A shameless plug for a post my dear friend Andrea wrote.

There are books that are still taught in schools today where girls and women don’t even exist: they are so inconsequential to the Very Important Ideas going on in the book that nobody thought to include them. (Which also, by the way, ingrains in us at an early age that girls and women don’t matter or have anything to contribute, if they’re not even present in the literature we select).

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This teaches all of us that the male perspective is the default perspective: it’s what’s considered good and right, it explores lofty ideas, it’s the Canon. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that if man is the default in language, then man is the default in everything. Language is the foundation of how we explain and communicate our world, and it represents who we are and how we operate.

Andrea Badgley

I agree so forcefully with what Badge says in this post that just hitting “like” wasn’t enough for me today. Please go read her post, now.

It also reminds me of this very important article.