The Masculine Case

First, offer to write book reviews instead of freestanding essays; second, once you’ve finished your piece, obsess over it for hours and hours. Make it as typographically flawless, structurally coherent, and altogether mellifluous as you can make it. What you want to do more than anything else, I say, is to make the editor happy, and the way to do that is to make the job of reading what you’ve written as easy as possible. At all costs, keep him from having to pause over the text, even for half a second, in order to figure out what you meant. One pause and you’re in trouble; two and you’re doomed.

I don’t know if these young advice-seekers ever do what I suggest. I doubt it. But I’m finding it harder and harder to follow my own counsel, chiefly owing to the vexing problem of gendered pronouns—whether to refer to indefinite pronouns (“someone,” “anyone”) and generalized nouns (“banker,” “professor”) with masculine pronouns exclusively, masculine and feminine pronouns at the same time (“his or her”), or one and the other at different times.

My general attitude is to wish the whole problem away and just use masculine pronouns. The obsession over gendered pronouns is part of a general tendency in recent decades to treat social and political questions as fundamentally about signs and symbols rather than actual men and women. I do not believe that using “he” or “him” to refer to “everyone” or “a writer” or “a physician” in any way implies that men are superior to women, or that the language of power, whatever that is, is somehow intrinsically masculine. I think the whole silly controversy arises from the conflation of reality and signifier.

Those are my views. I don’t apologize for them. But I would be willing to put them to one side, or just forget about them, if there were an easy way to avoid generic masculine pronouns and still make my sentences clip along without giving the reader any trouble. And by “trouble” I mean that brief moment when the reader thinks about the way you’ve written it instead of what you’ve written. This sentence, for example, comes from a recent book about Thomas Jefferson and the ways in which his views changed during his years in France: “The visitor compares the world she knows with the strange new one she encounters, and the comparison brings the known world into view.”

Yes, I want to say to the writer, I know that women, too, have spent time in foreign countries and altered their views as a consequence. But Thomas Jefferson was not a woman, and so the pronouns oblige me to think, however briefly, about the reason for choosing the feminine pronoun rather than the masculine one. It’s that half-second of slight annoyance that a careful writer will labor to avoid giving the reader.

Nor is my problem solved by using the third-person plural pronoun (“Hardly anyone is now prepared to invest their money in our political institutions”). Leaving aside the rightness or wrongness of that usage, and its increasing popularity in American and British English, it’s still not accepted everywhere—it sounds wrong—and if your aim is to please, and not merely to align with prevailing practices, you should avoid it.

I first encountered this convention 25 years ago in a university textbook on state and local politics in America. The author (a woman, if I remember) would use the feminine pronoun when the antecedent was something like “attorney,” “producer,” or “regulator,” whereas most of the masculine pronouns attached to antecedents with less wholesome associations: “inmate,” “felon,” “vagrant,” and so on. I thought it was a pretty good joke—assuming it was a joke, and assuming that my assessment was more or less accurate. But I don’t want my readers noticing which pronouns I’ve assigned to which antecedents. I want them thinking about the thing I’ve written about.

The generalized noun I’m most likely to use is “politician.” Generally, I dare not use the masculine pronoun—I would rather avoid arguments other than the ones I’m making—and so I’ve had to get round the problem either by writing “his or her,” which to my ear isn’t off-putting when used sparingly, or by pluralizing the noun.

Recently, for example, I wrote this sentence: “In the 1990s, when politicians wanted to preempt criticism of a bill or proposal, they would say it was about ‘education.’ ” My inclination was to write of a single, theoretical politician and rely on the masculine pronoun: “In the 1990s, when a politician wanted to preempt criticism of a bill or proposal, he would say it was about ‘education.’ ” The latter sounds better to my ear, but I’m happy enough with the former.

I wonder why Gary Saul Morson, in a brilliant essay in Commentary last year, didn’t use the same trick: “Readers who mistake theater for reality are vanishingly rare,” he wrote, “but almost every reader spends time wondering what she would do if she were to find herself in the same fix as the characters she is reading about.” Morson could have stayed with the plural “readers” (“almost all readers” instead of “almost every reader”) and so spared us the implicit and vaguely dissonant insistence that women are readers, too.

Once, though, I did use the masculine pronoun, and the subject was American politicians’ habit of saying they’ve held their views “from the beginning” or “since day one.” I asked:

I thought I could get away with it. I reasoned that I could, theoretically, have been alternating between masculine and feminine pronouns, only I didn’t need another such pronoun and so didn’t use the feminine one. But two or three sharp-eyed readers weren’t buying it: They sent emails asking how it was that the paper failed to catch this lapse into (as one of them put it) “patriarchal grammar.”

I wonder, though, if the insistence on feminine pronouns at least half the time doesn’t have the opposite effect from the one intended. This sentence appeared in an essay published by the Brookings Institute some months ago:

So that’s three flesh-and-blood men, two wealthy “high rollers” and one high-level politician, versus one theoretical woman, a mere “candidate.” A sentence like that, in addition to tripping readers up with the “she”—wait, did I miss someone? Oh, I see—doesn’t so much encourage sexual equality as mock it.

And so back to my younger friends asking for advice on submitting reviews and essays to magazines. Shouldn’t they worry about irritating editors of a more aggressively egalitarian outlook? Maybe. But I would still go with the quiet, unobtrusive masculine, just as I did in the second paragraph. Maybe you didn’t notice.

Barton Swaim is the author, most recently, of The Speechwriter: A Brief Education

in Politics.