HE, SHE, ZE

I remember the first time I saw the deliberate use of ‘she’ as a generic  pronoun instead of ‘he’.  It was, appropriately enough, in an article by Germaine Greer about the writer Martin Amis taking on a new agent who demanded (and got) a large advance from his publishers for a new book.   Greer used the ‘she’ word rather than ‘he’, reasoning that we had heard the masculine pronoun often enough and it was time for a change.  One of the reasons this seemed such a discrepancy was that it was, for me at least, an unknown practice.  I had always read – and written - ‘he’ when referring to someone like ‘the writer’ in general terms so this change jumped off the page, although it has by now become more common.  

There was a certain irony in this use of 'she' instead of 'he' because Amis had replaced his previous agent Pat Kavanagh (female) with the altogether more aggressive Andrew Wylie (male) who was nicknamed ‘the Jackal’.  Most writers, sportspeople (note the gender neutral term) and actors (a word now also considered gender neutral) use agents to cut their deals for them because these agents have both the contacts and the experience to maximise their clients' earnings.  Kavanagh was sidelined as Wyeth gained a huge advance for Amis, although this reputedly cost him the friendship of Kavanagh’s husband Julian Barnes.  The irony comes about from the fact that Wylie was showing typically masculine aggression while the more restrained Kavanagh was showing what might be considered feminine restraint. We might approve of the civilised virtues but, when it comes to making money, we like to have a mean bastard on our side - and he will probably be a bloke.

I sometimes still have to double check when I read ‘she’ to see if the writer is referring to a person specifically or a profession generally whereas, if they stick to the traditional ‘he’, this hardly ever occurs.  When I was working for the British government one (female) minister I worked under used to alter the drafts of papers and speeches which used the generic ‘he’ to ‘he or she’ but this seemed clumsy and laborious to the elegant mandarins of Whitehall and was not widely adopted (although it was tolerated for the individual in question).  ‘He or she’ still persists amongst certain writers and speakers but it does not flow off the tongue and many people would regard the speaker/writer using it as someone struggling to do the right thing at the cost of elegance, of them being – God forbid – too ‘politically correct’.  I generally avoid this phrase, in fact, but it lurks in the background of the way many (male, white) people think.

Now I have a solution to this problem, which I do not think has been tried yet but which I think will solve the gender imbalance at a stroke without using clumsy strokes and slashes (he/she).  This is that all male writers use the pronoun ‘he’ and the adjective ‘his’ while female ones use ‘she’ and ‘her’.  So, if I was a woman I would write a sentence like, “If she wants to be trusted a politician should always be honest with her constituents.”  Being male I would write, “A film actor should only take on parts he considers worthwhile rather than ones that improve his bank balance.” (Both statements are naive, I know, but these are hypothetical not actual sentences – and sentiments.) 

This new system would have the advantage of being simple, fair and easy to use.  Germaine Greer or Zoe Williams would always write (or say) ‘she’ when referring to ‘the writer’, ‘the actor’ or ‘the coal miner’ whereas Julian Barnes and Martin Amis could continue to use ‘he’ in these situations.  There are roughly equal numbers of male and female writers around – probably more women in fiction writing, men in non-fiction – so this would create an instant gender balance in what is published.   Admittedly there are not many female coal miners around so it might lead to the odd absurdity but we could live with that for the sake of equality and fairness.

It would also kill off the idea of replacing both ‘he’and ‘she’ with ‘ze’ which has been suggested as a gender neutral term to replace both male and female assumptions.  I cannot see it working because it is a polticial rather than a practical term.  Again the fear of political correctness would discourage people from using ‘ze’, a word my computer does not yet recognise.  It would divide writers into those who adopted gender free language and those who refused to embrace it so it would be automatically divisive.  The universal use of ‘he’ or ‘she’ in texts for respectively male and female authors would mean that the writers did not have to think about the issue when writing and readers could become used to slightly different systems when reading.  This may have posed a problem for Mary Ann Evans, who wrote under the name George Eliot, but the days when a woman writer had to pretend to be a man to be accepted are surely long gone.

We probably have the technology to alter already published texts to replace the general personal pronoun ‘he’ with ‘she’ if the writer was female and to even rewrite modern submissions in this way.  Most people opposing this move would be male so they could continue to write using male terminology without having to wander into the swamp of political conformity.  Women writers who were fed up with using he and wanted to avoid ze would have no such problem. 

