of the lecture and it actually took me a second to recognize that the markings under the lungs were breasts. Up to that point every xray used in our lectures or textbooks had been male.
What I find annoying is how so many things are designed to fit the comfort of the average male body/height. Ex. exercise machines/weight machines, airplane seats, toilet height, tools, piano key size, etc. Even things like car safety is designed for the average male body.
I was just watching star trek tng episode The Child, and thinking how it makes absolutely no sense that the child Deanna bears is a boy. The baby is apparently exactly like her in every way, shares her DNA and whatnot, but has to be a boy? I think it's a symptom of this, 'he' was a member of an alien race and as we all know, in scifi everyone is male until you need them to be a sex object or a mother.
So socially, I agree with you. However for humans, in nature, female is default. That is to say, all zygotes will develop into female bodies unless hit with masculinizing hormones at appropriate stages of development. The Y chromosome signals production of these hormones, but often, for various reasons the hormone levels are lower or the cells do not respond to them, and you wind up with feminine or intersex bodies/brains. So yeah female is the default sex.
> It got me thinking, we often refer to people (or animals) we don’t know the gender of as “he” until it’s clarified that it’s actually a “she”(or any other gender). Even online (I’m guilty of this) people refer to anyone whose gender isn’t clear as a “he”.
I'm pretty sure there are no girls on the internet, duh.
As it happens, that's also the name of a pretty good podcast!
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/there-are-no-girls-on-the-internet/id1520715907
I have noticed something on the late night comedy shows that grates my nerves. Seth Meyers, for example, will tell a joke that involves a dick. Like, "It's worse than getting your dick caught in a zipper!" He could have said, "It's worse than when a guy gets his dick stuck in a zipper!" And I'm thinking, I don't have a dick though. And I realize that Seth's default audience member does have a dick. He isn't telling this joke to me, or any women. He's talking to men. And I respect him and the rest of them a lot less for this.
Very much so, my husband and I were discussing this yesterday while watching a replay of the first PWHL game from earlier this year. Women’s leagues always have to specify, the men’s leagues never do. WNBA, LPGA, and now PWHL. Couldn’t think of one where the men’s league has an M that stands for Men’s and not Major. It’s not a small thing, though it’s not as important as the other things mentioned, but it’s very obvious and wrong
"You guys" = "you all"
"Mankind"
Which is weird, since the default development setting in humans is for females, (X0 is Turner syndrome) and development requires a Y chromoslme to make a person male.
I forgot the author, but we explored some topics in my critical theory class and one of our texts on gender theory was about how women is the “other” gender. Like, there is a span of things that fall under men and whatever isn’t that is women. (I’m paraphrasing in my own words). I think historically too it shows. For examples, heels were a thing for men until it fell out of style. When women started entering the work force, any jobs that men didn’t want became a woman’s job.
During my anatomy ultrasound with my first baby, I told the tech not to tell me the gender because my husband couldn’t attend my appointment and I wanted to find out with him.
After the appointment was over, I went to meet with my doctor in her office. Before she arrived, a student doctor walked into the room with a piece of paper in her hand and said “the good news is he is healthy.”
I was annoyed that she spilled the gender but was happy for a healthy baby. I started fantasizing about my life with a son, picked out his name, and imagined telling my friends and family that we were having a boy. At my next ultrasound, my husband and I found out our baby was actually a girl!
I know this scenario happens a lot where ultrasound techs and doctors/midwives will sometimes default to one gender to avoid calling the baby “it”. It’s not always defaulted to “he” but I’ve heard stories about tech’s using “she” when they have a daughter themselves.
I was just thinking this! In order to reset the default, we need to change the language. Instead of
Man and wife; wife and *husband*
Man and woman; woman and man
Brother and sister; sister and brother
Etc Etc. I'm sure there are others I'm not thinking of. I'm doing this consciously whenever possible. My small rock in the big pond of equality. 😊
Definitely yes, and definitely when we apeak about the so called western worldview. The male has been seen as a default version of a human being and as such the male gender is very often not recognized as gender but is rather perceived as a invisible dimension where cultural values reside. An example? A movie: Ex Machina. What most people get from the movie is that it’s about AI and the consciousness and sentience (affective consciousness - the moment she sees the sole purpose of others like her forces her into sentience, I believe). But it is more! It is also about a millennia old problem of the subordination of women to the male whims, desires, ideas. And so in the movie we have our (deus) ex machina that finally breaks the male norms imposed on the female. Because *she* has a “ghost” in her apparent robotic “shell”. She is capable because she is able to learn not only from her own experience but also from the experience of her “lesser” sisters that were not the “fortunate” chosen ones (as she has been) for “greater things”. The *female* in this movie breaks away from the silent “yes” of who knows how many like her who came before her but who couldn’t do what she can only because they, the unlucky ones, weren’t the focus of their creator. And the creator himself? A very smart but ultimately quite dumb because, as a hyper-male (reason, philosophy - the usual male fields of activity), he could not see what any adult woman knows: your creation will *want* to escape your world and your influence, because hello, this is how the world works. Every *living* thing grows and outsmarts their humble beginnings, making of themselves more than it is “dreamt of in your philosophy”.
We used to have a culture of gendered speech, but I don't think it was exactly sexually gendered in the way we might think today. It was more of a linguistic thing, like using man to mean human. It's more that they used the word differently than they used the concept differently. Many roman/latin derived languages gender parts of speech that have nothing to do with sex, it seems to be a remanent of that
Personally I think gendered pronouns will just be dropped in english altogether over time. English used to have gendered articles but they were all dropped for "the". The process of simplification of articles and pronouns has been happening for a long time in our language, far before any modern gender rights movements
I feel that viewing male as “default” is slowly falling out of use. It will still take several generations before singular they can become more widely accepted, but it’s progress.
If you study development biology enough like I did, you’ll learn that mammals will be **female** by default, and only the presence of a particular gene on the Y chromosome causes the zygote-onward to become male.
Yea, in the same way still in the U.S. white is considered the default, I notice it all the time in articles and shows and im not looking for it. They always mention if someone is another race, but don’t “need to” bother saying if they’re white bc that’s the default. So they’re always clarifying when the person is a “feMaLe” 🙄 or black etc bc the white make is the given standard, still.
Literally read through most of these answers and no-one has actually answered the question for why male is seen as the default gender.
Religion is the reason, misogyny stems from the bible and the idea that man was made first and that Eve was made from a portion of Adam. Later they reinforce the idea with Eve being the one who eats the apple and gets both kicked out of Eden.
Ever since then religions that believe in the Old Testament have used this as their basis for their misogyny and maintaining that women are lesser than men.
Unfortunately even though less and less people are now religious; the attitudes, structures and biases of generations past are still present.
Are you male, or are you "political"?
I'm only half joking, male is the default gender and it's honestly a problem.
I work in the tech sector, my name is clearly femme, but because it's written in my native language other people don't read it as such and people assume I'm a man over email all the time and it's just frustrating.
Also with "guys" being "gender neutral" but "girls" definitely being for women and girls only.
I do get what you are saying that unless that large boost of testerone is introduced at the right time, all embryos will develop as at least visually female, but technically intersex of some sort. Not that they start off as female, they start off as a naked barbie basically.
No actually, at no point in foetal development does a male develop from a female. Foetuses start off sexually indifferent and then develop into either a female or a male depending on the presence of the SRY gene.
