My dear friend James is the brain behind this gem. It was nearly one in the morning and a group of about seven other people and I were sitting in a Hopkins SAC van in an alleyway in East Baltimore, with a flat tire.
The van contained eight passengers, a dirty pillow and a jack, but it was very conveniently missing an accessible spare, a bumper and, as James elegantly brought to our attention, two tire nuts.
So logically, the question came up: What should we name it?
This was where the gender debate came in. I wanted to name it Neil, but all the men in the van felt that this wouldn't do because the van was obviously a girl. And so we arrived at the real crux of the issue, why do men insist on objects being shes? "I love my new Camaro. She's a beauty." Or "Wow, she's hot." Excuse me, it's enough that men objectify women, but do they really have to womenify objects?!
Granted, the missing nut comment was valid and rather clever, but my opinion still stands. Boats, trucks, trains, boilers and all objects with specs that include the terms "horse-power" and "manly" have always been assumed to be feminine. This doesn't make any sense!
The New Oxford American Dictionary defines the term feminine as, "having qualities or appearance traditionally associated with women, especially delicacy and prettiness." In music feminine is defined as, "occurring on a metrically weak beat." "Delicacy. . . prettiness . . . weak!" Do any of these adjectives remind you of industrial grade transportation?! Talk about mixed signals.
Now, let me point out that I'm not stating that women are weak. Rather, I'm perplexed at the cross-modal comparisons here. So I did some research and discovered the similarity. Women and trucks. These are two things that most men admire — and also bacon. So that's it then. I guess it's just a term of endearment (aww). Who says men are bad at expressing their feelings? But there is another discrepancy! Girls do it too. We give traditionally masculine names to things we adore like Mr. Snuggles the teddy bear or Team Jacob.
This isn't anything new, though. Back in the time of Jesus, the Romans liked to assign gender as well, as in they really liked to assign gender. To the extent that humans, animals, objects and their entire spoken language had sexual identities! Then it got even more crazy when sometimes feminine gendered names would be given to masculine objects and masculine names were given to feminine objects and so on and so on.
Then Rome fell, gave birth to a bunch of Romance languages with gender specificity and the whole thing got out of control. We as English speakers inherited a Eunuch of a language with absolutely no sexual dichotomies and we were forced to create our own system of gender separation. So it's not our fault.
As for the van, it never got a proper name. It remained nameless — and nutless — and was eventually towed away in the brisk Baltimore night, never to be seen again. Actually, it was just returned to the San Martin garage and still has a flat.
