Not now
Terry Gross talked to Masha Gessen about Putin’s war on Ukraine last Thursday.
My guest, Masha Gessen, is a Russian-American journalist who reported in late January and February from Ukraine, then went to Moscow after the invasion. On the night Putin shut down the last remaining independent source of TV news, Gessen was at that studio. Gessen’s dispatches are being published in The New Yorker, where Gessen is a staff writer. Gessen left Moscow on Thursday and is speaking to us from Tbilisi in the Republic of Georgia.
For 20 years, Gessen was a journalist in Moscow and had been the chief correspondent for Russia’s leading news magazine until it became impossible to report the real news. After that, Gessen moved to a popular science magazine. In 2013, when it became too dangerous to remain in Russia because of Putin’s anti-gay laws, Gessen moved to New York with their partner and their adopted son and their two other children. Gessen uses the pronouns they/them. They have written extensively about Putin, including in their book “The Man Without A Face: The Unlikely Rise Of Vladimir Putin.” Gessen warned about Trump’s authoritarian style of leadership and its parallels to Putin in the book “Surviving Autocracy.”
The interview is not great (which is unusual for Fresh Air); Gessen talks very slowly and as if with difficulty, which is entirely understandable in the circumstances but just not ideal for radio. It’s good that there’s a transcript.
That said…I find it pretty jarring to go from what’s happening in Ukraine and Moscow to luxury pronouns. Using “they/them” is really not ideal for a journalist doing an interview for the simple and non-political reason that it’s confusing. Ordinarily in such an interview “they” and “them” would mean Russians or Ukrainians or refugees or soldiers, not one of the people doing the interview. Also the interview is about Ukraine, not Gessen (and I’m sure Gessen would agree), so making room for the specialty pronouns is just not very appropriate in this context. It’s a bit like pausing to ask “What are you wearing?” It’s extra, it’s non-essential, and therefore in this context it’s frivolous and a bit obnoxious. For all I know Gessen would have preferred to leave it out, and it was NPR or Gross or both who decided to say it. At any rate, I wish they’d left it out.
Seriously, this. The obvious point of objective truth aside, my biggest peeve with luxury pronouns is that their use muddies up the language and transforms what should be clear text into a confusing mess that requires detective work to understand. It’s like they have just thrown overboard years and years of training and exhortations by language instructors and professors to write clearly.
You know, if the TR’s crowd were campaigning for an end to gender I could get behind that. Create a new pronoun set that is truely gender neutral, yet also linguistically clear. Of course that would come with committing to dropping all the spirit essentialist my inner being is not a product of my physical flesh bullshit. They’d have to drop the I liked playing with my mums clothes and makeup therefore I’m a girl bullshit. They’d have to drop the oh you don’t like how you feel when guys start looking up your skirt, you’re really a guy bullshit. They’d definitely have to stop reinforcing the patriarchy and using derogatory terms for women bullshit. I am… not going to hold my breath, so in the meantime I’ll continue to use the language as I understand it to function.
But James, writing clearly isn’t the point. The point is to make the average reader think “I don’t understand a word of this, therefore it must be profound and they must be much cleverer than I am.” The point is to make them feel superior to as many people as possible.
Instead of using the internet to spread education, humanity seems to be using it to raise a generation or two of entitled narcissists.
Fortunately, there are still enough actually educated and intelligent people around to point out that no, it’s only deep in the way a septic tank can be deep; there are no bright nuggets to be discovered in the crap by brave thinkers. Unfortunately, the narcissists seem to have taken over most of the media. Today when the little boy points out the emperor’s lack of raiments, he gets dogpiled and called a bigot.
“We pause to note that Ms. Special Whinypants chooses to identify as non-binary, and uses the pronouns they and them when speaking about herself in the third person. However, as our primary responsibility is to our readers, for the sake of clarity we do not.”
Papito#4: ‘uses the pronouns they and them when speaking about herself in the third person’ – you’re going to be in trouble. That should surely read: ‘uses the pronouns they and them when speaking about THEMSELVES in the third person’.
Good trouble, Tim.
In case it was unclear to others as well, I suggest that news organizations may, out of consideration, wish to report on their interviewees’ special pronoun selections, but they have no moral obligation to participate in them.
“Today’s interviewee identifies as a tiger, and asks others to use the pronouns ‘grr’ and ‘grrself.’ We spoke to her at the Bronx Zoo.”
They can’t even keep their own pronouns straight…in a court of law.
https://uploads.ovarit.com/a467e83d-80f9-5338-a08e-b6cece8d0a5a.jpg
Pronouns?
Would you like to come up and see my prepositions?