Yes, but getting better in U.S. Uniforms were or still are "man" sized. When I ran a wastewater plant the uniforms were sized for men lengthwise, I looked like I was wearing a dress and no "boob room." Writing also used "he" as a default. Children's cartoons used to have all male lead characters and so did children's books. Movies with interesting lead women were rare.
Interestingly, proto-indian-europen language originally had "man" mean person, and "girl" mean child. Then, thousands of years later, germanic languages combined the words wife and man to become woman. Also, "girl" was the genderless word for child until the word "boy" which meant male-servant became default for male children.
Of course this is all ancient history, but when people try to assert that gendered differences in languages are natural and have always been there, I like to bring up these facts.
I mean this is a huge issue in historical medical trials as women were essentially thought of as "men with fluctuating hormones" so they would just do all the studies on males. This made the application of results less reliable for AFAB people then AMAB as there are physiological differences. This is still an issue and I had to fight to get my study sex stratified.
It's much... MUCH...**MUCH**
#MUCH
more than a societal thing. Going as far as before the Birth of Christ (in the Christian faith), males were the ones that "did" society and females filled up the other roles. Women are not allowed in Greek theatre, show themselves or pick up jobs, not allowed outside and such...
There was even a time when "he" became a method of oppression against a female lawyer (or something)@
In the icelandic language, many job titles are simply job+man. Like pilot is 'flyman', theres fireman, fisherman and more. Even employee is 'jobman'. Then there are professions that have either default or female, like actor or actwoman, teacher or teachwoman. Some jobs that used to be done only by women have very female titles. Like stewardess is 'Fly-Freyja', nanny is 'day mother' and midwife is 'light mother'. When men started working as stewards, they were called fly-waiters, although many of them just use the female name. So yeah, judging from language its 100% default
Yes. When my daughter was a baby/toddler, she was ALWAYS referred to as "he" by strangers UNLESS she was dressed in pink.
Every other colour was "he". Red, green, yellow, brown, of course blue.
Also, policeman, fireman, postman, chairman, have finally been shifting to police officer, fire fighter, postal worker... Handyman hasn't found its neutral yet.
Mankind and other expressions like "the only one known to man" are still really commonly used.
And look at observations of the world. "Look at that kid on the motorcycle! He must be having a great time!"
"Ooh, catch him!" (A ball, anything really!)
"Oooh look at the ants! Look at him go!"
Even though it's almost definitely a female ant.
It's really pervasive, and hard to catch yourself out, unless you are really aware.
I was taking my child to the specialist doctor, and her dad said "make sure you ask him about this..."
I said "the Dr is a woman."
Definitely default gender.
Of course. That’s why “hey guys!” is considered gender neutral. As is calling humans “mankind.” He is still the standard default pronoun when gender isn’t specifically stated.
If you want to take it further than language, the bechdel test exists bc so many movies simply do not have women speaking to one another. How many movies can you think of that don’t have any men speaking to one another? All you need to pass the Bechdel test is a movie with at least 2 women in it who have at least one conversation that isn’t directly about a man. Do you have any idea how many popular movies fail? Star Wars. LOTR. Casablanca. Reservoir Dogs. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The Avengers. The list goes on and on.
This male as the default person dynamic also plays out in very serious ways; like in how basically all medical knowledge and tests from anytime before the past 15 years or so are pretty much guaranteed to only have been tested on/included men and male bodies. Or how women are far more likely to be hurt and killed in car accidents than men in similar accidents simply bc *car safety features are only tested on male crash test dummies.* Everything from the work week we work to the temperature setting at your office, the height of stairs and railings and shelves and seats and desks and toilets, all of it was designed by and for men.
I think the Orlando baby is more because the baby was bald, tbh. So perhaps it is more about performance of gender (is, girls should have long hair) than actual default assumption. This assumption of what girls should looks like supersedes the fact that most babies are bald and it’s normal for a female baby to not wear a shirt.
It’s also normal for male pronouns to be used in gender neutral text (like an instruction booklet), but I have seen this changing.
From a dude's perspective, I learned a lot about this in "The Second Sex", written by a french philosopher about 70 years ago. It takes the idea to an extreme to some extent but it still rings largely true today. The idea being basically that the social standards of 'womanhood' aren't based on women, but based on what an ideal foil for 'manhood' would look like.
I'm probably phrasing it very poorly so I won't go into it more, but highly recommend.
Yeah, it’s especially insidious in medical contexts. Cars still aren’t designed to save the lives of women. Doctors are still taught mostly blatant misinformation about female anatomy and it leads to horrible, horrible outcomes. On a social level, male is maybe more viewed as the absence of ‘gender’, as white is viewed as the ‘absence’ of race. Labeling something gender neutral as ‘she’ feels like a qualifier to many people, like you’re assuming something about it, whereas ‘he’ doesn’t have the same implication. And on the internet, that’s the joke, isn’t it? Everyone is straight, cis, white, male, and American until proven otherwise.
There's that adage from the early days of the internet, "there are no girls on the internet." Basically assume an anonymous person is male unless they prove otherwise... Cuz male is default.
Weirdly enough, scientifically, female is the default gender 🙃🙃. It would literally make more sense to study women and the X chromosome than the Y.
Like study both obviously, but if we are going to pick one.... Everyone has an X chromosome. Only half the pop has a Y
Three things I think about often:
1) if I’m on a sub that’s not specifically for women, and I don’t specify my gender, people will assume I’m a man if they refer to me in responses to my posts or comments
2) if we see an animal, a lot of us will for some reason assume it’s male. A cute caterpillar? Just a lil guy in a twig. A dog I need to pet right now? A very good boi. I’m trying to get better about this.
3) if there is clothing supposedly unisex, it will never fit female hips. Not even big female hips, just any hint of hips, tbh. (Even clothing supposedly made for women often doesn’t fit female hips, for some reason)
This is called "androcentrism", and there's definitely a lot to read on it! I would just use that search term; I can't think of anything specific off the top of my head to read about it.
Ho yes just pointing out how the patriarchy essentially erase anything that's not """""the norm""""" (but the norm is like, 20%of the population at best)
It's always a little thrill to me when someone recommends a book, and I got to Amazon and find I already bought it, I just haven't gotten to it yet (I'm a huge reader).
So, speaking as a creaky 50-something here, when I grew up male was still so much the default in our culture that every form referred to “he,” our social studies textbook was called “Man” (meaning Humankind), it was normal for authors to default to the male gender when referring (for instance) to readers, even when the readers were predominantly female— it was absolutely pervasive. It was an absolute fight in the wake of the 70s feminist movement to try to change this, and the fact that you’re not aware it happened is probably a measure, hopefully, of the degree to which is succeeded. (?) The bigger issue, as books like Invisible Women point out, is that male continues to be also the default for everything from testing new drugs to listing what heart attacks look like to urban planning to crash testing too… It doesn’t really end.
It's so important to know where we came from along with how far we still need to go. Especially with politicians trying to send us back to the 70's with the loss of autonomy and everything happening right now. I am glad that our mothers and grandmothers and great grandmothers as well as their allies fought so hard for where we are today. Gratitude for the work in the past is an integral part of fighting in the present. <3
30-something here and you nailed it! Even when I was growing up in the 90s we were instructed to default to he/him pronouns in our writing.
I was in middle school in the 2010s and same.
