A 33,000 year old dog skull is discovered in Siberia. Here’s how it’s reported:
God how I hate that shit. Shut up.
And here’s the first sentence of the article:
He’s been man’s best friend for generations.
Gah. He, he, he. Man, man, man. Shut up.
6 Responses to “You can’t even read about dogs without the goddamn patriarchy getting all up in your face”
Yeah. The he, he, he crap has the same effect on me.
As some one who teaches biology, I get that all the bloody time. We’ll be talking about earthworms (which are hermaphrodites for cryin out loud and we’ve just been covering their anatomy in class). As soon as the discussion starts, the earthworms all turn into males.
The funniest example was when a relative mentioned a cow and that “the vet had to be called in for him.”
I wonder what the world looks like inside these people’s heads?
Didn’t Seinfeld make a movie about bees and had the drones as main characters? I didn’t see it because I can’t stand Seinfeld or cartoon movies, but if he showed the drones doing what they usually do, I’m sure that the rating would exclude the little kids it was marketed to.
I, too, hate “he” as a default pronoun – more like the fault.
And the article has to go on about how the dog probably accompanied “the hunt,” which is code for was part of important MAN STUFF. Why not assume the dog accompanied “the gather”? That’s how humans got most of their food, but it’s hard to imagine gathering being male-dominated, so…
A while back I started reimagining the “Just So” stories from a female point of view. So instead of the mighty hunter finding the wolf cubs after killing their mother, I had a woman out gathering who discovers the wolf cubs when they are crying because they are hungry. Having recently had a child, when she hears the crying her breasts respond and she nurses the cubs, takes them home where she continues to nurse/feed them and they bond with her, and become defenders/part of the family. I personally think it is a more likely story.
Most of the men I know prefer cats.
I was just thinking if it had been a cat – I wonder if they would have defaulted to “she”. I bet they would have used “it”.
People I know have a difficult time getting the pronoun right for my various cats’ genders – even when they know their names, which are not gender neutral.