Little Stuff; Big Problems

As I've said before, being a feminist/womanist woman moving through this culture means there's a lot of stuff you have to ignore just to get through the day without becoming paralyzingly depressed about the plethoric examples of your inequality. This is one of those "little things" across which I stumble with frustrating regularity...

I was just reading an article at TNR (my first mistake) about MSNBC's election coverage when I found this sentence:

If you are someone who gets his international and "hard" news elsewhere, MSNBC is particularly appealing.

Now I know I'm a crazy feminazi and all, but using "his" there instead of "yours" not only makes that sentence construction just all kinds of awkward and nonsensical, but also alienating to feminist readers. You see, it's not just the typical (infuriating) use of gendered (male) language as the default, but its use immediately after the second person you, thusly implicitly presuming that you, the reader, are male.

(And spare me the grammar rules arguments. I can write that sentence six different ways without alienating female readers while simultaneously improving on the second- and third-person discordance.)

Yes, it's a "little thing," but it's a big problem. It reflects the mind of a man who thinks he is only talking to men. And in an article, no less, casually dismissing Clinton's complaints about sexism in the media as overwrought (though not totally without merit; gee, how magnanimous). Does anyone else see the inherent conflict there?

And that's why I've also said before that focusing on the "little stuff," when we do, is not a bad idea, given that the "little stuff" is the fertile soil in which everything else takes root and from whence everything else springs, that it's via the "little stuff" that the fundamental idea that women are not equal to men is conveyed over and over and over again.