r/bropill • u/Poligma2023 • 4d ago
Controversial What are your thoughts on male defaultism?
This is a topic I see brought up exclusively (or at least mostly) by women, so I thought of asking here to know what other men think of it.
Personally, I got my eyes opened about this 2 years ago (I am 20 now, so please go easy on me, I am still dumb and developing), when our teacher told us the following riddle:
"A man drives his son to a job interview. While still in the car, the son receives a phone call from the company's CEO telling him: «Good luck, son! You can do this!». How is this possible?"
My class and I went with all sorts of male-centered answers (even nonsensical ones): maybe the father was the CEO and phone-called his son right beside him for fun, maybe the CEO is particularly affectionate and calls everybody "son", or maybe the boy has got two fathers. When our teacher disclosed the solution – that the CEO is the boy's mother – I mentally facepalmed myself.
From then on, I have noticed how much we tend to resort to assuming anybody (and sometimes even anything) is male or male-ish until proven otherwise. Apart from the usual examples of strangers online or someone's pets being defaulted to male, there are some cases that I personally find incredibly annoying (though that I cowardly hesitate to bring up in a social interaction because I do not want to be a party pooper), and that have inspired me to make this post:
ChatGPT being referred to as "he", despite it having the most ungendered, robotic name of all time and literally lacking a single form of human representation of itself, other than through artists who make fan arts where they personificate different AIs and make ChatGPT look like a man, which still implies that their headcanon about ChatGPT is defaulted to male anyway in the first place.
Under a video of a mobile game where a chicken has to cross the road and a pro player went absurdly fast, a commenter said "Let that chicken rest, he's going faster than the trains!", so I jokingly yet intentionally replied to them with "True, she is basically the Flash.", to which I got the response "So, are you assuming all chickens are women?", when the person I was literally talking to did this first by using "he", but apparently, people seem to notice the "she" more because it seems to be the gendered exception of the default.
A video of two electric toothbrushes simulating a couple sleeping in the same bed: one of them wakes up screaming from a nightmare (the scream would be the toothbrush's noise when it is activated), and the other toothbrush scolding it for making so much noise. Most comments were like "Oh, I certainly know that's a dude with his wife, haha!", as if the toothbrush who screams, being the protagonist of the scene, must automatically be male, while the side role of the person who reacts to the protagonist's action must be female because of the archetype of the "dumb, funny male protagonist of your average comedy who happens to have an eternally irritated wife who does not understand him".
So, what are your thoughts on male defaultism?
P.S. I am sorry for the very long post, though I wanted to let you all know my opinion and experiences with it, and I really do not want to be a bother to anybody, so I apologise in advance if you find this topic annoying to discuss because it feels like it is being shoved down your throats.
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u/mercfoot 3d ago
There was a study done which demonstrated the idea of the white male default. They would show people pictures of human beings and ask them to describe them. The first adjectives they would use would almost invariably be how they differ from the white male to default, i.e. female, black, Asian.
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u/pinkjello 3d ago
You see this sometimes when boomer relatives describe people they interact with. They’ll tell you the physical description and perceived ethnicity of every random stranger when describing their day, but if there’s no description, it’s just a white guy.
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u/jorwyn 2d ago
Oh. I ran into this once when describing a crime to a police officer. He assumed white until I got around to that way at the end of my description.
But, I also realized that in my city, white is a reasonable default. It's 84.7% white (non Hispanic). The largest percentage of our crime turns out to be committed by young, white, housed but poor men.
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u/CaseyJones7 2d ago
Did they, in that study, also describe white men as white men too?
I'm only asking cuz if they didn't describe white men by referring to their gender or race, thats pretty crazy, but if they didn't discriminate based on their race or gender (for every photo, they would always say their race and gender first, even if its a white man kind of thing), thatd be a good sign, no?
Unless i misunderstood something?
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u/PeachFreezer1312 1d ago
Think the point was that, if no race or gender was mentioned, it was a white male.
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u/krebstar4ever 4d ago edited 1d ago
So many important things are designed only with male bodies in mind—which endangers women's lives.
Last year, the US finally resolved to use feminine crash test dummies. Women are more likely to be injured in car crashes because restraint systems aren't designed for us.
US CPR training uses only masculine torsos. People who go through this training (and don't go on to become healthcare providers) never learn to do CPR on feminine bodies. Moreover, women are far less likely to receive CPR from bystanders, because touching a woman's chest during an emergency "seems wrong." Women are also far less likely to receive defibrillation from bystanders, because the recipient's shirt and bra must be removed. (Note that this is about bystanders, not medical professionals.)
Medications are often insufficiently tested on women. Moreover, checklists of medical symptoms are typically based only on males. For example, heart attack symptoms are often different in women than in men, but only men's symptoms are widely known. (I think nowadays, women's heart attack symptoms may be widely known among US medical professionals. But in general, women's symptoms are studied far less than men's are.)
This is just a hastily written "tip of the iceberg." I recommend reading Invisible Women, by Caroline Criado Perez, to learn more about the data gender gap.
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u/Ted_Rid 3d ago
A further problem with crash test dummies (which were modelled forever on one particular male engineer) is not only are women's bodies different...they completely exclude pregnant women even further - such a radically different shape and centre of gravity!
Endangering the lives of the babies in utero at the same time.
