Pronoun discussion goes slightly berserk; Gamers in internalised sexism shock

My memory is probably less than accurate because I haven’t played Dungeons & Dragons since high school, but as far as I recall, the most recently released books handled gendered pronouns in one of three ways:

• Alternating between male and female pronouns throughout.
• Explaining rules using examples involving the characters rather than the players, so Lidda the halfling has her equipment and her hit points, while whatever the half-orc’s name is has his strength score and his experience points.
• Always using male pronouns, but with a disclaimer at the beginning about how it’s just a convenience thing and you can replace them with female ones in your mind (how magnanimous).

Games Workshop’s Warhammer books, true to their past form, don’t bother with any of the above and consistently use masculine pronouns without so much as a pseudo-apology. Given the relatively large number of women involved in both the company and the fandom, you’d expect them to at least put ‘being vaguely gender-inclusive’ somewhere down the bottom of their to-do list, but clearly most of their effort is going into finding new synonyms for ‘destroy’.

Somebody on a forum notices this. He jokingly points out that, if you take the rules absolutely literally, women aren’t allowed to play it. Embittered twit responds!

Ummm…. That would only be true if the English language, before being all politically-correctified, didn’t use masculine pronouns by default to mean ‘male and female’. Which it does. So I guess only _liberal_ females aren’t allowed to play.

Political Correctness = Anything that makes me question institutionalised prejudice. That this is still used today, as in example #3 above, doesn’t seem to matter. The masculine pronoun as default was changed because it was alienating and non-inclusive; it wasn’t fair prior to whenever the fuck political correctness was invented, and we’re presently dealing with shit that was published in 2007 anyway, so how things were doesn’t matter. On the basis of this, we should refuse to accept ‘anymore’.

Somebody else has a sensible suggestion.

You can just say ‘their’.

But, no.

You can, but the book doesn’t… It specifically says ‘his’. I mentioned it once to a female opponent, and she called me a sexist pig. Until I pointed it out in the book.

I bet her face was red, since everybody knows that your behaviour ceases to be sexist if there’s a precedent in a book about space elves.

Meanwhile, somebody who’s extended their literary horizons beyond the set texts makes an observation.

Most RPG rulebooks, and some of my criminal justice textbooks, refer to any player as “her”. Probably to make it seem less hostile to those of the feminine persuasion.

‘Probably’. This fact elicits the following reaction:

…… (shivers)

Yeah, imagine if RPG rulebooks were sexist.

Another sensible suggestion is made.

I believe that the proper way is to say “his or her”/”he or she” etc…

Another sensible suggestion is shot down by one of the thousand interchangeable people with ‘dominatus’ somewhere in their username.

The politically correct way. Not the proper way. Political correctness is… something I won’t bash for the sake of keeping this thread open.

Political Correctness = Acknowledging the existence of people who aren’t exactly like me. Considering the present state of the thread, I don’t think bashing whatever the hell political correctness is stands much chance of closing it down. Christ, it’s not like people were suggesting ‘herstory’.

Because I expect only the finest pedantry from wargamers, it takes slightly over a page for somebody to point out that…

Their is technically innacurate because it’s plural.

Which is true, although it’s basically acceptable and doesn’t confuse the meaning, unlike the inability of the staff writers to differentiate between ‘loathe’ and ‘loath’. Sadly, this post continues.

I knew a serious fem-nazzi in philosophy class back in the day, and she always made a big stink of this, then i pointed out that there is no possesive single case direct predicate in the english language, so we have to attach a gender… i’ll use his because i’m a him. and you use her’s because you’re a her.

Start To Feminazi: Less than three pages. Also, if you want to get pedantic about grammar, it helps to use capital letters sometimes.

Haha, good job on the front lines! *medal*

Why don’t women date geeks? 8(

Somebody says what everybody who isn’t a raging asshole is thinking.

grammar arguements are pointless, english language is a living language and it evolves to suit the speaker, it is a tool and hence can be used anyway the person sees fit. Without language developing we would all still speak in grunts so personally I’m all for bad grammar (and spelling) because it’s the future.

We could argue over the precise definition of ‘bad’ here, but he’s got a point. OR DOES HE?

True to some extent, yes. But taken to the extent that the use of ‘his’ is taken to mean ‘to the complete exclusion of the female population’ is ridiculous. No, the use of ‘his’ does not preclude women from playing Warhammer, and it is among the least of factors keeping them from doing so. Unless they are a femi-nazi, in which case, I don’t feel like playing them because they ruin my language. And any responses to this post from anyone who acts like aforementioned zealous feminists will be utterly ignored into oblivion.

He’s right; there are a lot of other reasons women are staying the fuck away from mainstream gaming, and he’s managed to demonstrate a fair number of them just in this post.

It was at this point (half way down page three) that I gave up because it was making me too depressed.