---

Feminist Grammar That Isn’t

-By Warner Todd Huston

Feminists are in essence an anti-intellectual lot. After all, the back flips they have to do to justify their anti-male crusade is an act worthy of Olympics style awards. Such are the illogical back bends that feminists must to do to justify their ideology that men become wholly unnecessary, biology and nature be damned. There are many intellectual outrages to education and tradition that feminists employ to make themselves feel superior. But I want to focus here on just one of these.

The example I’d like to discuss today is the elimination of the masculine pronoun. For those not “up” on their Strunk & White’s, the masculine pronoun is used when speaking about people generically. Example: Everyone should take his tea with milk. In this example the tea drinker is identified as “his” because a specific person or gender is not a focus, the sentence being centered on how people in general should drink tea.

The feminist complaint, of course, is that the generic “he” (or “his”) is offensive because it assumes all people are males. This, of course, is pure poppycock. Only an idiot — or a university professor, one in the same to many — would be so absurd as to make such a claim. Using the male pronoun does not assume that all people are males, nor does it posit that only males are important.

The unsatisfactory solution has often been to say “his or hers” in place of a simple “his.” This of course makes a sentence unnecessarily verbose, inelegant, and clumsy. Others have gone even farther into foolishness by suggesting using “his/hers” and its subsequent iterations in place of the masculine. There are also affected terms sponsored by the clownish provocateurs of gender neutrality such as “hir/hiz” out there further trivializing the language.

And now for the Big Top award for today… In a current example Farhad Manjoo has surrendered completely to the feminization of our language and decided that using the male at all is an evil beyond imagining. In a Slate.com article about website ad blocking software, of all things, Manjoo regurgitated a perfect example of this idiotic re-gendering of the masculine pronoun.

Here’s Palant’s solution: Adblock Plus would keep track of which sites you visit often. If it notices that you’re spending a lot of time at certain sites on which you’re blocking ads, the software would give you guilt-inducing prompt, like, “The owner of this Web site indicated that no annoying advertising is being used here. Would you like to disable Adblock Plus on Example.com to support it?” If the user clicks “Yes,” she begins to see ads on that site–but, importantly, she’ll be able to shut down all the ads on the site at any moment if they begin to annoy her.

Ridiculously, he goes from “you” to “her” in the same paragraph.

Manjoo dumped the male pronoun altogether and made it feminine. Now “she” is clicking on yes to be rid of ads on the Internet. Tell me Mr. Manjoo, do men not use the Internet? Just wondering because if you must use “she” to avoid sounding “sexist” aren’t you simply reversing the supposed bias?

Sadly, Mr. Manjoo is not a woman, but my guess is he wishes he were. I’d bet is he’s even embarrassed he has a masculine aspect to his last name. How infuriating it must be that his name is MANjoo! How long will it be before he tries to reengineer it to His/Herjoo? Maybe he’ll simply settle on Herjoo and be done with it?

But, seriously, the excerpted paragraph above shows the idiocy that is the attack on our language of feminism. Poor Mr. Majoo was so confused, so afraid of the feminazis that he didn’t know what pronoun to use. Though, granted, he knew which one NOT to use: the evil masculine pronoun.

Like I said, feminism is wholly anti-intellectual at its core.

____________
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer, has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and is featured on many websites such as newsbusters.org, RedState.com, Human Events Magazine, AmericanDailyReview.com, townhall.com, New Media Journal, Men’s News Daily and the New Media Alliance among many, many others. Additionally, he has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events and is currently the co-host of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Conservatism” heard on BlogTalkRadio. He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the new book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of publiusforum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston

Fair Use: This site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material available in my efforts to advance understanding of political, human rights, economic, democracy, and social justice issues, etc. I believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research, educational, or satirical purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site/blog for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.