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From: buzzard@TheWorld.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: Feminine Curiosity
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Date: Sun, 3 Feb 2002 17:33:51 GMT
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Paul Trembath <ptrembath@compuserve.com> wrote:
>If it is true that people's attitudes are really affected by "sexist
>writing", there must be a lot of really stupid people out there.  That seems
>to me to be a much bigger problem than a few vocabulary choices.

This is a newsgroup for writers, not readers. The question is
why people write this way. The answer relates to the readers in
the above way. Whether it's because they're "stupid" or whether
it's because of some interaction between language and thought
or whatever isn't really interesting to me.

>Anyone who has the ignorance, perversity or dedicated victimhood to count
>themselves excluded from anything that I say by the gender of my pronouns
>are quite right - but they made that choice, not me.

Assuming you're not a hypocrite, though, then by that logic
you won't feel excluded by my use of the generic "she",
right? So no harm done; so I don't see what the fuss is.
Well, except I can guess.

A lot of people seem to be reacting to this thread as if
those who are using "she" are militant feminists demanding
that everyone must us "she", that those who don't use "she"
are ignorant muddle-headed pigs. I've tried to be careful
never to say anything like that, since I don't believe it;
however, unfortunately, certain people have written things
along the lines of "anyone with any sensitivity at all would
do this". I thought this OT thread was perfectly reasonable
when it was "why do some people do this", but it has just
become another pointless copyright thread once it went in the
direction of advocacy.

So I will not be posting to it anymore.

SeanB