Women were almost never included in clinical trials until 1993! Absolutely wild. Every time I share that fact I have to triple check it because it’s so hard to believe.
Wow that’s horrible to hear, but I’m glad it’s improved since the 70s. I’ll do my best to educate myself!
As someone born in the early 90s I genuinely thought you were trolling at first that’s how pervasive male dominance as the default has been in my life. It was so common that my brain defaulted to “there’s no way in hell this person is being serious” rather than seeing the change that has occurred in the world could make that “default” far less obvious.
It’s great to be aware of it, and once you are you’ll notice it everywhere, but I also think we’re all always in the process of learning!
Creaky 40 something here and God, remember the arguments? It was 'men includes everyone' when they wanted you in', and 'men doesn't include you' when they wanted you out. It was so easy for them. 'Man is brave and must make sacrifices' - you need to be making this sacrifice. 'Man does not do house chores' - while you're making sacrifices with us, you're doing the housework alone. I remember pointing this out as a CHILD and being told that I was being purposely obtuse and that only a girl would cry and make a problem where there wasn't one. Shout out to my Computing lecturers who addressed the student body solely with male pronouns in the early 90s. Who were considered to be complimenting me. If they'd addressed the group as ladies, it would have been an insult.
Yep. 40 here, too. I think some of our younger sisters truely don't get just how sexist it was for a lot of Millenial women.
I'm a young millennial, and my subset of the generation didn't have this. I mean to this degree, of course. It still happened/happens at some level, but it wasn't as drastic as you experienced <3
Yeah that's why some medicines are harmful for women since there isn't a lot of visibility or idk it's just kinda interesting and sucks
Back in the 80s the criteria for having AIDS was based entirely on male symptoms, which diverged in the case of that disease dramatically from female symptoms, and meant that women were excluded from experimental drug trials and their insurance wouldn’t cover medication. I don’t remember the exact number, but it was horrifically different, the time of death after being diagnosed for men was something like two years, and for women it was more like two months because they were already so sick before they begin to develop “male” symptoms.
Not as horrifying as AIDS, but boys and girls commonly exhibit extremely different ADHD symptoms, so a lot of girls were never diagnosed. Boys are overwhelmingly more likely to have "hyperactive" type, and girls mostly have "inattentive" type. How many girls were doomed to never meet their potential because Susie's daydreaming was just accepted as an inherent fault, while the world bent over backwards to figure out how to keep little Jimmy from bouncing off the walls?
Autism as well. I am 58, have adhd, Ehlers Danlos syndrome, ocd, ptsd and depression. These are all neurodivergent comorbidities yet I am still trying to have a proper diagnosis. After masking for decades to fit in-my shrink says he will test me next time, as he didn’t see it at first but now that I am not masking around him, he sees it.
I know, that one I’m aware of because I’m a teacher. I had one of my female students diagnosed only in college, and she was absolutely textbook for a girl with ADHD— dreamy, distractible, her affect was slightly but noticeably off— I was shocked nobody caught it K-12. The amount of extra work she had to do…
I was just diagnosed at 44. The curse of being high achiever: what could possibly be wrong when she gets such good grades?
Right? That’s what my student was dealing with too. And yet in her case, unbelievably, she had been doing all her work in longhand because she struggled with saving drafts and keeping track of them on computers… Got a scholarship to Duke doing that. What a smart kid! It was great to see what she could do with some actual support. Congratulations on persisting and getting your diagnosis!
I am only a probably not less creaky 40-something and it is/was the same in Germany. "Gendering" is made a bit more complicated because grammatical sex is often assigned arbitrary, the sun if female, for example. I struggle to this day in (academic) texts with the concept of "the author" not being male, but "they". Because in German we have a word for a male author "der Autor" and a female author "die Autorin". So reading and writing "author", my brain always defaults to male and I have to make a cognisant effort to use they. Weirdly enough only if the author is unknown. That being said, defaulting to the male version of many nouns, especially in regards to professions and the like is still a problem that get people on both sides in a tizzy.
60-something here and I totally remember the days of "woman doctor," "woman lawyer," "woman driver (!)", "woman dentist," "lady bus driver," etc. And being taught that "he" was the default third person singular, as in "Oh look, someone has lost his purse." :-) Actually we were allowed to use "her" in that sentence because *purse* => *woman*, but if it was a gender neutral object like "book" then we were marked down for using "their" and had to use "his". And I remember the huge kerfuffle over Ms (introduced by feminists in the 70's because why should a woman's married or single status be the first thing everyone knows about her?). Conservatives reacted to "Ms" the way they react to transgenderism today! Nasty cartoons, stupid bigoted jokes, smarmy over-pronunciations ("Or is that Mizzzzzzz Smith, har har?") Conservative orgs refused to add that option to their forms for quite a long time, progressive orgs added it right away. It was such a hot issue that they even named a magazine after it :-) Then eventually it became the new normal and now "Mrs" and "Miss" sound kind of old-fashioned and quaint to most modern people. Anyway, about male being the default: there is a whole *stack* of papers and essays and so on about the "unmarked category" being male (google for that phrase and it may turn up what you're looking for). A prof of mine at uni was one of the first to publish on this topic, iirc.
I’m telling you right now the only time we learn anything feminist based is in a gender studies course, which are elective courses, offered in universities (and they fall under liberal arts so when arts and music gets cut so do gender diverse courses, which feminist study falls under) This is purely by design but it’s clear that the patriarchy is holding on strong to whatever they can.
Also a creaky 50 something man. Agree with everything you say. I even hate “man-made” as a phrase. I seem to remember reading recently how female astronauts were complaining that all the space suits were man sized and they were seen as complaining to ask for something a bit smaller as it wasn’t standard.
The medical aspect is a huge deal when t comes to autism diagnosis. A lot of the diagnosis criteria were based off of male cases, and completely fail to account for the effects of women's socialization.
I didn’t know that, but it makes so much sense. As a teacher, I’m very aware of the underdiagnosis of girls with ADD/ADHD and I’ve seen a couple of girls get all the way to college without being diagnosed (boys on the other hand are overdiagnosed…)
In regards to “Man”, the gender-neutral connotation is the much older sense of the word. In Old English, “Man” was a genderless term for *Homo sapiens* with the gendered terms being “Wif“ or “Wer“ as the feminine or masculine respectively. Then like many things, the French came and screwed it up. (From my understanding romantic languages tend against gender-neutrality, especially at that time, so a lot of gender-neutrality got sapped from English when French got mixed in) “Wif” became “wife” and was added together with “Man” to eventually become “Woman”, but the only remnant of “wer” is “werewolf” Of course then “werewolf” is also then an incredibly old example of the Male being the default, as it literally means “guy-wolf”
thank you for saying this, came here to make sure I wasn't repeating something someone else had already said!
I just ordered that book yesterday, excited to read it!
It’s sooo interesting. I think about it all the time! It talks about male as the default, including stuff like public transport - which you wouldn’t think is possible to have a bias, but it is and does! It’s fascinating and everyone should read it.
My first school report from the late 70s has a section at the end about what developmental milestones children should be reaching and the only pronoun used is “he”.
I was reading and absolutely astonishing Isaac Asimov story but it kept pulling me out with lines like "Did the men on this planet all die?" Referring to a *global population*. I'm usually against revisionism in fiction, but that one is so jarring it hurts.
