Count the number of people present, and if there is a majority of women, suggest the game of using the “feminine neuter”: “all of us” instead of “all of us” for example.
I am a man and I have often proposed this game during trainings or meetings. I put it forward as a game, because for some people (men or women), it is in fact very shocking. Doing it as a game allows to get around some blocks.
It sounds simple, but this game allows you to work your brain to question meaningful cultural habits. I remember a young 4th grader telling me, very shocked, that we couldn’t say that because the rule is that “the masculine prevails over the feminine”. This simple sentence means well the integration, in the uses of the language itself, of a system not arbitrary, but of domination. This integration of the system of domination in the language cannot be neutral on our representations of the world, and thus on the unconscious way of managing our concrete relations between women and men.
And it’s a real game! We make mistakes, we laugh, we are surprised to hear it in the mouths of others, we laugh at its inflexibility. It also produces a connivance, which is always useful in exchanges. And then, after all, we practice new “neuronal rewiring”!
