incidentally, new york magazine…

See, this is the problem with being a furious feminist! You’re going along just fine, reading New York articles, and then suddenly you have to stop, become angry, write a blog post about it, and then by the time you’re done you’re all like, “Well, it’s time for my cooter waxing appointment now, anyway,” and you never get to finish anything!

I found this article in googling for a definition of “grup,” which was, and I’m only just now actually looking this up and checking the dates and the writers’ names and all just now, so I’m realizing this is slightly weird suddenly, but this was a word used in an essay about the first Sex and the City movie.* (The word apparently comes from a Star Trek episode in which everyone lands on a planet ruled by children, and it means “grown-ups misplaced among the young people,” or, as New York would have it in this article to which all of my chitter-chatter is leading up [wow, did I do that right there?], old people who still, like, listen to music.) I would very much like to point out, now that I’ve noticed it, that the essay defining the word “grup” in this sense was published in New York magazine in March of ‘06, written by some dude. The SATC essay that references it so casually without re-defining it because it assumes that its readers are already so familiar with the definition was published New York magazine in July of ‘07 by some chick. I have not heard this word before, or since (except for just this morning when someone quoted one of the articles and I had to go look up the word…god, I’m typing like I’m drunk here, but I swear I’m not). Has anyone else? Correct me if I’m wrong, here, but, um, New York? Quit trying to make grup happen.

Wow. That was a long paragraph for a Mean Girls quote joke.

AND NONE OF IT IS ANYWHERE NEAR MY POINT. My point is this:

In reading the article that defines “grups,” I noticed an instance of this very casual, lazy, off-handed…what’s the word? Not sexism, exactly, though that’s almost it. “Male privilege,” maybe? Or “patriarchal blind spots?” Anyway – it’s an instance of “men” being “humans” and “women” being “female humans.” And it’s totally undeserving of such a long post, but I got distracted on that side-rant! So the first paragraph of the article, if you didn’t bother to click through, reads: “When did it become normal for your average 35-year-old New Yorker to…” and then lists a whole bunch of things that a “grup” might do. Sixteen of them, in fact (not including “all of the above”). Some of them use male pronouns, and some use female pronouns. As I was going through this list, I noticed about halfway through that the only ones that used female pronouns were the ones that talked about the “she” in question having a baby. So I decided to actually count them! I made a chart!

It’s not a particularly fancy chart. (Ugh – and I just noticed that I made a typo on it, but I’ve actually already deleted it, so I don’t want to go back and make a new one. In K, I mean that I left G gender-neutral, not H. It still adds up correctly.) But! It does come out that there are 7 things about dudes (one of which is also about babies) and 3 about ladies (two of which are also about babies). AND – that’s me being generous. There were two that were about “shaving” but did not contain any gendered pronouns (though they were both later extended into one that DID contain a male pronoun) but I was super-fair and called those “presumably male” instead of “male” – if you count them as male, then it’s 9 to 3, or 8 to 1 if you’re not counting people with babies. Which all becomes even more infuriating when you look at the photo:

ARG. New York magazine is supposed to be liberal, urban, hip, young. That’s what this goddamn article is about. But even here, just soooooo fucking CASUALLY, without noticing it or thinking about it, humans are dudes and ladies are lady-humans. If the numbers on this chart had been reversed, this would have been an article about/for ladies, but since dudes are dudes, it’s an article for everyone.

Eff you, New York magazine from 2006.

So there.

* Um also PS that is NOT the definition of Third Wave Feminism.