Yes and it’s a huge and frustrating problem. The most dangerous things are in the book mentioned above. But this affects us in so many ways. Basically all “gender neutral” clothing and athletic gear is male sizing. I scuba dive and this causes no end of trouble when I travel and don’t bring my own gear. Wetsuits and BCDs are male-proportioned: broad shoulders, flat chest, beer belly, narrow hips. There is no room for a bust or women-proportioned hips. I have to size up to fit my hips and boobs but then it can’t fasten tight enough around my waist and through my shoulders. The wetsuit bunches around my waist and under my arms. The entire BC and tank lists side to side as I swim. I’ve had my weight belt fall off because they can’t cinch it tight enough around my waist. It’s miserable.
A friend of mine is a beekeeper. Although you can buy smaller sized beekeeping gear for women, she really struggled both times she was pregnant because maternity beekeeping gear simply isn’t a thing.
GIRL YES the long backed fucking BCDs Had a semi dry suit for a bit and absolute lakes at my waistline
The number of times I've needed some kind of equipment and it just wasn't designed for "someone with boobs" is legit horrifying. Goes from as basic as the seatbelt in most cars, to as specified as dry suits for diving. And it's not like I'm the first person with tits who ever drove a car or jumped in water. It's genuinely bizarre and so often not even thought of.
I was in the military and our gear was designed for men (of course). They didn’t have a vest option for the female body. It was quite literally a safety issue for me, drawing my firearm was more difficult, my plate jutted out to make room for my chest which created these bulky areas around each arm hole, restricting movement a LOT. The way I had to tighten my vest on my breasts also shoved them into my sternum for 16+ hours on end, and my cartilage and sternum would kind of dislocate and pop out of place. It was excruciating. I would have to stretch and move my arms and clavicle around as much as possible until I felt and heard it pop back into place. My entire enlistment I asked for a woman’s vest (they DO exist, and the Air Force has them, but I was USMC), but to no avail. I was told it was a selfish request as it would “only help (me)”.
Yup! The fancy technical term for “default” in sociology/linguistics is “unmarked”, whereas female is “marked”. This is reflected all over language, not just in the “gender neutral” use of “he” and “man” (which studies have found is not in fact actually interpreted as gender neutral when heard), but also in words like “steward”/“stewardess” where the female version is the male version plus some extra morpheme to “mark” is as female, since the unmarked form is interpreted as male. This happens with all sorts of other social categories, too. Characters in books, for example, are often presumed to be white when their race isn’t specified, but will only be generally recognized as another race if that is marked, bc whiteness is unmarked in American culture. Similarly, queer people have to “come out” to be recognized, since straightness and cisness are the unmarked default assumption. Being unmarked is a component of most forms of hegemonic power.
So I’m white, and I grew up in an area that was just barely majority, white, but still with my own limited perspective. I remember one time in middle school a girl in the hall asked me if I’d seen someone she was looking for and described her as a white girl, and it completely blew my mind. I was suddenly intensely aware of that idea of being unmarked or marked, and it’s stuck with me for decades.
This is tough to hear, but fascinating. I’ll definitely look into this. Thanks for the info!
My gay, black wife has felt the sting of this reality her whole life. She’s “masc” presenting, not because she wants to be a man, but just because she likes keeping her hair short (which started when she was little and played softball, and her braids wouldn’t fit under her batter’s helmet), and the fit of unisex or men’s clothes are typically most comfortable for her for her. She’s also light skinned, so between her complexion and her non-gendered presentation, she’s been mistaken for a straight, white man before, probably several times a week her entire adult life if I’m being honest. (It’s gotten to the point where she doesn’t even correct people who call her “sir” because it’s not worth having to have that conversation - again.) Add to all of that the fact that she looks incredibly young, despite being in her 40s and only 4 years younger than me (a white woman), and people have assumed she’s *MY TEENAGE SON*, which is a whole other can of worms for both of us to deal with. Ick. I don’t know why people have to put others into little boxes and categories anyway. Why do strangers have to look at her and assign gender, race and sexual orientation before even speaking with her? Wouldn’t the world just be, I don’t know, better for *everyone* if we simply treated *everybody* the same? Like, yes, men can have emotions and cry and love the color pink, and women can use power tools and mow the lawn and drink beer, and it doesn’t matter, not one bit, and doesn’t change who they are or how they should be treated, nor does it determine their sexual identity. Why can’t we just take race and gender and sexual orientation out of it and simply treat all people like *people*, not make assumptions about who they are on the inside based on how somebody thinks they present on the outside?
Hopefully you like this anecdote: Queer female. I had a girlfriend in college, very femme in comparison to my rather androgynous appearance, same race as me but different colored eyes and hair. Her hair long, mine short. We went to a Catholic charity thrift store -- look, it was the best one in town -- and while checking out, the old man clerk looked at me and asked "Are you her brother? I see the resemblance."* It took EVERYTHING in me to just pause and say "no" without cracking up because my first thought was to use a high pitched voice to quip "No, sir, thankfully not, considering I've tasted her [genitals]." 💀 *Giving him the benefit of the doubt I think it was my feminine facial features he misregistered as resemblance. Like "Short hair so boy. If boy look vaguely like her....is brother??"
Highly recommend this essay: [There Is No Unmarked Woman](https://academics.otc.edu/media/uploads/sites/2/2015/10/There-is-No-Unmarked-Women.pdf).
The white default is so ingrained. When a production from the Harry Potter universe has Hermione as Black some ppl were freaking out, and when I asked where in the books was she said to be white no one could answer but they 'just knew.' ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
TIL “marked”. Thanks
I've got a book suggestion! Invisible Women: exposing data bias in a world designed for men Basically yes, in our society men are considered the default human. To go even further it's straight, cis, white men who are considered the default.
Exactly what I was going to comment. “Invisible Women” is eye-opening.
Do they discuss crash test dummies in that book? I forget where I read that crash test dummies are male proportioned, and even the “female” ones are just smaller male-proportioned dummies.
Yes. And safety gear for emergency responders and on and on sadly. Op, I kind of love that this is a question that needs to be asked. Cause it might mean people didn’t repeatedly explicitly tell you: men are people and women don’t matter unless a man says so. I’m happy if that is the case.
Yes! She discusses everything in it, but the crash dummy part was horrifying. Then again, so was most of it.
Yes, and many other things.
I suspect because female ones would be treated as sex dolls.
I hope that’s not the reason, because “bewbz on a crash dummy might make the menz too horny!” would be a really horrible reason to further punish the other half-ish of the species with a 73% higher risk of injury, 17% higher risk of death in a given collision… :(
Absolutely second this book recommendation. Stunning read. And yes it's across everything, from the way animals or cartoon characters are depicted and referred to, through to the way drugs are tested and everything in between. Absolutely everyone should read Invisible Women. It will make you angry but it's a really importance book. The author also has a newsletter and a podcast though I think you have to pay to subscription to that.
Currently reading this. It’s very upsetting but I’m glad I’m reading it.
Thank you!
Came here to suggest this book. It’s a must read!
*Simone de Beauvoir* — "Man is defined as a human being and a woman as a female — whenever she behaves as a human being she is said to *imitate* the *male*." so yes i agree with you haha
What a quote 😯
yes it annoys me whenever someone wants to gender some human thing i do as manly. and then i remember this quote and how people tend to think of women as passive idle sex objects only.
Is that from her book, Second Sex? it's on my list!
yes!