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3d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/PeachFreezer1312 1d ago
Designing a safe seat or airbag does not mean you can only make it safe for one body type. This is such a dumb argument
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u/concentrated-amazing 3d ago edited 3d ago
In addition to the medical and safety issues with male defaultism, there are also the annoying things that don't endanger anyone but still slow women down or make things more difficult. For example, the evolution for phones to have larger and larger screens makes them harder to operate (especially with one hand) for women, or things like handles, grips, etc.
I had a pink-for-women tool set, and really appreciate some of the tools in there that are smaller/lighter than standard. I don't swing a hammer for a living, and don't need a full size hammer just to put a nail in the wall to hang a picture, but my hand and arm certainly work better with the lighter weight.
(My husband, a burly heavy duty mechanic with firearms like Popeye, is always shocked when he sees how hard power tools are for me to handle because they're so much bigger in proportion to me and my arms and shoulders don't deal with manipulating weight like that very often. Give me a baby to hold, though, and I can outlast him by hours!)
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u/daitoshi 2d ago
The tool handle thing is SO real.
My first smaller-handle handsaw and wire snips made me go from 'how does anyone make anything with these things? Am I just stupid?' to 'oh shit, hand tools are great, actually!'
Turns out being able to comfortably grip the handle without straining all my knuckles just to hold the damn thing (or using both hands to open and close them) means more control, comfort, and a lot more efficiency.Guys aren't innately better at woodworking - most standard tools are just big, so it's harder and more painful for small hands to use them. There's a bigger barrier to entry in learning those skills, since people don't generally enjoy feeling their joints strain and ache just to hold a basic tool upright.
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u/siren-skalore 3d ago
As a musician, I have to buy a very specific kind of acoustic guitar because standard guitars are FREAKING HUGE.
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u/jorwyn 2d ago
I do a lot of manual work, so the lighter women's tools won't work well for a lot of things I do. However, I was envious of the pink. Like, it's not generally my color, but .. like, I'd love more colors in tools.
If you didn't know, harbor freight has very useful small tool chests (like baby ones) in pretty nice colors for a lot less than the similar ones at Lowe's. Mine are full of little organizers and hold fasteners and such.
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u/jorwyn 2d ago
Including vehicles. I spent years never quite being able to adjust my seat, seatbelt, and steering wheel quite right. Years having to just leave the radio playing static or the same tape or cd in while I was driving because I couldn't reach safely.
Now, I have a Land Rover with absolutely everything adjustable in a pretty wide range. I can reach everything! I'm a much safer driver.
I imagine this is also true for shorter men, though. The default isn't just male, it seems to be about 5'11.
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u/_humanERROR_ 3d ago
It's definitely undebatedly real. How much it impacts society can only be speculated. Heck it's actually one of the main reasons why the pronoun of 'they' has become more popular over the past century.
You can see some of the effects of male defaultism when talking about people's occupations as you said. On a less impactful note, it's one of the main drivers (besides the men in question being their flawed selves) behind extremely negative reactions towards assertive main female characters in stories. Because those men can barely comprehend a female being a main character, never mind a strong or assertive one.
Then there's many other defaultisms that shape people's perceptions and expectations of the world. Like white defaultism, straight defaultism, middle class defaultism etc. In the end it's just another form of stereotyping that is embedded and hard to shake that influences people's perceptions and expectations of the world.
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u/saevon 3d ago
Fun aside:
There's a whole culture of using "she" as the default pronoun for some books, not just 'they'!
Some recommended using the opposite of the default assumed gender for the profession/role/character as the "generic" pronoun too!
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u/thecrackfoxreturns 3d ago
I ran across a book that would say "women and men" and "she and he" instead of the opposite order and it was depressingly remarkable.
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u/Karth9909 1d ago
When the ttrpg company paizo moved on from dnd their default in the text became she/her pronouns and the male fighter icon became joke in a lot of art. It was a bit of revenge for having to use he/him for so long and praise the male character.
Now ita much more gender natural text
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u/PhigmentGreen 1d ago
Reading Anne Leckie's /Ancillary Justice/ (and it's sequels) drive home for me how strong my sense of gendered pronouns is. Using she/her as the default pronoun for everyone made it incredibly difficult for me to envision any of them as anything other than physically female, despite in-text descriptions, implications, and common sense.
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u/glitter237 they/them 3d ago
a good few TTRPG source books I've used do this to varying extents when the third-person is needed (off the top of my head, City of Mist refers to the GM and the player characters as she, while the players themselves are referred to as he)
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u/MusiX33 4d ago edited 4d ago
I think it's an interesting phenomenon to gender neutral words in that way. I mean it as someone whose native language isn't English. While I agree that every society can have a default gender for each word such as CEO or nurse, it's in its way a mirror of our society, where most CEOs are male and most nurses are female.
While I see it as something anecdotal from my, as I said, non English speaker perspective, I think it can teach us to double check the information we receive. Our brain tries to find shortcuts to every thought, so it's better to twist what we receive in order to avoid biases deeply ingrained in our society.
As a fun fact, in Spanish, Chat(GPT) is a "male" word, so it makes sense in this instance to see it as "him" for us. On the other hand, "AI" is a feminine word. Ironic.
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u/thirstarchon 3d ago
I recently learned that testosterone is feminine and estrogen is masculine in Spanish. It amused me
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u/StealthStrider 3d ago
French is even funnier. Vagina, breast, feminism are masculine. While testicle, beard and mustache are feminine.
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u/beetlefeet 4d ago
I noticed this for the first time in my life after having my first daughter. Like huh, why did I say "he", and 'other' my baby daughter from the situation...
So my thoughts below are in that context, of raising daughters.
