Quote (thesnipa @ Oct 29 2019 03:24pm)
you have an interesting relationship with time.....
english, and he/she by extension, are thousands of years older the Winnie the Pooh.
if we go back even further we see that almost 100% of art made by early civilizations had either exaggerated breasts or an exaggerated penis. so even before English our ancestors used a strict sexual binary, even their gods had sex.
in the case of Winnie, his penis isn't missing, it's implied. that's what the author calling him "he" meant.
around the time that "he" and "she" were created women and men were not similar in appearance. women wore loose shifts or dresses, men wore pants and tunics. you didn't need to see their junk to know what sex they were, that's basically the entire story of Mulan. everyone assumed that she was male because she dressed like it.
i can see how you'd be confused with thinking the pronoun was based on characteristics, rather than genitalia, if you're ignorant of the facts. in reality those characteristics were exclusive to those sexes, in the year 1,000 no men wore dresses (as a general rule).
it really is this simple, stick with me now, "he" historically has meant person with penis that shoots the sperm in the "she", which means person with vagina that can turn said sperm into a baby then feed it milk from "her" breasts. the terms were created directly to differentiate between the sexes, they were not created to refer to "person who wears dress". that's a correlation error in thinking it was causation.
edit: and this part is just silly:
the pronoun was created for the opposite reason, so you didnt have to see their genitalia to find out if you could mate with them.
i know you liberals like to hack up language but i didnt think history was on the docket this badly..... take an anthro class? lol
I'm talking about how people assess which pronoun to use in a given situation, not some reading of pronoun assignments as absolute truths of biology. We could just as easily make a third set of pronouns for people with androgynous characteristics and call them Hijras and it would be just as biologically true as the binary description.
Which pronoun you use has never been dependent on what genitals the other person has. It has, however, been based on secondary characteristics that are typical of one sex or the other, and on tertiary characteristics that are adopted depending on societal norms. I.E. primary = genitals, secondary = hip to waist ratio, tertiary = clothing choice, preferred pronoun, etc.
The only way you can reasonably say that the penis is implied is to create some ridiculous headcanon that Winnie the Pooh has a retractable penis that never shows up, or that in the truest reading you should mentally insert a dangling dong into every image of Pooh. In truth we call Winnie the Pooh a boy because he has a deeper voice and refers to himself as such. Change his voice and slap a "her" label on the same design and you've suddenly created a character that is female without doing anything with genitals.
This post was edited by Thor123422 on Oct 29 2019 02:55pm