Linguistic precision. Distinction. Humanization. These all stand in the way of the current cultural revolution, it seems.
To satisfy the gods of equity and inclusion, we must take up the scalpel and neuter our language. Teachers or principals become “educators.” Reporters and editors become “media workers.” Long ago, soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines became the impossibly grim “servicemen and women.”
The bulk of the depersonalization and neutering, though, seems reserved for our most intimate relationships. The more stilted and impersonal, the more enlightened, I suppose. The personal, distinctive, and endearing are hardly inclusive.
Matt Yglesias, a liberal blogger, commented on one common instance of this tendency. “It was fine pre-Obergefell,” Yglesias tweeted, referring to the decision that legalized gay marriage throughout the United States, “but now I think it’s weird when people refer to their ‘partner’ if it’s not like a law firm or something.”
Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the first lady of California, for instance, calls herself the “First Partner of California.”
Even those willing to admit they are married opt for the neuter and refer regularly to their own “spouse.”
The normal use of “spouse” is as an umbrella term. Your human resources manager might email the staff to explain that “spouses are invited to the annual Christmas Party” because some staff have husbands and others have wives.
Contemporary jargon, though, in academia and the media, uses “spouse” not as a category including husband and wife, but as a word somehow more proper than “husband” or “wife.”
On the pages of the New York Times or the Atlantic, writers mention the foibles or virtues of “my spouse.” In the tweets from activists or reporters, you will find regular, specific (not abstract) references to “my spouse” instead of “my husband” or “my wife.”
When we began down this hyperindividualistic, autonomy-maximizing road with “diversity” as a lodestar, it wasn’t obvious that we were heading toward such an impersonal, almost dehumanizing world. But Alexis de Tocqueville warned us that a fully democratic civic religion would leave us as millions of atoms, all so individualistic that we are totally indistinct.