I think this a neat solution to a minor but persistent problem and submit it to the world for consideration.

PRODUCE THE GOODS

Why did I find myself becoming so angry at the Tate Modern gallery yesterday?  We were on  a tour and saw works by the Guerilla Girls in the new wing.  These would ask why men dominated the art scene so much and say that American bus companies were more enlightened than its art galleries because they employed a greater percentage of female drivers than art galleries displayed the work of female artists.

The attitude of the Guerilla Girls assumes that equality is a top down rather than a bottom up phenomenon – that galleries decide not to show the work of women artists rather than that women artists are not producing works worthy of display.  Yet in the cut throat art world it is surely up to the artist, male or female, to produce the goods which are shown.  I took my daughter to see Top Girls by Caryl Churchill a few years ago as part of her feminist education.  It was written and performed entirely by women and was revived at a time when there were complaints that not enough plays by women were being performed.  Want more works by female writers on the stage?  Write another Top Girls, I thought.   

Our guide took us to a room where we could see a Jackson Pollock next to a Lee Krasner.  These two were married and Krasner pretty much gave up her career to support Pollock who drank and then drove himself to death when the creative fires began to dim.  Having the support of a devoted and talented wife did not prevent Pollock’s self-destruction.  He had the attitude of men of his day and referred to his wife as talented for ‘a woman artist’.  (Look up Ed Harris’s Pollock film for more about them.)

We also saw one of the Tate’s most notorious works ‘Equivalent Eight’ by Carl Andre’, better known as ‘the pile of bricks’, a neatly arranged stack of household bricks which the Tate paid £2,000 forty five years ago in what became known in the popular media as the biggest waste of money in art history (a crowded field).  Andre might have been considered a hero to progressives if he was not judged to be at least partially responsible for the death of his first wife by suicide.  (His enemies would say ‘murder’ for which he was tried and acquitted.)  Both Andre and Pollock had the standard attitude of the day to women – they were pretty much like cars, there to boost the ego and image of a man and to be disposed of if they ceased to function properly – especially when a younger newer model became available.

If Krasner were alive today she would probably give her husband a good run for his money and maintain her own career in the overpriced art market where people spend absurd sums.  Most of these ‘people’ are male, men like Andrew Cohen the hedge fund manager who spent over 140 million dollars on a Giamcometti sculpture after escaping a prison sentence for insider trading – his way of saying that he was still in the game. 

Cohen makes his money not by producing anything of value but by being good at buying and selling stocks and shares, backing hunches and spotting trends in the market, maybe using information gained before others have access to it to stay ahead of the competition.  If you said to Cohen that it was outrageous that the vast majority of people who succeed in his business are male and that steps should be taken to correct this gender imbalance, he would probably laugh in your face.  Get real, he might say.  If women learn to trade like he does then they can have a share of the spoils.  Until then they have to bring up the kids and act as arm candy.  If it is dog eat dog, you have to be a mean bitch to survive.

State run socialism, in which equality would be imposed from above, failed as communism collapsed because people did not enjoy living in a system which denied them freedom in order to grant them equality.  Under capitalism you have to achieve status from below by producing work which commands the respect, admiration and prices of the (generally male) established achievers.  Producing a work which sarcastically says that bus companies are more enlightened than art galleries because they make more use of female abilities is a socialist response to a capitalist problem.  Driving buses is easier than creating art.

I work in a profession (tourist guiding) in which gender is of little or no importance.  If anything, it is an advantage to be a woman in our business because people might find you less threatening and more symathetic than if you act the alpha male and are obviously trying to impress.  There were certainly more women in our study group yesterday than men but this has never bothered me.  If I have to get in touch with my inner female and become less dominating and assertive in order to succeed as a tour guide, so be it.   Like most guides I will do what is necessary to get a job and earn a living.    

The Guerilla Girls seemed to be saying that it was the art establishment which had to change, not the artists.  Yet I cannot imagine that any artist has been deliberately excluded from showing their work specifically because they were female.  The conventions and assumptions of society and family may have hindered them from achieving their aims but so too would the competition in the shape of fellow artists who, being mainly male, might be more aggressive/talented/connected/lucky (delete as applicable) than they were.  That did not prevent Jane Austen, Marie Curie or a bunch of other women from succeeding.  They produced the goods and so must the Guerilla Girls.

It should be easier now for women to win space at one of the four Tate galleries as they are now supervised by a woman, Maria Balshaw, while Tate Modern appointed a female director last year, Frances Morris.  About time too, I hear you say. 

