Gendered Language...

So I'm reading a book by Rosalind Hursthouse for my class Confucian Virtue Ethics entitled, "On Virtue Ethics." The book is fairly new (1999), so it doesn't surprise me that Hursthouse doesn't just use masculine language. I was caught off guard, however, finding myself 170 pages into the book and realizing she never uses masculine language at all. Every thought experiment, every example she gives, and every person she refers to in the hypothetical are all "she" and "her." I have a mixed reaction to this.

I hate the fact that the English language is gender specific. If it's not, it's grammatically incorrect most of the time. In that way, I can understand how a female author chooses to always write from the feminine perspective. The problem is that I find myself thinking, "Women and men are different, so I feel somewhat alienated that my particularity of the human race is not present in this book." My thought immediately after that was, "I guess this is how women feel a majority of the time."

Still, I don't think Hursthouse is off the hook. If a man in academia were to write from an entirely masculine perspective, he would be considered politically incorrect and would have to go back and revise his book to include feminine language. Why is it okay for a woman to write entirely from a single-gendered perspective? Does she not fall into the same category as a man simply because her gender has faced oppression for so long?

Part of me really is sympathetic, but there is a large part of me that thinks equal rights should mean equal treatment. If we don't want patriarchy, we shouldn't endorse the sorts of practices that keep this process in motion. On the other side of the coin, we shouldn't enforce the sorts of practices which may engender matriarchy either. Showing gender bias in one way or another, whether it be towards men or women, isn't right. We're different but equal creatures.

A lot of my feminist friends on campus would now rebut me by saying something to this effect, "Men have had the power for so long! It's time the pendulum swung in the other direction and gave women the authority to balance out the injustices that have been done towards women for hundreds of years." This is not feminism. It's simply chauvinism from the feminine perspective. So to say that Hursthouse's gender specific language is warranted to balance out the years of masculine-only writing is ignorant and not truly in favor of equality.

I'm done ranting now. I just wanted to get that off of my chest in a place where I can get responses.