Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

On the Gender-Neutral Use of ‘Man’

Top o' the Stack.

Roger Donway writes,

As I understand it, there are no "gender-neutral" nouns or pronouns in English. There is the masculine gender, the feminine gender, the neuter gender, and the common gender. The last applies to entities which have sex, but in contexts where both sexes are included or the sex is undetermined. "Someone has forgotten his umbrella." "Someone" and "his" are in the common gender. So, they do possess grammatical gender. They are not "gender neutral." Not positive about this, however.

Excellent comment, Mr. Donway. You're right. Strictly speaking, gender is a grammatical category with the four subcategories you mention. I was being sloppy in violation of my own principles.  Properly expressed, my point was that 'man' has a legitimate sex-neutral use in standard English. When used to refer to both males and females, it is sex-neutral but not gender-neutral for precisely the reason you supplied: so used, the term's gender is common. 

The sex of an animal is biologically based and therefore not a linguistic construct. This fact notwithstanding, it strikes me as legitimate to extend the sense of 'gender' so as to cover social roles. For example, traditionally women as a group have instantiated the nurse role and not the doctor role. No surprise: women can give birth, which biological fact makes women as a group more nurturing than men as a group and suits them for the nurse role. I have no objection to referring to the nurse role, a social role, as a gender role, midway as it is between the biotic/biological and the grammatical. 

But this is an extended use of 'gender.' Strictly speaking, gender is a grammatical category!

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Bill Vallicella

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7 responses to “On the Gender-Neutral Use of ‘Man’”

  1. Malcolm Pollack Avatar
    Malcolm Pollack

    Hi Bill,
    Long ago (so long ago that I forget the source), this generic usage of “man” (as, for example, in “Man does not live by bread alone”) was explained to me thus:

    “‘Man’ embraces woman.”

    Reply
  2. BV Avatar
    BV

    Hi Malcolm. You mean that as a pun, right? Men and women embrace one another.
    It is also true that man does not live by bed alone. Hugh Hefner take note.
    I also like to point out, with a bit of exaggeration, that every other word in Ayn Rand’s writings is ‘man.’ That usage did not prevent the formidable lady from making quite a splash.
    Is ‘woman’ a sexist term because it has ‘man’ in it? How about ‘person’? Is your daughter a perSON?
    Nobody asks me what my pronouns are. But I have an answer at the ready: ‘Up yours!’
    I propose ‘sheit’ for 3rd person sing.

    Reply
  3. Malcolm Pollack Avatar
    Malcolm Pollack

    Well, yes, a pun, but also an accurate summary of traditional usage.
    I dithered over whether to put “woman” in quotes as well, because the cleverness of the saying lies in its Necker-cube-like superposition of use and mention. So I split the difference…
    (Kind of a Schrödinger’s Aphorism, I suppose you might say.)

    Reply
  4. BV Avatar
    BV

    >>Well, yes, a pun, but also an accurate summary of traditional usage.<< Indeed. But it is so bloody obvious that I figured that a man of your intellect and sophistication had to be doing more than making that obvious point. But age-related sensibility comes into it. You are five years younger than me, and in this time in history, a five-year difference appreciably affects sensibility, linguistic and otherwise. To me, it is spectacularly clear that 'man' as used in standard English has two legitimate uses, one sex-specific, the other sex-neutral, neither of them 'sexist.' I suspect that for you, Malcolm, it is clear, but not blindingly clear, being, as you are, a mere 69 years old. I could go on to comment on my use of 'standard,' but I must get on with my day.

    Reply
  5. Malcolm Pollack Avatar
    Malcolm Pollack

    >> “I suspect that for you, Malcolm, it is clear, but not blindingly clear, being, as you are, a mere 69 years old.”
    No, I was raised by two literate Brits, and learned to read at two-and-a-half, so that dual usage has always been perfectly clear to me.
    I just have always thought “Man embraces woman” is such a perfect little jewel — in only three words, it sums up the generic usage as well as making a beautiful double entendre — and so I thought I’d drop it in the ComBox here.

    Reply
  6. EG Avatar
    EG

    Hi Bill,
    Let me take this conversation in a different direction, and maybe a discussion for another post entirely.
    Assuming some defeasible conception of Science and its discoveries and pronouncements, what do you make of the position that human beings evolved (and maybe this is a point we can start to quibble with each other, so we are having an argument where we understand what each interlocuter means.) Such that 1 million years ago there were no homo sapiens, and thus presumably no creature that strictly speaking is any of the sort that we refer to when we say human.
    What does this imply about out speculations about religion, our lives, meaning, etc.?
    I understand that this can be taken in a bunch of different ways some of which can have a credible claim to being rationally coherent and as defensible as any other similarly situated position given the constraints on what we can know etc. But I begin to think that it just reinforces the sense of our own ignorance and incapacity at properly grasping our own nature except as either a sort of self-created delusion, or, some fuzzy approximation, we constantly revise, though perhaps not always consciously, that is “usually” “good enough,” but neither precise nor entirely accurate in the way these explanation seems to suggest qua mapping to something True.

    Reply
  7. BV Avatar
    BV

    EG,
    Your comment is too woolly. Nothing to sink my teeth into. Advance a thesis. Pose a problem. Besides, it’s off-topic.

    Reply

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