I don’t mean this to be a full-blown thesis I’m defending or a fully-endorsed culture war take or anything, but today I got to thinking about the whole (very predictable) backlash to that very obnoxious “Is there a doctor in the White House?” article and the feminist issue of not treating men like the default gender.
Traditional sexism has historically been manifested in treating the default human as male while women show up as “human + gender characteristic” or “human + sexuality” (thus the only-recently-rejected norm of using male pronouns by default). I’ve become a lot more conscious of this issue in the past several years. Recently I was struck by Douglas Hofstadter’s apologetic discussion of why he used only male characters and pronouns in Gödel, Escher, Bach where he apparently thought that introducing female characters would inherently make them sexualized and so distract from the point he was trying to make. This is still kind of baked into our culture today to the extent that I consciously noticed only the last few years how many if not most people (including myself at the time) have a tendency to refer to an unknown particular person as “he” before knowing their gender. (To be fair, I noticed this in the context of discussing things happening in the math community, which is heavily male-skewed, but if anything that only means that more harm can come from this bad habit.) I would argue that phenomenon is one of those things that comes nowhere close to being neatly classified under “male privilege” but is insidious because anything that treats the genders very differently without justification is harmful.
Anyway, with the Dr. Jill Biden thing we have a writer who is completely dismissive of her credentials on the grounds that nobody should call themself doctor unless they practice medicine. He “supports” this by basically attempting to delegitimize the entire doctoral dissertation process at universities (in the good old days it was actually hard to get a doctorate, you see) but for some reason half the time he spends railing against non-medical people with the Dr. title is to sneer at honorary doctorates that universities give out to celebrities and wealthy donors (fun fact: the writer himself has one of those honorary doctorates! I had to look this up to believe it). He mostly names white men among the celebrities not deserving honorary PhDs but does slip in a few snide remarks about them being given to black women for political purposes -- he’s clearly very anti-PC but I have a feeling not many of the people outraged at his article know that about him or read that far into this particular piece.
Instead, all the outrage I’ve seen about this article is that its author, Epstein, has revealed himself to be a misogynist who wants to dismiss the credentials of a woman holder of an advanced degree. A lot of this outrage is coming from PhD-holders who don’t seem to mind that Epstein, you know, spent a bunch of paragraphs on his main thesis making out that advanced degrees nowadays are just a joke and shouldn’t be respected at all (mostly using men as examples). Not that titlism (looking down on non-PhD-holders) should be the alternative, of course, which ironically is what a couple of people seem to be emulating in their criticisms of him (actually referring to Epstein as just some loser who only has a BA). No, all that matters is that Jill Biden is a female doctorate-holder and so the whole article is an attack on women who use the title.
No, I don’t mean this as yet another “SJ is bad because it reinvents treating certain identities as relevant when we were trying to get past seeing them as relevant” because that whole take has pretty much been beaten to death as far as I’m concerned and I’m not sure this example can be entirely reduced to that, but it did get me thinking today about possible further instances of our subconscious tendency to categorize people as generic Xers and woman Xers.
