I fully endorse your character selection tactics, but I object to the idea that "in the ‘70s, anyone who was Black, on TV, and not George Jefferson was a street pimp." I realize this is a joke, and as such exaggerated for effect, and I'm not trying to be tiresome I swear, but this stuff folds right in to a pet peeve of young social justice types thinking that everyone who came before their enlightened generation were racist monsters because they only recently invented the concept of being decent human beings. It's ridiculous, offensive & devalues anything good in the past. I'm not saying this trope didn't exist, and I don't have counter-statistics or anything, but there was a lot more variety that's worth remembering -- I remember watching Sanford & Son, Roots, Benson (which was a spinoff of... something), What's Happening, Barney Miller, Star Trek, The Love Boat, Soul Train, & basically all of PBS's kid shows as a kid. Again, not trying to attack a joke (srsly, sorry!), just wanted to throw that out for any impressionable readers under 35 ;p
Fair point; I engaged in some egregious Fred Sanford erasure there. But, yes, the point is that there were a hell of a lot of Black street criminals getting busted on cop shows back then.
Benson was a spin-off from Soap! I loved Robert Guillaume! And I want to add Good Times to the list too. The 1970s were a high point for TV where Black characters were interesting and multi-dimensional.
Honestly the ‘70s were probably a lot better in terms of black representation on TV than the ‘00s, when corporate network types took over and pretty much everyone on TV was not only white but impossibly affluent (because every show had to be “aspirational”). The subset of shows with predominantly black casts, which seemed common from the ‘70s to the ‘90s, virtually disappeared.
This is the most honest – and honestly hilarious – piece of writing I've read in forever. Thank you for the deep belly laughs and all the rest of it. I feel a little better about the world now. And that's not nothin'.
This is a very interesting article, because it directly relates to the complete degradation of today's media productions.
You summed up the problem here very nicely: "If a writer thinks “There are gay couples in real life, so I’m going to make one of the two couples on my show gay,” and every writer does that, then suddenly half the couples on TV will be gay. [...] The actual share of same-sex households in the US is 1.44 percent."
The wild overshoot of "diversity" targets result in media where characters are laughable caricatures and every friend group looks like a liberal college pamphlet covershoot. Then, to pile onto the progressive fantasy, all stereotypes are either avoided, or subverted. Women act like men, and men women. How about the driver is a white man and the billionaire industrialist an Indian woman? If we need a criminal, can it be a black man? Why can't our action hero be a heroine?
When your understanding of the world is 'everything is a result of the white cis patriarchy, and we must fight back', your media creations look absurd to every normal person, since you are depicting characters that either don't exist in reality, or do exist at such a small % most people have never met anyone like that.
Your solution, random demographic generator, solves a good amount of this, but that still has flaws in that professions that are female or male dominated would be very screwed. Half the soldiers aren't ladies, half the nurses aren't dudes, and literally every president has been a man.
This idiocy, where we must be completely blind to both the outside world, and traditional character tropes, has caused most mainstream content to become 'by progressives, for progressives', with little appeal for the normie masses.
I've made my peace with "they" for a person of unspecified gender.
But it was not very long ago I read an article in New York magazine that used "he or she or they" for an unspecified person. I thought to myself, "We have reached peak pronoun awkwardness."
But what about people in other countries?! By entering UNITED STATES census data into a number generator, you are forcing Western representation onto the rest of the world, pushing into marginalisation and inevitable doom all oppressed people who have been denied access to the US!
*opens a dictionary of synonyms at the word 'nazi' and rambles for three more paragraphs*
"In my opinion, a writer who calls a fake president “them” is a conscientious and well-meaning person, but also a deep idiot who should be fired. Because to English speakers, “them” is a pronoun referring to two or more people."
Thank you for this. It’s the fricking Kobayashi Maru of modern storytelling and it takes up an inordinate amount of energy trying to “get it right”. It’s why the cast of every animated show now looks more and more like the 90s Burger King kids club.
The random number generator idea is a good one. I’ve often wondered if there’s value in taking a random picture of people in the location your story takes place and using that as your demographic breakdown, so that the midwestern High School you’re writing reflects a more natural distribution (and not some distracting multi-ethnic utopian society where a massive computer has been keeping the citizens in a bubble, deciding which citizens can have children, all in an effort to create a pan-demographic rainbow where there’s one of everything for the sake of representation).
Thoughtful look at a quandary so many of us find ourselves in today. As a teacher I often find myself in that “no way to win” space. Interesting thing is that we live in a day when it takes some degree of courage to simply give voice to it as you have. Ahhh, life between a rock and a hard place ...
We already have a non-gendered 3rd person singular pronoun in the English language (thanks to German!). I don’t understand why can’t we use “it” in the case where a thing’s gender is not specified? Our general use of “it” for inanimate objects makes this sound odd, but that is just our sapionormativity talking...