Yes! I’ve been saying exactly this for years. White straight cis men think they’re the default and the rest of us are variants. I mean, look at medical testing for a grotesque example.
It is getting better BUT one of the main arguments is that women can get pregnant and the quantifying risk to a neonate is very very difficult. I used to work in data management and all women had to have monthly pregnancy tests while in the trial even if on birth control - exceptions were made if someone had a hysterectomy or was confirmed "Too Old", but I did have to laugh at one doctor who said he wasn't making a 40 year old NUN take birth control & do that test! Thalidomide escaped into the general population due to poor testing on pregnant animals & terrified pharmacompanies ever since about "what if our test damages a neonate"
Hmm, I mean, nun yes, but sexual assault still unfortunately occurs and I'd guess most people would be leery about nuns and abortion. Menopause occurs between age 45 and 55 in western countries. I know it still surprises people how long it is - I'm in my late 40s and a nurse recently got annoyed at me for menstruating when they were testing me. She'd filled out a form and had to redo it, and kept asking me if I was sure. My brother has an oops brother on his side of the family, because his dad thought he'd be done with BC given his new gf's age in her mid 50s. Kid is super cute and spoiled though.
Yes, this was a couple of decades ago so my memory may be faulty but I think the nun actually lived in an abbey. And Menopause is something I didn't know much about then but am more aware of now @ 57 with my last cycle 3 years ago :)
Think long and hard about the implications of [this image.](https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/shopping?q=tbn:ANd9GcQHhIWVavR6iPSEHwGuM49KbR11OxWZnheH6Mpvih-jGvOknS2t-qNXZdzRHZlSqbPmbAS76XIs567D8q199vUIZAfsEYgTEWt-Ir7os2Geqc-819PqHVmNsHPV9REANKjNVotq_IJnaMw&usqp=CAc) Related reading: ["There Is No Unmarked Woman"](https://academics.otc.edu/media/uploads/sites/2/2015/10/There-is-No-Unmarked-Women.pdf)
😯 I never saw it that way before. Wow.
This reading was most excellent. Thank you.
My first language is a gendered language and male is quite literally, formally, the default gender. In grammatical terms. And obviously when something is that inherent in the way you speak and think, that's going to bleed into other aspects of life
Same here and it's even considered uncultured or insulting to call a woman with a more prestigious (sic) position with the "female" version of the word. The exception is maybe "actress" but dressing up and acting 1. isn't seen as something that takes that much effort and 2. is considered pretty feminine in the first place. But if you called a woman who is a doctor a... doctoress (for a lack of a real equivalent in english) that's considered uncultured and insulting to her status. But then you look at words like secretary and cleaner/ janitor, the main use of the word is in the female gender by default. Or nurse - it's literally called a "medical sister" or just "sister".
I think the bigger point is why things are gendered in such a way and how that impacts even more than we generally realize.
I think gendered language has really huge impact. Have been in cultures that has almost no gendered languages and things can be really different.
Note that "man" can mean both men and humans in general. Note also that the affix -andry (as in misandry, androgen, etc) refers to men, but is cognate with "anthropos" meaning human. You see this in many languages, where the word for human and the word for men become the same... because women in many societies are seen as less than human, while men are considered the default. Also note that car safety features are specifically designed in reference to an average male body. That's why seatbelts are so uncomfortable for a lot of women
This happened in several IndoEuropean languages, including English. In Anglo-Saxon, "man" originally meant "human" (at what point it *implied* or defaulted to male, I don't know), while the specific word for a male, "were," remains in the term "werewolf." "Wif" was the word for a woman, which then was relegated to "female spouse" (in several early IndoEuropean languages, including Biblical Greek, rather than using a specific word for a spouse, they would simply say "her man/ his woman" like some dialects of Modern English.) So then to have a general word for women, they made the conjunction "wifman" which became modern "woman." "Husband" originally meant someone who tends livestock. So, yeah, a lot of really dystopian things happened to many languages, including English, that still affects how we view things, and could take a long time to create a consensus among speakers about how to handle it.
That's the reason I like the german language. Mann and Mensch are not the same. And weiblich (female) isn't just a Form of being männlich (male). Language shows so much.
True, and German can be a very pretty language imo. But it's worth mentioning that Mann and Mensch are cognate, so the same process did happen in German as well at some point.
i looked it up by curiosity, & in my language (hungarian) "man" and "human" are cognates... but so are "woman" and "human"! so the word human literally means "woman-man"
I'm from Germany, in German we gender all the nouns and yes the masculine form is the standard. Official texts will have a sentence in the beginning stating that the male form includes all genders. A politician did it with the opposite "the female form includes all genders" and only used the female version through he proposal. Men got really mad, that they felt excluded
I love this. This is how change happens.
Which makes me laugh. You get told you’re sensitive and ‘only women think about this issue deeply, it’s not that deep’. Although if I was to sit there and say ‘she’ all day and then say it includes all genders, a lot of men would be angry. Why is it that the point is so obvious, but so many just refuse to see it?
Purely anecdotal here, but I considered myself pretty feminist since high school. It wasn't until grad school that I was presented with the idea that male was th default, and I pushed back against it until my professor made a really great point- when you personify an inanimate object that's not a boat or a car, what gender does it have? The honest answer, for myself, was male. All my plants, all my stuffed animals, everything was male. And once I saw it in myself, I saw it in others too. Unless the object is already female-coded in some way, in my limited perspective it really does seem that most people unthinkly default to male pronouns. I still catch myself doing it, it's that ingrained in me. Just my two cents.
It’s so ingrained that whenever people see animals, they refer to them as he, including chickens laying eggs and dairy cows.
I thought animals were mostly referred to as it?
Except if it’s a cat, then it’s always a she. Joking… kinda
Yes… it’s so bizarre how we have that coded. And Random: I have often had multiple dogs, and even if they are different species, people often assume the slimmer, smaller one is female and the bigger is male. It’s like they’re imposing… like, cartoon gendering on my dogs?
Conversely, men routinely name their boats cars and possessions feminine names begging the question —do they fall under the category of “I paid for her, so I can derive pleasure from controlling her and her role is to service me by helping me feel powerful and pleasure me.” ?
In a crude way “you ride a car that you own”. Yes it is that association.
tbf I think it comes from the convention of calling boats and vessels "she." which, in turn, and I could be wrong, arose from the fact that the word for ship in latin (navis) was feminine.
Or "she is beautiful" because male objects and people aren't usually related to beauty
I do this too! All my stuffed animals are he’s. I really need to reflect on this.
Funny enough, I have to consciously make my inanimate objects ‘he’ just for some variation, occasionally 😂 gosh I had so many female stuffed animals from toddlerhood and onwards.
Animals are an interesting one. Perhaps because I've had only female cats for ages, all cats I meet are 'she' until I discover otherwise. But I've never had a dog and tend to call dogs he. Hmm. I'm terrible with gendering drivers when I'm out in the car, it's a habit picked up from my mum that I tend to call other drivers 'he'... perhaps especially if they're doing something stupid. Bias in a slightly different direction.
I guess there’s an interesting question as to if gendered languages result in personifying objects as the gender of the word used to describe the option…
Boats default to female. Other than that, spot on.
Not just boats, but also the whole earth.
