androcentrism Nineteenth-century American Charlotte Perkins Gilman used this term in The Man-Made World or Our Androcentric Culture (1911) to characterize what she saw as western thoughtâs orientation around a male point of view, with the result that what was treated as common sense or universal was in fact a reflection of male identity and values. In this system of thought, the feminine perspective is treated as aberrant, a deviation from the male-centred norm. Feminist linguists like Dale Spender have shown how this male-centred outlook is ingrained in language, particularly in the use of the masculine pronoun as the universal term.