The big one for me is, like your chicken example, bugs and creatures. In real life and it in books etc.
"Oh look at that little beetle, poor guy, he's stuck on his back..."
So I default to female if I can, for sake of my girls not getting normative masculine default hammered into them. It's actually an effort to reverse this but I try my best.
And I will go so far as to correct others (depending on the context and if my kids are present) specifically in the case for bees and ants where the workers you usually see are actually categorically female. So "he" is not just normative it's scientifically wrong.
Also talk about the differences where you can.
"Oh thats a male bird, you can tell by the colours!"
Also on a related note, and after meeting some more gender diverse people recently I have moved to also default more and more to "they" and explain that "I don't know if they are male or female so 'they' works fine."
I view all this stuff as simple and easy to action (if not always easy to remember in the first place) and purely a positive thing, to shift the world to a slightly more inclusive place.
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u/lurker__beserker 3d ago
Yes! The bug thing bothers me. More than likely any bee, wasp, ant, or spider making a web you see is female.
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u/8ltd 4d ago
I think it’s a really useful exercise your class did, it’s always really good to critically think about and challenge our implicit biases. I would say it’s probably a bit context dependent. For example I was a stay at home dad with my kids while my wife worked and felt the opposite way a lot I.e. school or daycare ALWAYS calling my wife even when we had explicitly told them I was the primary carer and lots of “mum’s and babies” events etc.
Before I get yelled at, to be clear I’m not equating my niche experience to the systemic inequality that women have and continue to experience. But think we kind of build our mental schema based on what we’re exposed to.
Re: some of your examples, I’ve never assigned a gender to an LLM, I think of them as “it”. Not sure if it’s common to anthropomorphize LLMs or not? And with the tooth brush, yeah totally get you there definitely common tropes that media use to depict men and women differently I.e. women being nags, men being goofy, ignorant or incompetent in relationships/domestic situations.
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u/mynamemightbejacob 2d ago
i dont think you are offending any woman with saying you feel secluded by society because you are a house-husband taking care of a child. theres nothing wrong with it, nothing wrong with feeling judged and embarassed.
it shows that men are expected to be the providers, and that you are almost somewhat shamed or looked at differently because you are not providing but instead your wife is.
patriarchy only benefits those who FIT IN their standards, not all men. misandry exists in this unjust world as well.
dont ever feel ashamed for taking care of your kids, your a great parent for being involved with your kid as much as possible. dont be ashamed.
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u/girlgurl789 4d ago
I loved this thought experiment. My instinct was definitely to assume male, but when I re-examined it, I mostly felt that way due to the use of the word “son”. I have rarely (maybe never) heard a mom say “good luck, son”. This is such a male/manly thing to say.
If the sentence read “good luck, sweetie” I would have definitely assumed female.
Anywho very interesting! Cheers!
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u/fahad_the_great 3d ago
I had the same instinct! Ending sentences with "son" is just a very middle aged dad thing to say. I'm sure if it was something like "Good luck! I know you can do it!" people would be more neutral
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u/turbomaumau 3d ago
There is a another version where a father takes his son to the hospital and the doctor shouts „thats my son“ (what a mother could absolutly say in that situation) and it works the same. So for the most people it really is about genderexpectations
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u/Ilovekittensomg 4d ago
I think it's very embedded into our subconscious, but once you're aware of it, you'll start to recognize it more and more. "Invisible Women" is a great read on the topic, but I'm sure it's not the only one.
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u/GeminiIsMissing 4d ago
I find it very frustrating, even as a man. Nearly 50% of the global population is women, and yet we assume everyone is a man. Everything, from the room temperature of workplaces to the position of seatbelts and airbags in cars to the medicine that's sold on shelves is based on men. Women's healthcare is lacking (they only just mapped the nerves in the clitoris this year!!!). Women are expected to feel represented and see themselves in male characters, yet men get to throw fits about female characters not being relatable enough to the general population (read: men). Maybe it's just because I have a little bit of experience with that sort of thing as a trans man, but it sounds exhausting being a woman in a world made for men.
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u/mynamemightbejacob 2d ago
arguably, the question also shows how much men are expected of them. patriarchy only benefits the men who fit in with those standards. men do get made fun of for being house husbands or not being as successful as a woman is. theyre assumed to be the provider. this question makes you think of man first because we assume someone of a high status is a man, and therefore think a man should be high status. that a man should toughen up. stuff like that, i dont think patriarchy only benefits men. it certainly doesnt benefit me. i dont fit in with it much.
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u/catencephalon 3d ago
I've been reading Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez and the stats on just how much men are considered the default and women are considered "other" are so disturbing
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u/LaFrescaTrumpeta 4d ago
androcentrism! that’s the academic term for it if you want a key word to search for. it’s all over the place and quite the mindfuck you can’t unsee once you start noticing it, it’s honestly really refreshing to see a guy bring it up at all let alone a younger guy. and fwiw i’m a lesbro but i’m certainly not immune to that kind of bias either, this shit runs deep and affects people of all stripes
partially commenting to check back and see if this gets more responses, hope you can have some interesting convos from this 🍻
edit now i see it says there are ten other comments already but they’re not showing for me rip
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u/Juanitasuniverse 4d ago
i think this is definitely interesting! i usually don’t assume gender bc i’ve beaten it out of myself. every time i do that im reinforcing the patriarchy so im trying my hardest to stop.
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u/centerfoldangel 3d ago
I'm a feminist, have been as long as I can remember (since the Spice Girls). I was watching Z Nation a couple of years ago. Zombie show. In one episode, they go looking for the President. We don't know who it is because we don't know who got eaten, and who's up in the line to the presidency.