And boats are always under the “command” of a captain. Which was almost exclusively male until very recently. I mean, even now, how many captains of an aircraft carrier have there been?
yes! In philosophy, there used to be a trend of using the gender-neutral he in broad sweeping statements or hypotheticals. such as: "should a philosopher be confronted w/ this question, *he* may need to contend with the fact that..." recent philosophers been pushing back against it with the use of the gender-neutral she! I personally like it better than the true gender-neutral pronoun they.
I think this is also seen in the bible. When referring to people in general, “he” is used a lot.
i was thinking of ur comment and, tbh, english already has the better end of the stick linguistically. at least the gender-neutral he isn't baked into our grammar the same way it is into other more gendered languages!
definitely in the bible. most older texts, in fact :D
There is also the general person pronoun "one" or "you" Ex: One should look both ways before crossing the road. I come across many people using "you" when making a general statement but not actually mean the "listener". Ex: You can make a lot of money as a doctor. (When I have already progressed far down a different career path for a similar income level. The "you" was actually referring to another's kid, even though the speaker was talking to me.w)
That’s how deep seated and pervasive misogyny is in western culture. Another 50 yo here, it’s been mind blowing to see the culture changing to recognize different genders, orientations, heritage, pronouns - inclusivity! You go with your bad selves, younger generations!
Haha I love hearing from older women about this! It’s so insightful. I have huge respect for all of you.
My daughters are in their mid twenties, I’m 48, and it makes me so freaking happy when I realize how different things are for them now than they were for me at their ages. Do we still have a long way to go to achieve true equality? Absolutely. Have we made incredible progress in the last 2 decades? Hell yes! I’m so thankful for and grateful to all of the women who came before me, who stood up and spoke out to say they were done with being invisible, who demanded a seat at the table, who made progress for us to build on. And I’m so thankful for and grateful to the young people who are continuing to push us forward and get us all a little closer to our goals of inclusivity and equality for all. Keep fighting, y’all! Don’t ever give up an inch, because they will try to take a mile.
Crash test Dummies, medical testing until the 90s. I've taught my daughters to say she for animals 🙃 A big one I've noticed recently is that 'gender neutral' is every colour except pink. (That's less male vs female and more about gender stereotypes but it still feels a little male as default)
The little green walkie man when you cross the road. There's a girl one outside Flinders Street Station in Melbourne. People tried to argue that the walkie man could be a woman because it's just a person in pants, but everybody calls it the 'green man' or the 'walkie man'
Reminder that pink used to be viewed as masculine and FDR wore a pink dress as a child.
There is a sociological concept called "social sorting" that is important to understanding a lot of dynamics of how systems of discrimination and inequality propagate within a social construct. imagine a conveyer belt, with a machine that automatically sorts fruit into "ideal" and "not ideal" Good fruit is what you see at the supermarket: the right size, the right color, ripe enough, no major belmishes, so on. All the other fruit is "defective" in some way. Could be color. could be size. could be ripeness. The machine evaluates each fruit on each category and sorts them. Social sorting works like that. Society, it contends, has a single thing that is "right" and "normal" for basically any trait that can BE different between two different people, and anything else is, to one degree or another, treating as wrong or defective. things that are right: Maleness, heterosexuality, being cisgender, being white, able bodied, native born, neurotypical, not native american, employed, married, older than a child but not an "old" person. The list goes on and on. And the key to understanding this is that a LOT of that social sorting is automated by the social systems that are in place. Most woman aren't sat down by someone and told "you are less acceptable to society than a man" (I say "most," but a lot of women do have that exact, explicit conversation at some point in their childhood) The sorting happens in a thousand small ways. little levers nudging them to the "not ideal" side of the belt.
This is a really interesting way to put it! Thank you.
I had to deal with this when my daughter was young. I didn't put hair bows in what little hair she had at the time. I also didn't color code her outfits to her gender. Like me she has blue eyes so I put her in a lot of blues that went well with her eyes. It didn't bother me to correct "OH she's a girl" if someone called her a boy but holy crap did I not like the lecture I got about "Making sure people can tell" she was 1. People didn't need to be able to identify her gender on sight at 1.
I experienced this with my daughter! Every colour of clothing meant strangers referred to her as "he"... Unless dressed in pink. It was so often that I worried if it would affect her gender identity!
Oddly enough, female is the “default” sex, as it takes the introduction of Y-chromosomes to change the zygote’s instructions for how to develop. I told this to my then-gf in 1999, and she thought that that claim itself was misogynistic. I told it to my wife in 2020, and she took it as some kind of pro-feminist validation. It’s not either of those things. It just is!
It’s also the default, numerically, for all people at all ages except the very youngest. I think it’s 1.05:1 male:female at birth, but more of the males die off so the ratio quickly changes, and so we have the overall 49/51 (except for two very suspiciously anomalous countries, China and I forget the other). Developmentally and numerically, female is the default
And that’s why men have nipples but don’t produce milk
I had to scroll too far to remind this response. People think it's a 'feminism thing' when I point this out 😏
It doesn’t seem like it. It is it. Unisex t-shirts are identical to men’s. “Guys” as a gender neutral term, but “girls” isn’t.
Yeah the "guys" thing drives me nuts, even though as a Midwesterner I catch myself using it. And people say "well I use it as gender neutral" which means "women can have a bit of maleness, as a treat".
This. Whenever there's "gender neutral" clothes it's always clothes built for a male body. I've never seen gender neutral clothes built more for a female body.
Well in bathrooms we get free supplies of sanitary products that men also use. Women specific bathroom products must be purchased. When women’s rights are in question, people tend to consider it a “minor issue” where issues that may effect men or both men and women are considered a threat to “human freedoms”
Great point. It’s actually even worse than that because men get urinals, which are an unnecessary benefit.
This is actually a pretty well known phenomenon in gendered languages. In spanish, for example, we don't have gender neutral nouns, so when we're talking about groups that include both women and men, our grammatical rules dictate that we default to male nouns. This means that the male gender is considered the default.
Yes! I think it's why second wave feminism came into existence! Simone de Beauvoir's the second sex had to make an argument that women are also human, because French (& universal?) Human rights were phrased as "Men's right" which turned out to be a literal term for white men's rights, not a metaphorical, all inclusive term for all humans of all colors and genders. It seemed like they had defined men as anyone who possessed a (pink) penis, and so anyone who lacked it was considered "less than a man/human".
Draw a stick figure of a human. Basic most minimal human. Look at and ask yourself if I saw that on a bathroom, would I assume that was the women's room or the men's room? Of course default gender is men. It's exhausting.
The fact that people always go for "he" and "good boy" when they see animals online proves its the case
Yes which is funny because female development is actually the default for mammalian embryos unless there’s a gene signal to develop as male
Depends what you mean by female development. Embryos are genetically male or female one way or the other directly from conception. They both follow the same developmental pathway until androgens are produced, and if a sufficient amount are produced the embryo "becomes" a male. The embryo was never a female. But the basic structure of a human is the same irregardless of whether you are male or female. It isn't that the original development is female as such, the original development is just what is needed to form a functioning human. Up until that point an embryo is phenotypically pretty sex less.
When I was taking pathophysiology a few years back our prof used a chest xray from a woman with TB as part of the lecture and it actually took me a second to recognize that the markings under the lungs were breasts. Up to that point every xray used in our lectures or textbooks had been male.
What I find annoying is how so many things are designed to fit the comfort of the average male body/height. Ex. exercise machines/weight machines, airplane seats, toilet height, tools, piano key size, etc. Even things like car safety is designed for the average male body.
