That thing where people insisted that books stop using only He to refer to humans and start using She as well? When I first heard of it I thought they were being pedantic! What difference does it make! bla and all!
Reading a book which switches between He and She and What a difference it makes! Our mind builds up pictures when we read something. Pictures that are built when u say He ate rice as staple v/s when u say She ate rice as a staple is infact immense. She is infact more inclusive, atleast for me.
When they used just He to represent humans, they left a huge part of the humanity out of the stories. We only imagined the He's doing everything, even tho we knew that the He refered to both men and women, Our mind built up stories about only the He's. We expected seperate stories for women, Even tho He and She ate rice, we imagined He eating rice and we ignored what she did, Unless it was explicitly mentioned - Eg: Women collected bulbs or something like that.
The fact that it is so noticeable when someone uses She says something about how deeply He is ingrained as default in our culture, There is so much implicit bias in our lives!
I saw a face book status on valentines day today - which listed a few men who they said died for love, Jesus being one of them. They were asking where are all the women? Why are they not dying for women? It is a joke. But Its a sad joke, For me it brought home the fact that women have been left out of all the stories, out of all history all these 1000s of years.
Reading a book which switches between He and She and What a difference it makes! Our mind builds up pictures when we read something. Pictures that are built when u say He ate rice as staple v/s when u say She ate rice as a staple is infact immense. She is infact more inclusive, atleast for me.
When they used just He to represent humans, they left a huge part of the humanity out of the stories. We only imagined the He's doing everything, even tho we knew that the He refered to both men and women, Our mind built up stories about only the He's. We expected seperate stories for women, Even tho He and She ate rice, we imagined He eating rice and we ignored what she did, Unless it was explicitly mentioned - Eg: Women collected bulbs or something like that.
The fact that it is so noticeable when someone uses She says something about how deeply He is ingrained as default in our culture, There is so much implicit bias in our lives!
I saw a face book status on valentines day today - which listed a few men who they said died for love, Jesus being one of them. They were asking where are all the women? Why are they not dying for women? It is a joke. But Its a sad joke, For me it brought home the fact that women have been left out of all the stories, out of all history all these 1000s of years.
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