And they find the husband of the President. And I thought the President thus is a gay man. And it was a woman. And I remember being so mad. Betrayed by my own brain.
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u/mynamemightbejacob 2d ago
its actually really surprising. i too do stuff like that and thought i was the furthest thing from a sexist as much as possible.
starting to believe every single person is racist/sexist to some extent, even if its not on purpose.
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u/ThatKarenBitch 4d ago
Yeah, male defaultism is in fact a super common sexism problem, and of course you‘re going to hear it brought up more by the gender that gets the short end of it. Most people don’t notice what benefits their own groups but harms another, and that works for either side. Also, doctors are defaulted to male, but nurses are defaulted to female. Professors are defaulted to male, but grade-school teachers are defaulted to female. A pilot is defaulted to male, but a flight attendant is defaulted to female. Notice the pattern? The jobs with academically higher, more “intelligent” or “harder” versions are men, but the “lesser” versions of the jobs are women.
ETA: Although, I am a woman, so I really didn’t help you see what men thought, but unless reddit is bugging out on me, no one else has said anything yet.
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u/trans_catdad 3d ago
90+% of CEOs are men, we live in a patriarchal structure. Investigating where male defaultism comes from is the first step in acknowledging it imo.
A significant part of male defaultism is the perception of the feminine as "other".
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u/dostoevsky4evah 3d ago
Another part of it is valuing male coded behaviour as the superior human talent. There is so little regard for feminine strengths and approaches to situations. These are brushed off as weak or silly: I remember watching the new Battlestar Galactica where the new (female) president (who is referred to as the school teacher because she became president due to being the only living member of the chain of polical command or whatever it's called) and after they realize their group are the only humans left and they are panicking "what do we do?!" she says "we need to start having babies".
It seemed a super cringe and girly thing to say in that horrible predicament but you slowly realize that it is the most important thing to be aiming and working towards, if you want the human race to continue. Not revenge.
That's always struck me as why it's stupid to discount a woman's input out of hand.
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u/Satisfaction-Motor 4d ago
I can’t speak on male defaultism specifically, but defaultism in genderal makes conversations annoying as hell sometimes. As an example, everyone’s assumed straight and pursuing romance until proven otherwise, if they are not stereotyped as something else. It’s easy to get into a conversation and have someone assume that you have an opposite gender partner, and that if you don’t, you must want one (and so they will try to reassure you or otherwise comfort you), and if you don’t want one, it must be because you want a same gender partner, and if you don’t then… if their brain hasn’t already short circuited, it’ll short circuit.
Or like able-bodied defaultism. Making weird comment about other people or assuming things. I don’t have a good example for this, but a lot of people don’t understand that what makes a disability is frequency, severity, and cause. A one-off, rare, or similar symptom is not the same as living with a condition. “I do x, y, and z and it works for me. You just need to do that, stop making excuses” when the underlying cause, available treatments, and ability levels are fundamentally different.
It also makes political discussions difficult, when people come to the conversation with this idea of a default person. “[group] doesn’t experience [thing]”, when [subgroup] absolutely does.
Speaking to male defaultism specifically, something really interesting that I’ve noticed is that in women-dominated environments and fields, people tend to assume that I am a woman, but in male-dominated environments and fields, people assume I am a man — but nothing about my appearance has changed. Job, environment, task, location, etc. all heavily impact assumed gender. This includes for hypothetical people — like how people think of women when they think of nurses — and real people whose gender is ambigous.
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u/mynamemightbejacob 2d ago
im just ignorant, so please educate me if im not understanding
the world is nearly 50/50 on men and women, but most people are also striaght. so wouldnt it be normal for people to assume if you have a partner they are opposite gendered? obviously they shouldnt be surprised or weirded out by it, but also they are a minority in the grand scheme of things...
must be frustrating still to talk about ur partner and people immediately assume their gender... something else i might be doing that i didnt realize.
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u/TuEresMiOtroYo 4d ago
"Not a man" disclaimer - I think male defaultism is a thing, and pointing it out in a humorous or gentle/thoughtful way is good and helpful, but I also think ultimately it's a symptom of deeper issues with society and not a cause so it's not a place where I personally dedicate a ton of mental energy or concern (beyond avoiding it myself as best I can).
The one place I think it may be more serious and important to be aware of, and moves beyond being a symptom to becoming more of its own problem, is in creative/storytelling fields like book writers, illustrators, movie producers, and so on where if protagonists and certain character tropes are always defaulted to male (white, straight, etc.) it impacts representation and feeds into the vicious cycle. Also, of course, with genAI, though to me the root problem with AI is that it's being personified at all -- and people do default to female with agents that are in more "subservient"/"assistant" roles as opposed to "expert" roles, which is something plenty of AI ethicists are weighing in on.
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u/nightmare-salad 4d ago
It’s definitely a thing. I was in training for a job once and they put up a piece of generic “leadership” clip art with a group of stick figures carrying a giant arrow and another stick figure standing on top of the arrow and pointing the way. We talked about it for like 15 minutes before a woman said “why are we all calling the stick figure ‘he’?” You could have heard a pin drop in that room. None of us realized we were doing it.