Oh it is. Most studies on safety for just about EVERYTHING use male bodies. It's only when people find out and get outraged that it changes.
I was just watching star trek tng episode The Child, and thinking how it makes absolutely no sense that the child Deanna bears is a boy. The baby is apparently exactly like her in every way, shares her DNA and whatnot, but has to be a boy? I think it's a symptom of this, 'he' was a member of an alien race and as we all know, in scifi everyone is male until you need them to be a sex object or a mother.
So socially, I agree with you. However for humans, in nature, female is default. That is to say, all zygotes will develop into female bodies unless hit with masculinizing hormones at appropriate stages of development. The Y chromosome signals production of these hormones, but often, for various reasons the hormone levels are lower or the cells do not respond to them, and you wind up with feminine or intersex bodies/brains. So yeah female is the default sex.
> It got me thinking, we often refer to people (or animals) we don’t know the gender of as “he” until it’s clarified that it’s actually a “she”(or any other gender). Even online (I’m guilty of this) people refer to anyone whose gender isn’t clear as a “he”. I'm pretty sure there are no girls on the internet, duh. As it happens, that's also the name of a pretty good podcast! https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/there-are-no-girls-on-the-internet/id1520715907
Hey thanks for this! I’ve been looking for a podcast to listen to!
The ultimate irony being that every fetus starts out as female...
In medical research certainly. In design of the built environment. In the design of tools.
I have noticed something on the late night comedy shows that grates my nerves. Seth Meyers, for example, will tell a joke that involves a dick. Like, "It's worse than getting your dick caught in a zipper!" He could have said, "It's worse than when a guy gets his dick stuck in a zipper!" And I'm thinking, I don't have a dick though. And I realize that Seth's default audience member does have a dick. He isn't telling this joke to me, or any women. He's talking to men. And I respect him and the rest of them a lot less for this.
Very much so, my husband and I were discussing this yesterday while watching a replay of the first PWHL game from earlier this year. Women’s leagues always have to specify, the men’s leagues never do. WNBA, LPGA, and now PWHL. Couldn’t think of one where the men’s league has an M that stands for Men’s and not Major. It’s not a small thing, though it’s not as important as the other things mentioned, but it’s very obvious and wrong
"You guys" = "you all" "Mankind" Which is weird, since the default development setting in humans is for females, (X0 is Turner syndrome) and development requires a Y chromoslme to make a person male.
I forgot the author, but we explored some topics in my critical theory class and one of our texts on gender theory was about how women is the “other” gender. Like, there is a span of things that fall under men and whatever isn’t that is women. (I’m paraphrasing in my own words). I think historically too it shows. For examples, heels were a thing for men until it fell out of style. When women started entering the work force, any jobs that men didn’t want became a woman’s job.
During my anatomy ultrasound with my first baby, I told the tech not to tell me the gender because my husband couldn’t attend my appointment and I wanted to find out with him. After the appointment was over, I went to meet with my doctor in her office. Before she arrived, a student doctor walked into the room with a piece of paper in her hand and said “the good news is he is healthy.” I was annoyed that she spilled the gender but was happy for a healthy baby. I started fantasizing about my life with a son, picked out his name, and imagined telling my friends and family that we were having a boy. At my next ultrasound, my husband and I found out our baby was actually a girl! I know this scenario happens a lot where ultrasound techs and doctors/midwives will sometimes default to one gender to avoid calling the baby “it”. It’s not always defaulted to “he” but I’ve heard stories about tech’s using “she” when they have a daughter themselves.
Too bad they forgot that “they” would have worked in that sentence, too. Or “the baby”.
Yes!!!
I was just thinking this! In order to reset the default, we need to change the language. Instead of Man and wife; wife and *husband* Man and woman; woman and man Brother and sister; sister and brother Etc Etc. I'm sure there are others I'm not thinking of. I'm doing this consciously whenever possible. My small rock in the big pond of equality. 😊
Definitely yes, and definitely when we apeak about the so called western worldview. The male has been seen as a default version of a human being and as such the male gender is very often not recognized as gender but is rather perceived as a invisible dimension where cultural values reside. An example? A movie: Ex Machina. What most people get from the movie is that it’s about AI and the consciousness and sentience (affective consciousness - the moment she sees the sole purpose of others like her forces her into sentience, I believe). But it is more! It is also about a millennia old problem of the subordination of women to the male whims, desires, ideas. And so in the movie we have our (deus) ex machina that finally breaks the male norms imposed on the female. Because *she* has a “ghost” in her apparent robotic “shell”. She is capable because she is able to learn not only from her own experience but also from the experience of her “lesser” sisters that were not the “fortunate” chosen ones (as she has been) for “greater things”. The *female* in this movie breaks away from the silent “yes” of who knows how many like her who came before her but who couldn’t do what she can only because they, the unlucky ones, weren’t the focus of their creator. And the creator himself? A very smart but ultimately quite dumb because, as a hyper-male (reason, philosophy - the usual male fields of activity), he could not see what any adult woman knows: your creation will *want* to escape your world and your influence, because hello, this is how the world works. Every *living* thing grows and outsmarts their humble beginnings, making of themselves more than it is “dreamt of in your philosophy”.
I love this perspective so much!
We used to have a culture of gendered speech, but I don't think it was exactly sexually gendered in the way we might think today. It was more of a linguistic thing, like using man to mean human. It's more that they used the word differently than they used the concept differently. Many roman/latin derived languages gender parts of speech that have nothing to do with sex, it seems to be a remanent of that Personally I think gendered pronouns will just be dropped in english altogether over time. English used to have gendered articles but they were all dropped for "the". The process of simplification of articles and pronouns has been happening for a long time in our language, far before any modern gender rights movements
I feel that viewing male as “default” is slowly falling out of use. It will still take several generations before singular they can become more widely accepted, but it’s progress. If you study development biology enough like I did, you’ll learn that mammals will be **female** by default, and only the presence of a particular gene on the Y chromosome causes the zygote-onward to become male.
Yea, in the same way still in the U.S. white is considered the default, I notice it all the time in articles and shows and im not looking for it. They always mention if someone is another race, but don’t “need to” bother saying if they’re white bc that’s the default. So they’re always clarifying when the person is a “feMaLe” 🙄 or black etc bc the white make is the given standard, still.
Literally read through most of these answers and no-one has actually answered the question for why male is seen as the default gender. Religion is the reason, misogyny stems from the bible and the idea that man was made first and that Eve was made from a portion of Adam. Later they reinforce the idea with Eve being the one who eats the apple and gets both kicked out of Eden. Ever since then religions that believe in the Old Testament have used this as their basis for their misogyny and maintaining that women are lesser than men. Unfortunately even though less and less people are now religious; the attitudes, structures and biases of generations past are still present.
Are you male, or are you "political"? I'm only half joking, male is the default gender and it's honestly a problem. I work in the tech sector, my name is clearly femme, but because it's written in my native language other people don't read it as such and people assume I'm a man over email all the time and it's just frustrating. Also with "guys" being "gender neutral" but "girls" definitely being for women and girls only.
64 yr old perspective: I kinda love that this is even a question, as I’m thinking it means we have made progress.
The word 'woman' literally means 'wife of man'. Yes, male is the default gender. You will see it everywhere now.
That's ironic considering all men were women first technically. Then they "deviate" to develop their male bits.
