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”.

“Subtle racism interferes with black people’s mental function even more than overt racism does, a psychological study shows.

For whites, who are much less often the targets of prejudice, overt racism interferes with mental function more.”

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?

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.