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u/I_like_fried_noodles 3d ago
This community makes me so happy as a cis man. I see hope
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u/mynamemightbejacob 2d ago
reallly does. sometimes i feel ashamed of just being a white cis man. its like because im not a minority anywhere im assumed as privileged and an abuser.
people assume im gonna be high status because im white, people assume im strong because im a man, people assume im gonna dress manly because im straight.
i work 2 jobs to support my college lifestyle and feed myself.
im 130 lbs at 5''8, im gaining some muscle but im still scrawny.
i like wearing long sleeves, baggy clothes, bright colours, i have a lot of piercings like an eyebrow and multiple earlobe and 2 helix piercings.the amount of times ive been assumed gay for my piercings or the way i dress is insane, people just profile me. i feel excluded? but im so privileged in life. but i dont feel any of it. maybe i havent been in a scenario where it would come in handy such as a judge deciding how much time i should serve for a crime i did.
but, im coming to terms with my masculinity. its a social structure upheld by both men and women, common people, and people who say they arent misandrists or misogynists. even i, with the question in the post, assumed the ceo was some sort of old friend of the dad who gave the boy a chance. the thought of the mother owning the company didnt cross my mind.
i wish it was talked about more...
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u/Teleporting-Cat 3d ago
Over the past years, I've started intentionally defaulting to gender neutral in all my communication, unless I clearly and explicitly know the gender of the person I'm referring to.
It is WILD how many assumptions and unconscious biases this has made me aware of.
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u/sandyposs 3d ago
Where it's especially dangerous is in medical research and testing. Male and female anatomical differences are important to know in medicine, medication, side effects, symptom presentation, and physically dimorphic considerations. So, take a guess: Up until which year do you suppose it was that medical science used ONLY men as the default human subjects to study medical side effects on?
... 1993. I'm not even joking.
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u/ToasterOfCinder 2d ago
Looked into this, not that I didn’t believe it but it seemed idk exaggerated. The 1993 part is real, that's when the NIH Revitalization Act required women in NIH funded trials, and the FDA dropped its 1977 rule keeping "women of childbearing potential" out of early drug trials. "Only men" is a bit of a stretch since women were in research before that, but yes definitely they were massively underrepresented.
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u/j--__ 4d ago
there's a lot to unpack here. i'm glad that you've been trying to unpack some of it.
note that gendering "true" animals (or a.i.) can be problematic in either direction, and "it" is usually best for the same reason that "they" is usually best for humans -- because the gender is not relevant. however, if you're anthropomorphizing an animal (such as a cartoon character), "she" is a fine choice. it's ridiculous that animals are considered male if they're not wearing skirts or hair ornaments.
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u/Ani_Drei 4d ago edited 4d ago
I very much notice the so-called unnecessarily-gendered language and I hate it.
One good example is when I drive someone around and they comment on the instances bad driving around me: “what is this guy doing?” “he should just go already” “wow, he’s driving so fast!” etc. It is assumed that if a person is driving a car, then it’s automatically a male.
Maybe I’m autistic, but I’m very sensitive to inaccuracies in someone’s rhetoric. To me, assuming someone’s gender is simply a type of inaccuracy because that assumption can be incorrect.
P.S. Ironically, I catch myself doing the reverse in one specific circumstance. This might be TMI, but I want to be a parent someday, but because I don’t think I’ll do a good job raising a boy, I default to wanting a girl instead. So a few times I caught myself saying things like, “if had a child, I’d name her […]” etc.
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u/serenamoeba 3d ago
Simone de Beauvoir - The Second Sex
Men as the default, the "Self", women as the deviation, the "Other".
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u/AliceCode 4d ago
It annoys me online quite a lot. People constantly calm me "man", or "my guy", and there's absolutely no indication that I'm a man (I'm not).
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u/ASpranneusRoseus 4d ago
It's an interesting topic. I remember Judith Butler in Gender Trouble talking about how different feminists philosophers described the subject of feminism, the nature of gender and what it means to "be a woman". Butler mentions an author whose name I don't remember who suggested there is only one gender: female. "Male" is not a gender, it is the definition of "genderless", the default. "Men" are not men, they're just humans. It's women who have their own specific category. Think of it this way, you could have two boxes - "male" and "female", or a whole open universe where the "general population" lives, and a small box inside this open space, where the "female population" (not part of the "general population") lives.
Obviously it's an abstract philosophical concept not meant to be taken 100% literally. Culturally, we think of both "male" and "female" as genders, even if, functionally, they tend to work as previously described. Butler themself doesn't fully agree with this theory iirc. But once you notice it, you can't unsee it. It's why misogynistic gamers complain about "female" characters, because you have two categories: normal characters and female characters. "Female" is a more specific and specialized category than "male". It's also why women are thought to be excluded from history: you can only think that if you see them as separate from the "general population". Women have always been subjects of endless political, cultural and economic processes, if different from men, generally. Women are not "excluded from history" when they're excluded from the public political life and confined to domestic work, because domestic work is a political process too! It's still an element of the economy! Some marxist thinkers proppose that women's role in capitalism is the reproduction of the workforce by basically making new (male) workers and taking care of the existing ones so they won't die and will be able to continue working, but even if that were true (which is not - women have always worked in the public sphere), putting them into a separate category continues to fall into "male defaultism". There's a general population and a specific, specialized population.
It really is everywhere O_o
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u/Formal-Theory-7001 he/him 4d ago
This is interesting certainly something to look into. Also, in the ceo example, referring to his mother as the ceo of the company creates a (narrative) distance between the character--the son, and the other--the ceo. So neither his father, nor his mother would make sense, yet at the same time why would a ceo wish someone success for an interview for their own company? Confusing all around tbh.
