I know this is tangential, but what is it with libertarians and unnecessarily gendered language? I truly don’t mean that as a rhetorical question or an attack on you personally or any kind of specific political point, it’s something I’ve been sincerely curious about before and maybe you know the answer; why do so many (obviously not all) libertarian and Randian types seem to be so attached to the whole everyone-is-”man”/”he” schema, including the ones who are way too young to have lived in times before people started realizing why that was a bad idea? Proportionally, even social conservatives don’t seem to do that nearly as much anymore.
“Use gender-neutral language” is motivated by an egalitarian instinct, and is said by (moral) authorities—both are things libertarians don’t seem very fond of.
(I don’t identify very strongly as a libertarian, but can relate to the kneejerk reflex against being told what to do)
Also, some people might not phrase it as “people started realizing why that was a bad idea” but rather as “sanctimonious politically correct busybodies started telling everybody how to speak resulting in some horrible eyesores like he/she or ey all over the place”. I don’t really buy the second version , but I don’t think the first one is a fair description either (though it’s hard to judge from a French point of view, gender and grammar work a bit differently in French).
I suspect that it is due to emotional reactions against feeling like one is being told what to do. I don’t know what the correlation v. causation is in what comes first (the philosophical attitude leading to such emotional reactions or the emotional attitude making one more likely to accept a libertarian philosophical viewpoint). But given such an emotional reaction, one can easily see people going out of their way to avoid using the terminology that they might feel like they are being told to use.
That’s a good question—though I’m not sure I can think of a good answer.
I know that, in most of my writing, I tend to use ‘they’ as a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun… when I wrote ‘Man is a rational animal, etc’, I was aware that I could have rephrased the whole thing to be gender-neutral… but when writing, I felt that it wouldn’t have provided the same feeling—short, sharp, direct, to-the-point. The capitalized term ‘Man’ is, for good or ill, shorter than the word ‘humanity’, and “Man is a rational animal” has a different sense about it than (I wanted to insert ‘the mealy-mouthed’ here, which isn’t a term I remember actually having used) “humans are rational creatures”.
There’s probably something Dark-Artish in there somewhere, though it wasn’t a conscious invocation thereof.
I know this is tangential, but what is it with libertarians and unnecessarily gendered language? I truly don’t mean that as a rhetorical question or an attack on you personally or any kind of specific political point, it’s something I’ve been sincerely curious about before and maybe you know the answer; why do so many (obviously not all) libertarian and Randian types seem to be so attached to the whole everyone-is-”man”/”he” schema, including the ones who are way too young to have lived in times before people started realizing why that was a bad idea? Proportionally, even social conservatives don’t seem to do that nearly as much anymore.
“Use gender-neutral language” is motivated by an egalitarian instinct, and is said by (moral) authorities—both are things libertarians don’t seem very fond of.
(I don’t identify very strongly as a libertarian, but can relate to the kneejerk reflex against being told what to do)
Also, some people might not phrase it as “people started realizing why that was a bad idea” but rather as “sanctimonious politically correct busybodies started telling everybody how to speak resulting in some horrible eyesores like he/she or ey all over the place”. I don’t really buy the second version , but I don’t think the first one is a fair description either (though it’s hard to judge from a French point of view, gender and grammar work a bit differently in French).
I suspect that it is due to emotional reactions against feeling like one is being told what to do. I don’t know what the correlation v. causation is in what comes first (the philosophical attitude leading to such emotional reactions or the emotional attitude making one more likely to accept a libertarian philosophical viewpoint). But given such an emotional reaction, one can easily see people going out of their way to avoid using the terminology that they might feel like they are being told to use.
That’s a good question—though I’m not sure I can think of a good answer.
I know that, in most of my writing, I tend to use ‘they’ as a gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun… when I wrote ‘Man is a rational animal, etc’, I was aware that I could have rephrased the whole thing to be gender-neutral… but when writing, I felt that it wouldn’t have provided the same feeling—short, sharp, direct, to-the-point. The capitalized term ‘Man’ is, for good or ill, shorter than the word ‘humanity’, and “Man is a rational animal” has a different sense about it than (I wanted to insert ‘the mealy-mouthed’ here, which isn’t a term I remember actually having used) “humans are rational creatures”.
There’s probably something Dark-Artish in there somewhere, though it wasn’t a conscious invocation thereof.
I’d guess it’s the gender split. It’s a doozy.
I think you’d see less gendered in libertarian journalism, where there are more women.