And just to blow your mind further, a little girl in German is called “Mädchen” which is neuter and would be referred to as “es” rather than “sie”. Talk about patriarchy!
In Italian, objects can only be referred to as “he” or “she” (lo/la). This is basically the same in all Latin languages.
In many Asian languages they don’t use pronouns at all. And we all know China is the most gender equal place in the universe.
The good news is that almost everyone who doesn’t speak English natively thinks all this crap is nuts, and I am inclined to agree with them.
In Chinese the pronoun is "ta" (first tone) and it's pronounced the same regardless of gender or species. So native Chinese speakers often mix up gendered pronouns in English because in their first language it's not something they have to think about. But in written form, "ta" incorporates either a male or female radical into its character -- so it's gendered in writing but the gender is indistinguishable in speech. When referring to an animal there's a different radical that connotes "it."
> But in written form, "ta" incorporates either a male or female radical into its character -- so it's gendered in writing but the gender is indistinguishable in speech. When referring to an animal there's a different radical that connotes "it."
This is wrong in many of the details. The male written form is 他, and the female form is 她. Those do differ by radical, but neither uses a male radical - the female form uses the radical 女 [female], while the male form uses the radical 人 [person]. The reason is that 她 is an innovative form, meant to imitate the distinction of male and female pronouns that occurs in European languages; before the 20th century, 他 was used of both sexes.
And the form for animals is 它. The radical there is "roof", the top of a house.
As far as I can tell, 它 is the original form and 他 derives from it. But at the time the derivation took place, 它 just meant "snake", and the reason 他 incorporated it was just that the two words were pronounced the same. (No longer true - 他 and 它 are both pronouns now, pronounced tā, while the modern word for "snake" is 蛇, shé, but you can see how 蛇 derives from 它.)
As an interesting aside, the 也 component that you see in 他 represents the character 它 and not, you know, 也, which is a different character. This turns out to be fairly common in characters that are old enough - for example, 脸 "face", 腰 "lower back", and 脚 "foot" are all body parts and they all share a radical that appears to be 月. But 月 means "the moon"; the radical for body parts is drawn the same way (now) but actually represents the character 肉, "meat".
Thanks for the details. I’m better with speaking and very shaky when it comes to Chinese writing. The basic point I knew was that the pronouns are the same in speech but gendered in writing.
Yes, and that is an important point. The speaker confusion you mention is enough to show that -- in the language itself -- there is only one third-person pronoun. By way of comparison, the Spanish word for "night" is noche, and the word for "knight" is caballero, but English speakers don't experience any trouble picking the correct Spanish word even though "night" and "knight" are pronounced exactly the same way. This is telling us that, for an English speaker, "night" and "knight" are different words that sound similar by coincidence, whereas, for a Chinese speaker, 他 and 她 are the same word, but there's a special set of rules that gives that word a different spelling in different circumstances.
Languages are awesome creations and super interesting to study, which is why all of this pronoun stuff drives me crazy in the first place. Thanks for the explanation!
> I don’t think there’s a fix for this; I don’t recommend that the Writers Guild create Gay Character Permits and hand them out at the beginning of pilot season
Yes, this is obviously wrong. It should not depend on who you know.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Damned if ya do, damned if ya don't! Might as well live our lives, trust in our basic goodness, be humble and open to well-intentioned feedback, decline anyone's attempt to shame us, and always aim to do better as we learn better...
I read a Steven Pinkerton book, and he says in the first chapter that the convention among linguists when writing hypothetical speakers is to:
- Flip a coin for the first usage (like, heads "he" tails "she")
- Switch back and forth every time you come up with a new person
I thought that made good sense. You could add in they w/ a random number generator for enby people too. Then just keep a running count of what the most recent hypothetical person was in an article and switch back and forth.
Interesting. No clear rule in English then? In French, neutral has completely merged with the masculine form. It probably happened because masculine and neutral were quite close in latin, and went on because many feminine forms are built on the masculine form with additional letters. A male nurse = un infirmier, a female nurse = une infirmière, a nurse = un infirmier. Ships are 'he', unless the ship's name is so clearly feminine that it would sound too weird.
French feminists have suggested things like "un.e infirmier.ère", but this is impossible to pronounce, so it's generally mocked outside of these circles.