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u/mynamemightbejacob 2d ago
its not about the buildup of the question its how u assume the gender of the family..
i initially thought it was an old friend of the dad, like a man calling him son even though he isnt son. but it was in the most literal sense, the woman is son was being interviewed. ofc she called him son.
some of my friends thought the dad was gay as well. they only said mom after a few moments of thinking about it. none said it immediately.
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u/modulusshift Broletariat ☭ 3d ago
Okay well I’ve never been called “son” by my mother so that’s probably the main reason I wouldn’t have assumed that, to me it’s an old man coded word, and not even a particularly familiar one.
That said I wholeheartedly agree with the general point.
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u/JCDU 3d ago
Male defaultism is everywhere although some of it is more harmful than others - I don't think most of it happens deliberately, it's just that there's centuries of history of the world being male-dominated so even language itself has grown up "male default".
Defaulting to calling things "he" is not necessarily a major issue compared to u/krebstar4ever 's example of there being no female crash test dummies or a lot of medicine being almost entirely based on male anatomy / physiology for example.
It's useful to look out for it and catch it where you find yourself doing it, either flipping pronouns or using non-gendered ones is a decent habit to get into and once you start it's sort of fascinating how many examples you find in general conversation / daily life.
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u/flatirony 4d ago
It’s so obvious that the mom is the CEO in that quiz that it’s kind of shocking to me that it stumped any present 18 yo’s. And I’m 58.
I try to avoid male defaultism in my own writing and conversation. I generally do it by swapping “she” and “he” in randomly (not in the same story or paragraph), because I’m too old to feel comfortable with using “they” as a singular pronoun, and often find context unclear when others do it.
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u/funfun151 3d ago
Riddles with multiple correct answers but one “actually” correct answer are the worst. I also thought mum as the CEO was obvious, and then immediately thought “how can that be the “correct” answer though”. The two dads suggestion is valid, so’s the multi-parent scenario.
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u/mynamemightbejacob 2d ago
all of the answers are plausible its just most people are straight, and most people thinking that the dad must have been gay or it was an old friend (even my friends and myself did this) instead of it just being the mom speaks volumes for what we have internalized.
its not about the right answer, its about the answer you first thought.
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u/That-Judgment-3520 3d ago
I feel like the specific examples you mentioned may have more to do with other languages than english having gendered objects and what not. The internet mingling the ESL people with English may or may not lead to this feeling of defaultism in those language related cases
For instance, in my language (PT-BR) Chatgpt sort of HAS to be referred to as 'male' for linguistic reasons (don't quote me on this, I can't exactly explain WHY), plus the fact that the male pronouns also double as gender-neutral pronouns in a way, so we have to choose between either referring to it as male or female, and for fonetic reasons and the way the word is made people automatically refer to it as male. I imagine a similar process happens in some other gendered languages
Cases like this may lead to these people forgetting or just defaulting to using male pronouns in English even though they/them exists by accident, which may influenciate other people and so on.
But yes, on the first CEO point and others I agree with you, those may indeed be harmful stereotypes and what not.
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u/ExplicativeFricative 3d ago
There is definitely a presctiptive linguistic aspect to this. If you look in a lot of older English grammar books, they state that it is proper to use he/him as a generic pronoun if the gender of the person is unspecified.
They/them is becoming more in vogue for this, but for decades and decades and decades he/him was taught to be the correct usage to native English speakers.
Personally, they/them has always made more sense to me in this case. About a decade or so ago, I remember there being a lot of pushback from older people in using the singular they at all. It didn't feel proper to them. This was also around the time non-binary people were becoming more well known to the general public. There were a lot of discussions on what the singular gender neutral pronoun should be.
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u/loranthippus 4d ago
It has taken me a loooooooong time to rid myself of verbalizing male as default. I often still think it first, but recognize that's my socialization thinking, and I do my best to default to "ya'll" when speaking to a group and "they/them" when referencing a person I don't know or a group in general.
Another wrinkle is that riddle perpetuates the heteronormative default. Food for thought :)
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u/FluffyDaWolf 4d ago
It’s complicated . More like society gives certain roles to some genders and any vague action is automatically attributed to them. For example, if I say a parent is taking care of their sick child, feeding them soup. You’ll intuitively most likely think of a ‘mother’. Or when I say the nurse was very gentle to the patient you’ll think of a woman nurse.
Certain genders are assumed the default for certain qualities. Compassionate, nurturing and empathetic to women (women are wonderful effect) and ambitious, logical and stoicism to men (men are leaders).
It sucks if you’re a somewhat effeminate man, but yeah. The only way out is by breaking gender roles and that’s not happening anytime soon.
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u/BugbearBro 4d ago
It's such an ingrained habit at this point even if I notice it, any it's very hard to break fully. I've gravitated towards 'they' as a default because it's easier overall, and in the case of animals I know are likely to be female or matriarchal (e.g. Spiders, hyenas) I do that.
I also think it's more likely for someone of one gender to project that gender on an unknown. For a dude it might be 'a dude and his wife' but for a woman it might be 'a lady and her husband'.
And I wonder whether some languages probably deal with this less. Grammatically, at least, if not culturally. I've been learning German and antecedents take the gender of the noun, for example.
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u/Xietnin 3d ago edited 3d ago
I guess it depends on whether male defaultism is troublesome or problematic in a way.
Inherently, the English language doesn't have a gender-neutral term for all things, but in the points with ChatGPT and the chicken, both of you could have used "they" though it is probably more comfortable to default to "he/she" as "they" is a less specific term as it is sometimes used for multiple living beings.
