In early 2022 my partner and I decided to watch Jurassic Park together. It had been years since we had seen it and we just needed a movie night. After the film was over, Fina turned to me to ask “How did you like it?”
“Oh I loved it. Except it always makes me feel a little sad after watching it.” -me
“Wait, you are feeling sad? Why?” -Fina
“I just feel like they gave so much screen time to humans instead of the dinosaurs. Yes, I know dinos were on screen part of the time but the edit feels like the story is about humans.” -me
“…Ben, this is a horror film with dinosaurs as the antagonists.” -Fina
Photo Courtesy of Lincoln Hughes.
One of the numerous problems in the Patriarchy is male is seen as the ‘default.’ Common English lacks a gender neutral singular pronoun so often ‘he’ is used instead. There has been some intentional usage of ‘she’ or even a singular ‘they’ to fight against this, but unfortunately in many situations male is just assumed as the default.
This is how I feel about humans in media. It’s not that I hate humans. I am amazed at what we can do as a humanity. But I get so tired when I think I am watching/reading something not about humans when all of a sudden it becomes a human story.
A book that illustrates this is Finding the Mother Tree by Dr. Suzanne Simard. She goes to great lengths to describe in detail her work with trees and how they communicate to one another. Slowly she starts introducing more and more about herself. By the end you realize that she relates her work to her own journey as a human, and now it is part autobiographical.
Again, she is an excellent writer and an even better scientist. But I just wanted to read about trees! In the same way when I first watched Jurassic Park as a child I thought it was going to be all about dinosaurs. Humans kept talking and screaming when I just wanted to see cool dinosaurs doing cool things.
“Ben, why don’t you just watch nature documentaries if you don’t want to see humans?” -is what I’m assuming you are asking at this point. Unfortunately so many nature documentaries also talk about humans way too much. With how much life there is on this planet, it it insane to me that most of our conversations need to be around what we already are, instead of trying to get to know who is on this planet with us.