So, just curious, what bothers you about him saying fellas? I can't imagine it's to degrade women?
Most people do not use these words to INTENTIONALLY degrade women; they are rarely meant as slurs. But as a society, defaulting to the male -minimizes- the presence and importance of women.
Did anyone notice facebook changed their default icon that shows if you have friend requests? It used to be a male with a female behind him. Now, if you report being female, the female is in front. They also changed the "notification" icon, that is a globe. It shows the continent you live on in front, rather than always North America.
In my case the female is in front, even though I am male (and male on Facebook, too). And no, I had not noticed any of this.
In fact, I had never even noticed until now that:
- There is one male and female in that one icon. I always just thought that there is a generic number of generic people.
- The round-thingy icon is a globe.
I don't hugely mind the default assumptions. I grew up in a part of England so white there was only one non white kid at school and even he was born in England and of Indian descent. I feel like I never really picked up how to treat non white people differently because we never had any to practice on and being good members of the middle class we knew racism was bad. I pretty much treat everyone as if they were white. Male too, it was an all boys school and my extra curricular activities were mostly things like Boy Scouts and so forth.
So if you say you went to see your doctor I'm thinking he's a white man. But equally if you mention the bin men I'm also thinking white men. And if I meet your doctor and she's a black, gay woman I'm still going to treat her with all the respect I'd give a white man because I never got the hang of how exactly you modify your behaviour to adjust to black, gay women.
Incidentally it becomes problematic when you start mixing with girls a lot more at university. I am oblivious to subtext.
Wow. I think I am you ;-)
I am subtext-impaired, too. And I am an extreme individualist and quite rational. My girlfriend, on the other hand, is relatively sensitive about issues of racism and nationalism and such. After a while of trying to sensitize me about these issues (that I do understand to exist but have a hard time to understand), she gave up. And she told me that she now understood that these things are hard to understand for me because it would never even occur
to me that someone's skin color or gender might matter to a given question unless there is an actual rational connection (like women have a harder time to use a urinal than men). And that, as a result, I would never even get the idea that someone might base something he says or does on racism, beause that whole concept is basically beyond me ;)