In the case with the toothbrushes, that's probably problematic, as that's imposing a societal assumption/role on ourselves. It doesn't seem like a good mindset from the commenters in this situation. Hopefully it is something we can grow out of in time. I definitely recall a lot more older sitcom-oriented comedy relevant to that kind of mindset, and hopefully with those old family sitcom values being mostly in the past, those cultural assumptions/roles phase out in a few generations. It'll likely just take time.
Though personally, I've always wanted a living-being-exclusive non-plural term that doesn't apply to objects, because being able to regularly use a term like "they/it" would be so much easier as a whole. Though for now, I feel like "they" is the best course of action for the sake of subverting the language part of male defaultism altogether.
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u/ToSeeAgainAgainAgain 3d ago
Re riddle: I guess we could also say we default to conservative values because that CEO could also be a husband (gay couple), or we could say we default to conventional circumstances because that CEO could also be either the biological father or the step-father. That CEO could also have they/them pronouns and not identify themselves as husband or wife too.
Regardless, I like to use they when speaking of other redditors and like to use he/she interchangeably in conversations in real life as a way to fight this and help others see things a little bit differently
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u/witchcapture 3d ago
This is not directly your point, but if someone referred to an AI with a gendered pronoun in a conversation with me, I would probe that a bit. I think it is incredibly unhealthy to anthropomorphise AI models.
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u/i_am_et_al 3d ago
Thank the Greeks for having a male centered social and economic hierarchy that never truly died away from how the western world formed itself today. Also there’s some bullshit history where we adopted a lot of their judicial systems, and in the 18th century we went from using “they” to generalize people to using “he” because of inspiration to make English behave more Latin like. British parliament in 1850 shifted legal language to he and enforced it in school books.
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u/Reynor247 3d ago
Becoming a dad made me realize how much of society is defaulted to women when it comes to parenting
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u/CoconutPawz 3d ago
It's wild because if you were to learn about our species by just observing our media and systems, you would likely conclude that women comprise 30% of the population tops. In movies and TV shows that are meant to be geared to everyone, male characters tend to outnumber female 5 to 1, at least. It's getting better now, but up to now, we've been lucky to get 2 female characters in a movie, with some genres being more guilty than others. People are so used to these ratios that media with even an equal number of female characters gets lambasted as "woke propaganda" (as if women don't exist and it's unrealistic to include them), or that media is seen as chick flick material.
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u/Lovelyesque1 3d ago
I was just thinking about this yesterday. I was watching something where someone was reading a user manual and they used female pronouns instead of male pronouns- ie, “The user will then see a number corresponding to her ratio of” blah blah etc. The men were all super confused.
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u/fanna-jane 3d ago
I make a point of referring to animals and plants as she at least half the time. Very often, I get a glance and a question when I say she. “How do you know it’s a girl?” I don’t. I just don’t treat the entire world as male with female outliers sprinkled in.
I also roll my eyes at the term “mankind” when people are referring to humanity. Say womankind and that means women only. But mankind means everyone? Silly.
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u/book_bug4 Trans bro (he/him)🏳️⚧️ 3d ago
This is interesting to me as a non-native English speaker because apparently, I taught myself to perceive English differently. In my native language, we have the generic masculine, which means that for all words that describe people, the masculine form is also the "gender neutral" form. When I was learning English, I actively reminded myself that almost all of the nouns are gender neutral, and I (apparently naïvely) assumed that they would sound neutral to a native English speaker.
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u/lurker__beserker 3d ago
In addition to what everyone has said, as a dad I tried to combat this by switching the gender in my kids books when reading to them.
Very hungry caterpillar can be she, for example.
Also, their stuffed animals could be “female”
It was very annoying to them when their grandmother kept referring to their toys as “he” even after being told repeatedly “she's a girl!”
Grandma just couldn’t wrap her mind around the fact that a toy other than a doll would be a “she”. Same with bugs. Most ants, bees, wasps, and spiders are more than likely female. Especially the bees you see actually pollinating. But grandma would always say “look at that busy bee, he’s working hard!” And my kids would say “SHE!” But it never stuck for her.
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u/subjunctivejunction 3d ago
There are lots of great responses here and I agree that male defaultism definitely exists and is a product (problem) of the patriarchy.
I'd like to add my two cents to OP's example though. The riddle about the CEO, like the riddle where "the doctor is a woman," is intentionally misleading. When you hear about a father and son, if a mother is going to be introduced, you expect her to be introduced in relation to her husband or her son. Although it can technically be true, it is strange to tell a story a boy speaking with his dad and a CEO (who happens to be his mother).
Parallelism primes us to expect father and mother to be introduced in similar ways. And we expect new character introductions (even for single characters) to lead with their most defining relationship. Introducing the mom as "a CEO" is like introducing Hitler as "a German artist" or introducing my math professor as "a beer enthusiast." All this to say, I don't think that these riddles actually show male defaultism, except insofar as respondents use the pronoun "he" in reference to the CEO/doctor. Everything about not assuming the CEO/doctor could be the mother is a trick of the riddle.
TL;DR: Male defaultism is real but the examples we often point to are bad examples.
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u/aquacraft2 3d ago
Well it's kind of funny when you consider that it isn't even really true. All babies start out as female and then after a certain point start being retrofitted to be a boy.
