Reading Marcus Aurelius With Feminine Pronouns

The first time I was ever a student in a classroom where a female pronoun was used in a generic example, I literally startled and turned around to see who had walked into the lecture hall. I had assumed the professor was referencing an actual woman he was seeing.

But it turned out he was just experimenting with putting a woman in his example. "Imagine she then realizes the trolley is not going to stop."

Growing up, loving illustrated children's books, so many of the protagonists to identify with were boys. Researchers have counted, of course (imagine the work we would have to do without them), and found that the award-winning children's books from the 1940s to the 1960s featured boy or male protagonists at a two-to-one ratio.

And then, though I insist I was less influenced by film than it is commonly suggested we all are (we did not have cable or visit theaters much), the films of my era also featured male protagonists, and you would root for them, in all of their cases. The ratio of women or girl main characters to men or boys seems to have been the same as that for children's books.

What kind of impact could this have on us? Of course, that is very hard for them to assess, person by person. We obviously differ in our exposures and role models and commitments to fairness.

The philosopher Kate Manne, in her book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, develops the concept of "himpathy," which we would experience whether or not we laughed along with the sexist films of the 1980s. It is the difference in the sympathy we have for men and boys compared to that we have for women and girls.

I think an easy test for this is how rattled you are depending on whether a boy or girl or woman or man starts crying.

Impacts like these are hard to recognize in reactions; we are just so accustomed to them. And of course the whole of our lives are difficult to assess as well; a good life is not made from how much sympathy (or himpathy) we garner. But to me, to realize how we ourselves maintain assumptions when we do not think we do is so interesting.

A more sustained test of this is to read Catherine Yee's revision of George Chrystal's older translation of Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. She replaced masculine references with "feminine and neutral forms" throughout, preserving the rest.

Will it not matter to you? Or will that bother you each time you see it?

Likely you will not nearly jump out of your seat as I did first hearing "she" used in a classroom example, because we have changed our view on women's roles in even our lifetimes. But Yee's clever switch will still surely get you thinking about what you are bringing to the ancient text, how very much that is.

And what a good philosophical and Stoic exercise that would be.