Opinion: Male alive!

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My former Pittsburgh Post-Gazette colleague Tim McNulty has a witty piece today about the quest for ‘the biggest prey this primary season . . . Pennsylvania’s voting-age white male.’

McNulty writes: ‘The species is described -- depending on who’s talking -- as either traditional or old-fashioned, proud or angry, straight-talking or racist/sexist. It is rough-hewn. It is gritty. It is a walking, talking cliche.’

All true, and the fixation of journalists on angry white males predates my native state’s sudden (and atypical) relevance in presidential politics. No convention of political reporting is hoarier than the interview with Joe Sixpack in the local workingman’s bar, and the decline of the steel industry in Pennslvania won’t prevent reporters from sidling up to big-bicepped bruisers in search of a rough-hewn observation about Obama or Hillary.

But it isn’t just political journalists who refer to ‘males’ as opposed to the more appropriate noun, ‘men.’

‘Male’ and ‘female’ are adjectives, which have been transmogrified into nouns by laboratory technicians, Personals columns and police dispatchers (‘Suspect is a white male with tattoos...’).

It doesn’t bother me when someone refers to a rat as ‘a male,’ but a human bring — even a suspected criminal — deserves to be called ‘a man,’ just as a woman is a woman, not a ‘female.’ As the Elephant Man (not Male!) famously cried’ ‘I am not an animal.’