Neutered

One of the first classes I took in college was on modern Christianity.  It was everything one hopes for in a college class: the professor was a brilliant, encouraging, progressive educator, we had a seminar table, and I left each class feeling challenged, uplifted, and a little unsettled.  

When it was time for us to turn in our first papers, the professor gently suggested considering how we chose to gender "God" in our writing.  Try using "She" instead of "He," he said, and see what happens.  Mind you, this was before it became hip to portray God as a female or black, or whatever.  As I've always been inclined to consider "God" as a male-female pair anyway, I really took to my professor's suggestion.  "Mankind" was replaced with "human," and since I don't like picking or switching gender in papers I've just gotten into the habit of shaping my writing so I won't have to.  This isn't anything radical, really-- it's a general trend in academia.

So I was surprised when I started grading papers at my new job and kept running into un-self conscious usages of "Man" and "mankind" in my students' essays.  It's weird to read sentences like "Wordsworth believed in a symbiotic relation between Man and nature" and I never know how to respond.  It's neither incorrect, nor am I teaching a class on philosophies of social justice, nor am I at a small, overtly granola liberal-arts college, nor am I a charismatic old tenured man.  These are all cop-outs, of course, and the fact that I resort to these excuses makes me feel like there's some merit to the recent NY Times article on the apolitical attitude of young professors.  When I read it I was instinctively indignant, but I'm not so sure anymore.

Are we spineless?  Sometimes I think we're so crushed by the pressures of graduate school and the dismal job market that by the time we land jobs we're freaked out and too frazzled to do anything risky.  And honestly, as much as I'd like to discuss the effects of gendered writing with my students I'm not sure how many of them actually care.  Despite what many conservatives think, a lot of professors really do have symbiotic intellectual relationships with their students.  It's hard to be an activist in a vacuum.