My default setting is male. If something is of uncertain, or undefined gender, I unconsciously make it male. When I was a kid, if a toy wasn’t pink and had no bows or lace on it, in my mind it was masculine. Animals in nature, pets, heck, probably clouds and rocks too. I always made them male if the choice was up to me.
This wasn’t something I ever really thought about, or even really noticed, because as I said, it was really all in my subconscious. But then I began to notice that Ruby makes everything female.
Her toys are probably an equal mix of male and female targeted items, and I must confess that I have accidentally assigned many of them a male gender, but even some of the toys with masculine names she will refer to as “she.” Ruby also enjoys helping me play my Wii games. She solves puzzles with me and looks for items and secrets when I play. Currently I am in the midst of “Skyward Sword,” and Ruby thinks that all of the characters in the game are female. Most of the characters are quite clearly male, (although with anime style rendering I could forgive some confusion) and yet Ruby always says things like “Go talk to that lady again,” and “Did you find her fun wheel yet?”
I assumed that it was a gender thing, and that boys must make things male and girls make them female, but when I asked my wife about it last night, she said she often defaulted to male as well. So does society cause us to lean maleward, or is it different for different people? Is society changing? Is Ruby heralding a new societal norm in which being female is as valued (or more valued) than being male? That would be nice, but I am working with a very small sample group here. Do any of you tend to assume gender heavily in one direction or the other? Have you ever thought about why? I’d love to hear more thoughts on this!
I’ve heard of this phenomenon before, and I think it’s actually about language development: Correct English grammar defaults to a male pronoun, unless “one” is appropriate as a pronoun. I have a feeling just reading and seeing and hearing that causes one to default to male pronouns. Which, incidentally, is part of the reason English translations of the bible define god as “he”. In fact, now that I think about it, most languages with male and female pronoun but no neuter do this as well. (like French and Italian). See what happens when she starts reading serious, grammatically thoughtful literature- maybe she will start to default to male as well!
Quoth the sociologist: society causes us to lean male most of the time. It’s a symptom of unconscious biases that we all hold, even if we actively try not to be sexist or racist or homophobic, etc. For most people, the default gender is male, the default race is white and the default sexual orientation is straight.
You may have encountered the somewhat well-known feminist riddle that is meant to point out these unconscious gender biases:
“A man and his son are driving in a car one day, when they get into a fatal accident. The man is killed instantly. The boy is knocked unconscious, but he is still alive. He is rushed to hospital, and will need immediate surgery. The doctor enters the emergency room, looks at the boy, and says…
“I can’t operate on this boy, he is my son.”
“So, the question is, how is this possible? “
Answer: the surgeon is his mother, but it took me the longest time to figure it out the first time I heard the riddle.
What interesting territory you wander into, Adam! I was talking with my physicist daughter the other day – she is an Associate Professor at a well-known university and is in a tenure-track position – no guarantee that it is going to happen for her. But one of the things she said about herself is that she thinks she tends to have at her work ‘like a man’. She was straddling our 18-month granddaughter on her lap, so the conversation could not get too much more in depth. But I think she meant something like this: that she is going to go after tenure with a tenacity often equated to men. BTW – she noted the irony – she has been a strong, outspoken “Women in Science” advocate throughout her career (I think about 6 years now).
How do we see the world? How do we name the world? How do we behave in the world? I may answer each of those questions very differently!
Oh …. and …. “Go, Ruby!”