A Girl With a Sword

to each her own

One thing that is really beginning to irritate me again is the feminine generic pronoun. I first encountered this phenomenon in the book Covenant sent me to read before I came here, The Idea of a Christian College. The author was continuously refering to the student as "she" and this got really annoying. Now the idea of a generic pronoun is to give the idea of a neutral gender. When people use the feminine pronoun, she, as generic it catches me off guard. The feminine pronouns have definate female connotations, while the masculine, he, is traditionally used as generic and makes far more sense. Next thing they'll be trying to tell us that "womankind" means the same thing as "mankind" and they'll be re-editing Bambi to talk about "Woman." Although, and this is an idea that I am still in the midst of contemplating. I think that "Man" isn't as masculine as most people take it for. This is not an original idea. I was reading Madeleine L'Engle's The Irrational Season over Christmas and in the first chapter she writes, "One of the most pusillanimous things we of the female sex have done throughout the centuries is to have allowed the male sex to assume that mankind is masculine. It is not. It takes both male and female to make the image of God." She talks about how the word "man" has gone so far it is probably not redeemable. A long time ago the familiar word for male was wer, like in werwolf (and the familiar for female was wif). L'Engle goes on to say that it is "the more thoughtless members of the female sex who do not realize that they are not more free by insisting on falling down personholes, but are blindly relinquishing their true identity." C. S. Lewis dwells on the difference between masculine and feminine and male and female at the end of Perelandra, which I sadly do not own and cannot quote, but those who have read it probably know the part I mean. Lewis also talks about this in That Hideous Strength, now that I think about it. There is a great freedom in the diversity of male and female.