I find it to be really strange that some women feel offended about a petty thing like this. It seems clear that it is not a real problem; people should be concentrating on real cases of mistreatment or inequality - not a simple tradition.

With all due respect (and a lot is due — I really enjoy the blog) this is clearly untrue, at least in the American that I speak and as long as you allow in American as part of the English language :^)

The everyday answer to third person singular pronouns is “they” and “them” of course. If you can indulge me a whole paragraph, I promise the only people who would raise an eyebrow at the reworked quote below would be a ragtag collection of math professors, English teaching adjuncts, disgruntled newspaper editors, and, perhaps, your mom. In fact, I’d wager a public apology if I’m wrong that most people would find the use of he/him to be MORE odd than they/them — although granted not as odd as she/her.

“But silliness has great value to an actor! It frees them up, lets them connect to those new sounds in a joyous, unfettered manner, stripping away all those value judgments of sounds (and ultimately symbols) as being “mere math”. And once they can hear those sounds in their own mouth, to feel the physical action required, the visualize the action of their articulators, they are ready to begin to learn how to write them down systematically with IPA.”

I’m all in favor of using he/him or she/her as third person pronouns for dramatic effect. The former seems to sound vaguely retro and academic. The latter, as heard in the original post, provokes a mental double-take. But to say that English lacks a sex-neutral third person singular is to ignore an overwhelmingly widespread linguistic fact.

The same pattern shows up in lots of cartoons, and a similar pattern is common in children’s literature: the main characters are a trio– there’s the hero, who’s handsome and brave and who the reader is expected to identify with; his friend, who’s fat or smart or gay or otherwise less cool; and his other friend, who’s a girl.

Over and over, we see “female” as “character actor”. Normal people, of course, are male.

What?

Now, I’m not normally one to get excited about gendered pronouns (well, I *do* get pretty excited about pronominal gender, but generally only in morphosyntactic contexts, not sociological ones), but I would definitely argue that there’s a cultural bias here to see Everyman as a man, and the woman as a marked variant; and that that bias has something to do with reading use of the feminine pronoun as a default as “pandering to the extremist feminist lobby”.