For more on the Guerilla Girls go to guerrillagirls.com  
For more on the Tate go to: tate.org.uk  My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com  

EDWIN LERNER

THE PARTY I AM NOT INVITED TO ...

EDWIN LERNER is a tourist guide, freelance writer and father of two children.  This will be a weekly blog every Friday looking at issues involving men and feminism.

Now let’s get one thing straight from the start:  if I had been born a woman I would have been a feminist. Maybe not the bra-burning, man-hating, men-excluding type as portrayed in popular imagination and and the media who is pretty rare and largely fictional, but one who campaigned for and expected equal treatment with men.  If I had been in the right place and time I would have been proud to have joined marches for racial equality (I never did) and I tick most of the boxes for the middle class liberal – read the Guardian, vote Labour and donate to the usual suspects – Amnesty, Oxfam, etc.  I do set aside a certain amount of my income for these causes and put coins in their collections boxes. 

Yet feminism seems like the party I was not invited to.  And being a well brought up type of person I do not push in without an invitation.  How much fun can it be being a gate-crasher anyway, helping yourself to someone else’s booze while no-one talks to you? 

Effective mass movements usually try to foster a sense of togetherness, of people uniting to help a cause they all believe in.  They all hold hands and sing a song such as We shall Overcome together ending with the slightly downbeat ‘Some day’, drawn out to postpone the end of the party they are all enjoying.  This is when everybody has to go home having achieved their aim, unable any more to enjoy the sense of being a close community of outsiders.  One of Tony Blair’s most symbolic acts as leader of the Labour Party was to end their singing of the Red Flag.  It was the musical equivalent of abolishing Clause Four.  The song had little appeal to the middle England voters he so desperately wanted to win over.  Labour was no longer to be a movement of outsiders singing a song that looked forward to the destruction and rebuilding of a system but a party of insiders working from within.

The nearest feminism has got to an anthem of its own is probably Sisters Are Doing it for Themselves not sung ensemble-like as a good protest song should be but belted out by Annie Lennox or Aretha Franklin with a catchy chorus everyone can join in.  Everyone?  I never felt like it was my song and would have felt a bit of a prat holding up my arms standing on my own two feet.  It sounds too much like a song for girls alone.  After all they are doing it for themselves now and don’t need our help.    

This is the thing.  While we enjoy the comradeship of being part of a movement we also like to pat ourselves on the back for being useful.  One of our main motivations for giving to charity, supporting worthwhile causes and helping the less fortunate is the feeling of well-being we get from philanthropy.  (Cynics would say it’s the only one.)  When I am driving along in slow moving traffic I, like most drivers, often let someone stuck in a side road who does not have priority out in front of me, sometimes a pedestrian who I could otherwise safely ignore.  There is no advantage to me in doing so and it means that the other car is ahead of me in the queue, but I still do it because it gives me a little uptick of benevolence and, hopefully, a wave of acknowledgement and thanks from the other driver.  This makes  a slow, boring journey slightly less irritating, if a few seconds longer.

People who run charities know that they will gain better and longer-lasting support if they make people feel good about giving rather than guilty.    They send thank you letters to donors, spending money they could otherwise use more constructively, because they know that you are more likely to write another cheque if your first one has been acknowledged.  They send you newsletters (usually with smiling faces on the front) and invite you to parties, concerts and meetings where you can bathe in a warm glow of congratulation. 

This sounds like one of those cynics alluded to earlier, yet I not only let other drivers out in front of me, but write cheques and make out standing orders to all sorts of charities.  I have enough disposable income to do this without seriously threatening my way of life.  It is the act of giving which is important not the motivation behind it.  You can acknowledge that there is a element of self-congratulation in your giving and still think that it is right to give.  It is the easiest thing in the world to put a bad motive on a good action and use that as an excuse to do nothing.  That is merely putting a good motive on a bad action (or inaction).  Judge the action and not the motive.

What has all this to do with feminism?  My feeling is that feminism is not an inviting movement for roughly half the human race – the male half of which I am a member.  We do not get that little uptick of benevolence by supporting feminism that we get from letting a fellow driver out in front of us or writing a cheque to help less well-off people than ourselves.  To tell the truth, we (that is men) feel frightened by feminism.  If sisters are doing it for themselves, what use are we?

It is themes like this which I will be exploring in a series of posts every Friday.

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com published every Monday. E L