Feathering the Magpie's Nest

My favorite feminist word is not “patriarchy” or “privilege.” It is not “sisterhood” or “womyn.” It is not even “respect” or “consent.”

My favorite feminist word is “person.”

I’ve been trying to use it whenever gender isn’t relevant to the story. “There was this person walking down the street…” “I’m reading a book by a person who…” “There’s a person I work with…”

“Man” and “woman” shouldn’t be nouns. They should be adjectives. Man person and woman person. And when none of that has anything to do with anything, person.

Feminism is the radical notion that everyone is people.

Male is default. That’s what you learn from a world of boy dogs and Smurf stories. My daughter has no problem with this. She reads these books the way they were intended: not about boys, exactly, but about people who happen to be boys. After years of such books, my daughter can happily identify with these characters.

And this is great. It’s the reason she will grow into a woman who can happily read a novel about men, or watch a movie in which men do all the most interesting things, without feeling like she can’t relate. She will process these stories as being primarily not about males but about human beings.

Except it’s not happening the other way. The five-year-old boy who lives up the street from me does not have a shelf groaning with stories about girl animals. Because you have to seek those books out, and as the parent of a boy, why would you? There are so many great books about boys to which he can relate directly. Smurf stories must make perfect sense to him: all the characters with this one weird personality trait to distinguish them, like being super brave or smart or frightened or a girl.

I have been told that this is a good thing for girls. “That makes girls more special,” said this person, who I wanted to punch in the face. That’s the problem. Being female should not be special. It should be normal. It is normal, in the real world. There are all kinds of girls. There are all kinds of women. You just wouldn’t think so, if you only paid attention to dogs and Smurfs.