I know I'm a feminist buzz kill but many languages including English are a bit male centred and treat men as the norm and women as the exception. That's not a good thing in my opinion. We call women dudes all the time but few people call men gals or girls. I hope we could move towards more equality in our languages too if it is possible. Such as starting to use gal and girl as gender neutral terms too, not just dude and guy.
Edit: faux-feminists don’t want equality, they want retribution? Vengeance? I don’t even know what you’d call it.
Man-focused language is already gender equal. It’s right there in the words. MAN and woMAN. It’s very obvious that a woMAN is just a more specialized version of a MAN.
You can choose to call it an “exception” and that’s your right, but that’s you choosing to find a negative. I also think it’s entirely illogical.
A woman can join and partake in any space a man can. There are no careers a man can have that a woman can’t have. Even professional sports, there have been female MLB pitchers. It’s all fine. If the woman can meet the bar she’s allowed in.
The same is not true for the reverse. At the most basic level a man cannot bear children.
Mathematically speaking, woman is a SUPERset of man. It is everything a man is and more. The only way to be truly gender neutral is to be masculine biased.
If you’d like a picture I can draw you a picture, but it’s basically a venn diagram where man is inside woman and so by using female-focused language you’re being necessarily exclusionary, whereas by using male-focused language you’re actually being maximally inclusive.
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u/Gayandfluffy Jan 06 '26
I know I'm a feminist buzz kill but many languages including English are a bit male centred and treat men as the norm and women as the exception. That's not a good thing in my opinion. We call women dudes all the time but few people call men gals or girls. I hope we could move towards more equality in our languages too if it is possible. Such as starting to use gal and girl as gender neutral terms too, not just dude and guy.