Language Rapists

Now, this guy is an asshole.

Writing for the American Enterprise Institute, David Gelertner assures us that feminism has won the day and in the process destroyed raped the English language. How did we accomplish this mission? By teaching a generation of young men (which, of course, means men and women) to use constructs like "he or she," "s/he," "he/she," and the dreaded "they" instead of the singular male pronoun to mean a person of unspecified gender. Mr. Gelertner goes on at some length and hilariously insists on missing the point at all costs. A sample paragraph railing about the abomination of a straight "she" for "he" swap in cases of undetermined gender:

"The driver turns on his headlights" is not about a male or female person; it is about a driving person. But "the driver turns on her headlights" is a sentence about a female driver. Just as any competent reader listens to what he is reading, he pictures it too (if it can be pictured); hearing and imagining the written word are ingrained habits. A reader who had thought the topic was drivers is now faced by a specifically female driver, and naturally wonders why. What is the writer getting at? To distract your reader for political purposes, to trip him up merely to demonstrate your praiseworthy right-thinkingness, is a low trick.

You see I was picturing a "driver" turning his headlights. My "driver" just happened to be a man. A man wearing a gray flannel suit and a fedora, perhaps on the way home from working at the office. Thinking about getting home and pouring himself a nice martini, maybe reading the paper before dinner. A nice steak, potato, and green salad later, he might relax in his favorite chair, light himself a pipe and laugh along with Jack Benny. After the kids were in bed, maybe he'd, and it just happens to be a he I'm picturing here, take the wife into the bedroom for some straight-forward marital relations.

But if some fancy-pants intellectual comes along and writes "the driver turns on her headlights," I am forced to picture a woman driving a car. Then I start wondering why a woman is driving a car. I start to worry about the traffic around her. How are deliverymen supposed to get their packages delivered on time if they're having to watch out for some crazy woman driver? I mean where is this woman going? Why is she leaving the house without a male escort? Should women be in public without a male relative? Aren't they inviting rape? Corrupting young men who can't help themselves? What will become of society with all these women driving themselves around?

You see, it's just better for everyone if we continue to use the perfectly neutral masculine pronoun.