I fully endorse your character selection tactics, but I object to the idea that "in the ‘70s, anyone who was Black, on TV, and not George Jefferson was a street pimp." I realize this is a joke, and as such exaggerated for effect, and I'm not trying to be tiresome I swear, but this stuff folds right in to a pet peeve of young social justice types thinking that everyone who came before their enlightened generation were racist monsters because they only recently invented the concept of being decent human beings. It's ridiculous, offensive & devalues anything good in the past. I'm not saying this trope didn't exist, and I don't have counter-statistics or anything, but there was a lot more variety that's worth remembering -- I remember watching Sanford & Son, Roots, Benson (which was a spinoff of... something), What's Happening, Barney Miller, Star Trek, The Love Boat, Soul Train, & basically all of PBS's kid shows as a kid. Again, not trying to attack a joke (srsly, sorry!), just wanted to throw that out for any impressionable readers under 35 ;p
Fair point; I engaged in some egregious Fred Sanford erasure there. But, yes, the point is that there were a hell of a lot of Black street criminals getting busted on cop shows back then.
To defend you, I’d refer everybody to “Black Acting School” from the brilliant “Hollywood Shuffle”.
Very funny movie!
Benson was a spin-off from Soap! I loved Robert Guillaume! And I want to add Good Times to the list too. The 1970s were a high point for TV where Black characters were interesting and multi-dimensional.
The Flip Wilson show was another black-led ‘70s hit--one of the first--but is now largely forgotten since it was in the variety show genre.
I *thought* it was Soap, but I was too lazy to look it up so thank you ;p
I like to point out to my SJW daughter that the most beloved family in the 80s was the Cosby family
Honestly the ‘70s were probably a lot better in terms of black representation on TV than the ‘00s, when corporate network types took over and pretty much everyone on TV was not only white but impossibly affluent (because every show had to be “aspirational”). The subset of shows with predominantly black casts, which seemed common from the ‘70s to the ‘90s, virtually disappeared.
This is the most honest – and honestly hilarious – piece of writing I've read in forever. Thank you for the deep belly laughs and all the rest of it. I feel a little better about the world now. And that's not nothin'.
This is a very interesting article, because it directly relates to the complete degradation of today's media productions.
You summed up the problem here very nicely: "If a writer thinks “There are gay couples in real life, so I’m going to make one of the two couples on my show gay,” and every writer does that, then suddenly half the couples on TV will be gay. [...] The actual share of same-sex households in the US is 1.44 percent."
The wild overshoot of "diversity" targets result in media where characters are laughable caricatures and every friend group looks like a liberal college pamphlet covershoot. Then, to pile onto the progressive fantasy, all stereotypes are either avoided, or subverted. Women act like men, and men women. How about the driver is a white man and the billionaire industrialist an Indian woman? If we need a criminal, can it be a black man? Why can't our action hero be a heroine?
When your understanding of the world is 'everything is a result of the white cis patriarchy, and we must fight back', your media creations look absurd to every normal person, since you are depicting characters that either don't exist in reality, or do exist at such a small % most people have never met anyone like that.
Your solution, random demographic generator, solves a good amount of this, but that still has flaws in that professions that are female or male dominated would be very screwed. Half the soldiers aren't ladies, half the nurses aren't dudes, and literally every president has been a man.
This idiocy, where we must be completely blind to both the outside world, and traditional character tropes, has caused most mainstream content to become 'by progressives, for progressives', with little appeal for the normie masses.
I've made my peace with "they" for a person of unspecified gender.
But it was not very long ago I read an article in New York magazine that used "he or she or they" for an unspecified person. I thought to myself, "We have reached peak pronoun awkwardness."
But what about people in other countries?! By entering UNITED STATES census data into a number generator, you are forcing Western representation onto the rest of the world, pushing into marginalisation and inevitable doom all oppressed people who have been denied access to the US!
*opens a dictionary of synonyms at the word 'nazi' and rambles for three more paragraphs*
Lol. Too true.
Also. Dictionary of Synonyms = Thesaurus
"In my opinion, a writer who calls a fake president “them” is a conscientious and well-meaning person, but also a deep idiot who should be fired. Because to English speakers, “them” is a pronoun referring to two or more people."
Well.... it was nice knowing you, Jeff.
Thank you for this. It’s the fricking Kobayashi Maru of modern storytelling and it takes up an inordinate amount of energy trying to “get it right”. It’s why the cast of every animated show now looks more and more like the 90s Burger King kids club.
The random number generator idea is a good one. I’ve often wondered if there’s value in taking a random picture of people in the location your story takes place and using that as your demographic breakdown, so that the midwestern High School you’re writing reflects a more natural distribution (and not some distracting multi-ethnic utopian society where a massive computer has been keeping the citizens in a bubble, deciding which citizens can have children, all in an effort to create a pan-demographic rainbow where there’s one of everything for the sake of representation).
Thoughtful look at a quandary so many of us find ourselves in today. As a teacher I often find myself in that “no way to win” space. Interesting thing is that we live in a day when it takes some degree of courage to simply give voice to it as you have. Ahhh, life between a rock and a hard place ...