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u/JesseAster Trans bro🏳️⚧️ 3d ago
I had my own experience with that second example in a video game community about a being that doesn't even have a gender in the first place. Technically "it" is the only correct pronoun for it as far as I'm aware but people got my case for calling it a she once but when I called it a he I was left alone. Fucking weird
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u/Peter-Andre 3d ago
I don't even think we should be personifying chatbots with gendered pronouns in the first place. I'll never refer to a chatbot as anything other than "it".
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u/ntdavis814 2d ago
I heard a story one time that a group was playing Dungeons and Dragons, and the DM decided to swap the genders of all the characters in the module they were playing.
The module was written with only two female characters, so the players were dropped into a town where everyone but two people were women.
The players noticed how few men there were, and assumed that part of the story must have been that all the men were kidnapped. They derailed the entire adventure, trying to figure out where all the men had gone. Would they have done the same if the story had been presented as written? The writers certainly didn’t think it was strange to have a town with only two women.
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u/jorwyn 2d ago
I see this same basic thing from another angle as a woman. When I mention I played ball when I was younger, everyone assumes softball. Outside of PE, I've never played softball
When contractors come to the house, they ask if my husband is home. They try to talk to him. He has to tell them they need to talk to me, because I'm the one who understands the work.
Similarly, people assume the tools are my husband's, that I drive a Land Rover because he talked me into it, and that the chainsaw, chaps, and hardhat are borrowesd from him.
They assume my tractor with backhoe is his. He doesn't even know how to operate it. I'm the one who likes to play in the dirt.
They're defaulting to male even when I'm literally there doing the thing.
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u/imrzzz 2d ago
This is a great topic to bring up, please don't downplay/apologise.
Adding to the excellent comments already here, only 0.5% of the world's written history is about women.
This creates a cycle of male-defaultism: we know about men more than we know about women so we assume "male" because our frames of reference are male-saturated. Because we assume "male" most of our collective interest is in the actions of men. So most of the things we write down is about men... So we know about men more than we know about women.
Anyway, start writing about women.
Not just about the things they do that we would find impressive in men (like creating disruptive software) but about the kitchen tools, recipe hacks, child-rearing habits, gardening ideas, local political campaigns, the ways they communicate etc etc
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u/25Coconuts 2d ago
This is a definitely a thing and a real issue but… what was the answer to the man and son question.
I got absorbed in it soon as you brought up but I wanna know what the answer was bc I can’t forget it out
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u/ohnosquid 4d ago
Some languages have "sexes/genders" to words, in my native language, Portuguese, bridge for example, is masculine, there's an "article" before words and they aren't neutral, professions are more flexible, they are kind of neutral, you can use both articles. Other things that can influence how you assume if someone is male or female is your own biological sex, I assume, without even thinking, that someone is a man if there isn't any clarification, not because I'm sexist, it's because of me projecting my own image or sense of self onto things, or something along these lines. Sure, there can be sexism involved but it's not the whole story.
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u/weirdgroovynerd 4d ago
Things like countries, ships, the Earth (Mother Gaia) are called "she."
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u/haightor 3d ago
You’re right it’s true, also storms and animals by default. But human things usually are not.
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u/other-other-user 4d ago
Idk bro, I feel like I heard a million versions of the "riddle" and it might just be your group of students weren't the smartest.
Male defaulism is definitely a thing, however I don't think it's some all encompassing law that everyone falls victim to. I've had strangers assume my pet was a girl, we just make vibe based judgements a lot of the time. I've definitely made the mistake of assuming the person I'm talking to on reddit is a man, but that's also not entirely baseless given that reddit has the highest ratio of men to women for social media, so now I just try and refer to everyone as they. I have never referred to chat gpt by anything other than it. People often relate anecdotes to their personal life or things they've seen, the fact that you liken the ad to a trope explains why they assume which tooth brush is which. It wouldn't be female defaultism to assume the damsel in distress in the tower is a woman, it's a trope for a reason. Obviously you can choose to subvert the trope, but then it's a subversion. It's not a gendered defaultism, it a trope defaultism. Not saying that's better, but I feel like it's notably different
All that to say, I think broadly you are right and it is something more people should work on, however I don't think your examples are the greatest and it's really not a hard problem to fix. I just default to they in 99% of situations now.
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u/mynamemightbejacob 2d ago
for the reddit portion...
yea most redditors are male
yea most ceos are maleeveryone assumed the caller being a friend of the dad or a second dad before they thought about the term "son" being used in the most literal context, being the woman is son.
even if most people on reddit and ceo lists are male, we shouldnt assume someone is male based off of that. its sexist, harmful to both women and men, and supports patriarchal views.
men arent always high status, and they shouldnt be expected to be a provider or a higher status because of their gender.
women are just as capable as men in becoming a ceo, and half the population shouldnt be ignored because we are now talking about someone high status.
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u/Lazy-Conversation-48 3d ago
It absolutely is a thing. My daughter experiences it - she’s working on a commercial pilots license and at event people never assume she’s a pilot. I have been mistaken as the administrative staff of my own damn company, and I have a friend who is a retired law enforcement officer who was Captain of a fairly good sized department. She outranked her husband despite similar years on the force but I guarantee if people had to hazard a guess who had rank, they’d absolutely choose him.
Worse, almost, is in the medical industry. Male bodies have traditionally been the default. There is so much about women’s bodies and women’s reactions to medication that we don’t know because they never bothered to study it. Women’s bodies are treated as an aberration. I was talking to my husband about perimenopause and he was shocked - asked why nobody has ever taught him about any of it. I told him women aren’t taught either and a lot of it is poorly understood by most doctors.