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?
