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.