We already have a non-gendered 3rd person singular pronoun in the English language (thanks to German!). I don’t understand why can’t we use “it” in the case where a thing’s gender is not specified? Our general use of “it” for inanimate objects makes this sound odd, but that is just our sapionormativity talking...
And just to blow your mind further, a little girl in German is called “Mädchen” which is neuter and would be referred to as “es” rather than “sie”. Talk about patriarchy!
In Italian, objects can only be referred to as “he” or “she” (lo/la). This is basically the same in all Latin languages.
In many Asian languages they don’t use pronouns at all. And we all know China is the most gender equal place in the universe.
The good news is that almost everyone who doesn’t speak English natively thinks all this crap is nuts, and I am inclined to agree with them.
In Chinese the pronoun is "ta" (first tone) and it's pronounced the same regardless of gender or species. So native Chinese speakers often mix up gendered pronouns in English because in their first language it's not something they have to think about. But in written form, "ta" incorporates either a male or female radical into its character -- so it's gendered in writing but the gender is indistinguishable in speech. When referring to an animal there's a different radical that connotes "it."
> But in written form, "ta" incorporates either a male or female radical into its character -- so it's gendered in writing but the gender is indistinguishable in speech. When referring to an animal there's a different radical that connotes "it."
This is wrong in many of the details. The male written form is 他, and the female form is 她. Those do differ by radical, but neither uses a male radical - the female form uses the radical 女 [female], while the male form uses the radical 人 [person]. The reason is that 她 is an innovative form, meant to imitate the distinction of male and female pronouns that occurs in European languages; before the 20th century, 他 was used of both sexes.
And the form for animals is 它. The radical there is "roof", the top of a house.
As far as I can tell, 它 is the original form and 他 derives from it. But at the time the derivation took place, 它 just meant "snake", and the reason 他 incorporated it was just that the two words were pronounced the same. (No longer true - 他 and 它 are both pronouns now, pronounced tā, while the modern word for "snake" is 蛇, shé, but you can see how 蛇 derives from 它.)
As an interesting aside, the 也 component that you see in 他 represents the character 它 and not, you know, 也, which is a different character. This turns out to be fairly common in characters that are old enough - for example, 脸 "face", 腰 "lower back", and 脚 "foot" are all body parts and they all share a radical that appears to be 月. But 月 means "the moon"; the radical for body parts is drawn the same way (now) but actually represents the character 肉, "meat".
Thanks for the details. I’m better with speaking and very shaky when it comes to Chinese writing. The basic point I knew was that the pronouns are the same in speech but gendered in writing.
Yes, and that is an important point. The speaker confusion you mention is enough to show that -- in the language itself -- there is only one third-person pronoun. By way of comparison, the Spanish word for "night" is noche, and the word for "knight" is caballero, but English speakers don't experience any trouble picking the correct Spanish word even though "night" and "knight" are pronounced exactly the same way. This is telling us that, for an English speaker, "night" and "knight" are different words that sound similar by coincidence, whereas, for a Chinese speaker, 他 and 她 are the same word, but there's a special set of rules that gives that word a different spelling in different circumstances.
Languages are awesome creations and super interesting to study, which is why all of this pronoun stuff drives me crazy in the first place. Thanks for the explanation!
I just read this for the third time and it still makes me so happy. Hope and Despair had a love child. They named it Humor.
> I don’t think there’s a fix for this; I don’t recommend that the Writers Guild create Gay Character Permits and hand them out at the beginning of pilot season
Yes, this is obviously wrong. It should not depend on who you know.
Instead, the permits should be auctioned off.
Shit like this is why people 100 years from now will consider this period a cultural wasteland
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Damned if ya do, damned if ya don't! Might as well live our lives, trust in our basic goodness, be humble and open to well-intentioned feedback, decline anyone's attempt to shame us, and always aim to do better as we learn better...
I read a Steven Pinkerton book, and he says in the first chapter that the convention among linguists when writing hypothetical speakers is to:
- Flip a coin for the first usage (like, heads "he" tails "she")
- Switch back and forth every time you come up with a new person
I thought that made good sense. You could add in they w/ a random number generator for enby people too. Then just keep a running count of what the most recent hypothetical person was in an article and switch back and forth.
Interesting. No clear rule in English then? In French, neutral has completely merged with the masculine form. It probably happened because masculine and neutral were quite close in latin, and went on because many feminine forms are built on the masculine form with additional letters. A male nurse = un infirmier, a female nurse = une infirmière, a nurse = un infirmier. Ships are 'he', unless the ship's name is so clearly feminine that it would sound too weird.
French feminists have suggested things like "un.e infirmier.ère", but this is impossible to pronounce, so it's generally mocked outside of these circles.
At least the ridiculous "Bechdel test" has stopped being the pervasive shortcut for lazy reviewers that it was a few years ago.
The sign post is perfect for our times.
Thank you.