Talking the Walk

So here’s the thing. I just purchased Forrest E. Morgan’s book, Living the Martial Way, published in 1992. I have been a martial artist for more than half my life, sometimes earnest, sometimes sporadic, but always with at least one foot on the path. At the very end of his introduction, Morgan says:

“To avoid awkward ‘he and she’ sentence structures, I tend to refer to warriors in the masculine gender. I don’t mean this to imply that women can’t be warriors. Some of the greatest warriors in history were women, and there are great ones with us today. Indeed, warriorship knows no boundaries of sex race or culture” (Morgan 13).

What is implied is: “…but I’m too lazy to give them their due, so I am going to keep on perpetuating the myth of the masculine as the default human.”

So here is what I propose to do at least from time to time in this blog:

To avoid awkward “he and she” sentence structures, I will refer to warriors in the feminine gender. I don’t mean this to imply that men can’t be warriors. Some of the greatest warriors in history were men, and there are great ones with us today. But I think that if we are going to change our ideas, we have to start by changing our language. So where Major Morgan says, “The master warrior is a man of character, a man of wisdom and insight,” even though it would be just as easy to say “person” instead of “man” without any “awkward sentence structures,” I will say things like “The master warrior is a woman of character, a woman of wisdom and insight,” because we need to start thinking this way.