I was reading Castle in the Air’s latest post: ‘“Chess for Girls” — What women want from games’ and he mentions, in passing actually, that most roleplaying games have sexist language, the preference for ‘He’ over ‘She’. I know, I kinda of wandered around this topic already (and here too on LJ)…. but… could someone explain to me the problem with using “He” as a generic pronoun? I’m genuinely interested in an answer.
Until English has a common generic or singular gender-neutral pronoun, we seem to be stuck with a conundrum. If you use “She” explicitly in roleplaying games to say refer to the GM, is that being sort of sexist towards men as the use of “He” is sexist towards woman? If we switch equally between “He” and “She” in the text, I find that a bit disconcerting as a reader. Same goes for “it”, “they”, “s/he” etc. Though, to be correct, we should really use “they”. I did find this fascinating article on the use of “they” as the neutral pronoun and how it was changed (by an act of law) to be “he” and how that was later abused by men using it literally, as a male pronoun, instead of how it was intended, as a gender-neutral pronoun. I guess that’s a good argument to avoid using “he” (or “she”) specifically in law and other technical documents.
I do a lot of technical documentation on my job, and when you write such documentation you try to avoid using gender-specific terms. You know, saying “It can be done…” instead of “He can…” but this reads as very boring formal text. Well, it is meant to be technical documentation. You can’t write a roleplaying game that way, can you? I mean, part of a roleplaying book’s purpose is just as much to entertain you as provide you with information about the setting and rules. If it fails to entertain, people won’t be interested in playing or buying more of your books. Is it possible to write gender-neutral (as opposed to say balanced) text and still entertain?
What’s the best solution to all this?
Hey Mark! I talked a little about this in my comment thread in response to your comment, but I figure I can chime in here, too.
The problem, of course, is that our language is inherently sexist in that we don’t have a gender-neutral personal pronoun. Some languages actually do, but we just don’t have one in English. “It” doesn’t fly, and I’m with you that many solutions just plain suck. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to bring myself to use “s/he” or, worse, “ze.”
In both fiction and non-fiction—and, yes, technical writing, the only kind that actually pays the bills—I usually go with the following three strategies:
1. Try to rewrite the sentence so a singular neutral pronoun isn’t needed.
2. Use “he or she” for boring technical documents. I find it isn’t too bad there, because I can rewrite most sentences not to need singular pronouns, so the few that do crop up are hardly noticed amid tedious menu descriptions and step procedures.
3. Alternate between one and another, so section or chapter uses “he” and the next uses “she.” You mentioned that you find it disconcerting. Personally, I don’t mind it when it’s done well. Doing it well requires that the examples are obviously quite separate. Switching from one to another between chapters doesn’t bother me. Switching every paragraph—or worse, every sentence—does.
I do think it’s worthwhile for RPGs to take a look at their styles. I agree that the GM=”she”, player=”he” seems a little silly and is probably sexist too. (I don’t mind that the Buffy games use “she,” a nod to the source material.)
I guess every solution is imperfect, but in the end I feel that ignoring the issue is worse that some of the patches.
Hi Alec, it seems Spam Karma thought your comment was bad because of the wikipedia link. Very strange.
On a side note, my wife is French and I’m desperately attempting to learn the language as my three year old toddler will soon be able to secretly converse with my wife right in front of me! Arg. But yes, other languages certainly do have protections. In French at least, every noun is either female or male, so that makes it easy to speak about Game Masters generically, though I do wonder if GM is female or male in French?
I think using “She” isn’t as bad as using “He” exclusively. I saw this article on digg recently about “Subtle racism” as compared to “Explicit Racism”.
Perhaps the issue is the same here. The use of “he” over “she” (or vice versa) is a form of “subtle sexism” that effects women more than men as they have been exposed more to sexism than men have. Using “she” might have less impact on men. Maybe.
Surely non-fiction, the use of he/she isn’t an issue? I mean you refer to characters who are either male or female? Or is there another aspect of this issue I’m missing?