***
Those who are ignorant of history (e.g. feminists) carp that lines such as:
"It's every man for himself"
"The fabric is man-made"
"What time does the postman come?" and
"Ask the average man in the street"
are sexist. Incidentally, these are actual example sentences from a book on "Sex Education" (whatever that has to do with Sex Education - this section, "Blue for boys and pink for girls", is bizarrely and abruptly jammed in between two agreeably relevant ones).
Yet, not only does this ignore the fact that centuries of use have effectively neutered the male pronoun, it leads one to question why they still use the terms "woman" and "women" to refer to their gender, since these terms build upon the hated root word of "man" in the first place.
Yet, they know that to use terms like "womyn", "womon" or "womin" will mark them out as positively batty and lose them what popular support they have, and so refrain from doing so.
As Hugh Rawson wrote on this topic,
"Woman" itself has a curious history, which may be of some consolation to female readers, since it shows that they are not, linguistically at least, derivatives of the other sex. "Woman," superficial appearance to the contrary, does not come from "man," but from the Old English "wif-mann," where "wif" meant "female" and "mann" meant a human being of either sex. As late as 1752, the philosopher David Hume could use "man" in the original sense, when contending that "...there is in all men, both male and female, a desire and power of generation more active than is ever universally exerted."
Carping about this "problem" is what is creating the problem in the first place.
Or more simply, they are taking a crap in public and then complaining that there's shit in the open.
As the page linked to earlier concluded,
[W]hat can you do with a philosophy which believes changing the spelling of a word (womyn/womin/wimmin, they can't even agree on that) is a significant act? Or that Ms should be pronounced Mz (as in miserable) and not be an abbreviation for anything at all? (Why not just eliminate the use of Mrs and use Ms, pronounced Miss, as the logical counterpart to Mr?)
Anyway, all the capable, independent, intelligent, competent women I know (and that's almost all of them) have far better things to do with their lives than indulge in these inane academic parlour games.
