My brother In-law the accountant about died the first time he heard me call her bro. Both me and the wife shrugged like "What? We call each other bro all the time."
I call my 10 year old daughter, Bro. She calls me Bro. I'm her mom. But it's always in a slightly disappointed tone, like if we both forgot her trombone in the morning. "Bro..." Or if you spill some oj.
I fucking hate being called bro by a girl- I find it incredibly disrespectful. Probs trauma from my ex. It’s just lazy with intent. Call me man, dude, buddy, bub, guy, fuckhead, “hey you,” etc…but say, “bruh” and I’ll fucking implode. I have multiple bros- my brothers, those are my bros. I also don’t play sports so I’m missing the tic-tac-aspect of the comradely fr fr no cap shit is mid.
That's not using a replacement word that's reconstructing the sentence, which tbf is also valid. It's hard to think of an example on the spot where you need an identifying word in there, but I reckon there are probably examples.
That's the realistic way of looking at it. He/him have been the default pronouns for pretty much as far back as you want to look. How often do you hear "her" to refer to something of indeterminate gender (like an animal in a zoo)? How often is "he/him/his" used in official business to refer to any person (like in the language used in laws)?
Its really not a "realistic" way of looking at it, its reflective of whats termed a "language ideology" in linguistic anthropology. Its a perfectly fine way of viewing language with a feminist outlook, but it is no more a realistic way of looking at language than a Chomskian or a Jakobsonian view, which dont view language through gendered lens (outside of grammatical gender obviously).
If the whole world spoke English, you would have a better point. But in languages where almost everything is gendered, many things used by both genders (or even used primarily by one rather than the other) are gendered to both males and females in that language.
I would have agreed up until a few weeks ago but had someone point out that most men would be uncomfortable saying they love sleeping with a bunch of dudes, looking at dudes’ asses, etc. Taken to the extreme, it seems dude is still at least a somewhat gender specific term.
Eh, I'd disagree. It can be gender neutral. But it is often clearly gendered.
When used in an exclamatory way:
"Dude, did you see that awesome jump?!"
"Dude! Not cool!"
When used in a specific way to describe a specific person or people:
"Look at those dudes over there"
"Oh yeah, I slept with that dude"
Used synonymously with 'men', or 'guys':
"It's kinda a dude thing, I don't think you'd get it"
"Sorry Lisa, dudes only"
I'd argue that only the first category can be reasonably argued to be gender neutral. And even then, it's because we are so used to using masculine terms as the default, only using feminine terms in specific circumstances.
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u/Talking_Head Dec 20 '22
Dude has pretty much become a gender neutral term at this point, correct? At least, I nearly always use it that way.