The Internet Is A Westernized Space - Blog Posts

So, let me add my two cents to this conversation. I’m German and in my language, every noun has a gender (either female, male or neuter) and gets referred to by gendered articles which are der (the, masculine), die (the, feminine) or das (the, neuter) and it‘s the same with the pronouns for said noun where there are either er (he), sie (she) or es (it) pronouns used for the word.

And while the moon in many languages is seen as a symbol for femininity, which probably stems from the moon being a female noun in Latin (Luna, Lunae f.), in German, that is not the case.

In my language, the moon is a masculine noun and referred to by male articles. We say DER Mond (the moon) and when we want to say that it looks beautiful, we‘d say: “er sieht schön aus”, aka “he looks beautiful.”

So, what’s the takeaway from all of this? The easiest way to phrase it is, that both cultures and languages are simply very different all around the world. I know that that sounds a bit.. obvious but I have recently observed that, especially on the internet, there seems to be a “right” and “wrong” way to go about things.

Seeing matters from a perspective that isn’t typically “Latin” or “American” is often shunned and shut down online because people aren’t used to it.

You can easily see that happen in the above post, where the user who posted the photo and caption was immediately shunned by the people in the comments for using the “wrong” pronoun for the moon.

Which is kind of funny to me, seeing as in English, nouns DON’T EVEN HAVE gendered pronouns. So this is definitely coming from the culture online being heavily influenced by Latin, as the internet seems to be a very western space and many of those languages have roots there.

But to me it is important to say that just because Luna is a commonly used term when talking about the moon, that doesn’t have to mean that everyone needs to agree on it being female. In my language, that isn’t the case and I’d very much feel pretty annoyed if anyone told me that my or my language’s/culture‘s perspective is somehow wrong.

So, as the person above my way too lengthy post already said: we‘re not all Romans. And in my humble opinion, that‘s a good thing. So stop policing other people on stuff like this, just because they have a different perspective on this. Emphasis on the word DIFFERENT by the way. Different, not wrong.

I think I'm gonna start using he/him for the moon on purpose now.