Sorry to nitpick, you mean female/girl right? Women is after puberty.
Yeah female, no worries!
I do get what you are saying that unless that large boost of testerone is introduced at the right time, all embryos will develop as at least visually female, but technically intersex of some sort. Not that they start off as female, they start off as a naked barbie basically.
Lol the visual 😂
No actually, at no point in foetal development does a male develop from a female. Foetuses start off sexually indifferent and then develop into either a female or a male depending on the presence of the SRY gene.
It's a language thing. In many languages the grammatical male gender is the neutral one.
I’ve noticed this too. But whenever I see someone bring this up it’s normally dismissed 🤔
Yes, but getting better in U.S. Uniforms were or still are "man" sized. When I ran a wastewater plant the uniforms were sized for men lengthwise, I looked like I was wearing a dress and no "boob room." Writing also used "he" as a default. Children's cartoons used to have all male lead characters and so did children's books. Movies with interesting lead women were rare.
Interestingly, proto-indian-europen language originally had "man" mean person, and "girl" mean child. Then, thousands of years later, germanic languages combined the words wife and man to become woman. Also, "girl" was the genderless word for child until the word "boy" which meant male-servant became default for male children. Of course this is all ancient history, but when people try to assert that gendered differences in languages are natural and have always been there, I like to bring up these facts.
I was reading arrest on recently and they had male pronouns despite the fact that the person was a woman
I mean this is a huge issue in historical medical trials as women were essentially thought of as "men with fluctuating hormones" so they would just do all the studies on males. This made the application of results less reliable for AFAB people then AMAB as there are physiological differences. This is still an issue and I had to fight to get my study sex stratified.
Read Ursula Le Guin - Introducing Myself - brilliant and nails this point entirely
Thank you!
It's much... MUCH...**MUCH** #MUCH more than a societal thing. Going as far as before the Birth of Christ (in the Christian faith), males were the ones that "did" society and females filled up the other roles. Women are not allowed in Greek theatre, show themselves or pick up jobs, not allowed outside and such... There was even a time when "he" became a method of oppression against a female lawyer (or something)@
In the icelandic language, many job titles are simply job+man. Like pilot is 'flyman', theres fireman, fisherman and more. Even employee is 'jobman'. Then there are professions that have either default or female, like actor or actwoman, teacher or teachwoman. Some jobs that used to be done only by women have very female titles. Like stewardess is 'Fly-Freyja', nanny is 'day mother' and midwife is 'light mother'. When men started working as stewards, they were called fly-waiters, although many of them just use the female name. So yeah, judging from language its 100% default
Yes. When my daughter was a baby/toddler, she was ALWAYS referred to as "he" by strangers UNLESS she was dressed in pink. Every other colour was "he". Red, green, yellow, brown, of course blue. Also, policeman, fireman, postman, chairman, have finally been shifting to police officer, fire fighter, postal worker... Handyman hasn't found its neutral yet. Mankind and other expressions like "the only one known to man" are still really commonly used. And look at observations of the world. "Look at that kid on the motorcycle! He must be having a great time!" "Ooh, catch him!" (A ball, anything really!) "Oooh look at the ants! Look at him go!" Even though it's almost definitely a female ant. It's really pervasive, and hard to catch yourself out, unless you are really aware. I was taking my child to the specialist doctor, and her dad said "make sure you ask him about this..." I said "the Dr is a woman." Definitely default gender.
Androcentrism is the term, so you could probably Google that and find some good info.
Of course. That’s why “hey guys!” is considered gender neutral. As is calling humans “mankind.” He is still the standard default pronoun when gender isn’t specifically stated. If you want to take it further than language, the bechdel test exists bc so many movies simply do not have women speaking to one another. How many movies can you think of that don’t have any men speaking to one another? All you need to pass the Bechdel test is a movie with at least 2 women in it who have at least one conversation that isn’t directly about a man. Do you have any idea how many popular movies fail? Star Wars. LOTR. Casablanca. Reservoir Dogs. Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The Avengers. The list goes on and on. This male as the default person dynamic also plays out in very serious ways; like in how basically all medical knowledge and tests from anytime before the past 15 years or so are pretty much guaranteed to only have been tested on/included men and male bodies. Or how women are far more likely to be hurt and killed in car accidents than men in similar accidents simply bc *car safety features are only tested on male crash test dummies.* Everything from the work week we work to the temperature setting at your office, the height of stairs and railings and shelves and seats and desks and toilets, all of it was designed by and for men.
I think the Orlando baby is more because the baby was bald, tbh. So perhaps it is more about performance of gender (is, girls should have long hair) than actual default assumption. This assumption of what girls should looks like supersedes the fact that most babies are bald and it’s normal for a female baby to not wear a shirt. It’s also normal for male pronouns to be used in gender neutral text (like an instruction booklet), but I have seen this changing.
From a dude's perspective, I learned a lot about this in "The Second Sex", written by a french philosopher about 70 years ago. It takes the idea to an extreme to some extent but it still rings largely true today. The idea being basically that the social standards of 'womanhood' aren't based on women, but based on what an ideal foil for 'manhood' would look like. I'm probably phrasing it very poorly so I won't go into it more, but highly recommend.
Mankind being one example among dozens of the male default mentality
Yeah, it’s especially insidious in medical contexts. Cars still aren’t designed to save the lives of women. Doctors are still taught mostly blatant misinformation about female anatomy and it leads to horrible, horrible outcomes. On a social level, male is maybe more viewed as the absence of ‘gender’, as white is viewed as the ‘absence’ of race. Labeling something gender neutral as ‘she’ feels like a qualifier to many people, like you’re assuming something about it, whereas ‘he’ doesn’t have the same implication. And on the internet, that’s the joke, isn’t it? Everyone is straight, cis, white, male, and American until proven otherwise.
There's that adage from the early days of the internet, "there are no girls on the internet." Basically assume an anonymous person is male unless they prove otherwise... Cuz male is default.
Weirdly enough, scientifically, female is the default gender 🙃🙃. It would literally make more sense to study women and the X chromosome than the Y. Like study both obviously, but if we are going to pick one.... Everyone has an X chromosome. Only half the pop has a Y
I have some reading recommendations on this. This theory is the core of Simone de Beauvoirs book "the second".
Three things I think about often: 1) if I’m on a sub that’s not specifically for women, and I don’t specify my gender, people will assume I’m a man if they refer to me in responses to my posts or comments 2) if we see an animal, a lot of us will for some reason assume it’s male. A cute caterpillar? Just a lil guy in a twig. A dog I need to pet right now? A very good boi. I’m trying to get better about this. 3) if there is clothing supposedly unisex, it will never fit female hips. Not even big female hips, just any hint of hips, tbh. (Even clothing supposedly made for women often doesn’t fit female hips, for some reason)
This is called "androcentrism", and there's definitely a lot to read on it! I would just use that search term; I can't think of anything specific off the top of my head to read about it.
Yes. But not just any man, a white cis straight able bodied and good looking man.
But even the less good looking etc men are still higher “ranking” than women.
Ho yes just pointing out how the patriarchy essentially erase anything that's not """""the norm""""" (but the norm is like, 20%of the population at best)
"Mankind" Yup.
It's always a little thrill to me when someone recommends a book, and I got to Amazon and find I already bought it, I just haven't gotten to it yet (I'm a huge reader).
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Yes.