Stephen <mcavoysATaolDOTcom@> wrote:
> I think that I'm a feminist as I believe in the doctrine advocating social,
> political, and all other rights of women equal to those of men. I'm not offended
> nor is my wife who could never be described as anything other than a feminist.
> What you are saying is trivial and a smokescreen making it more important to do
> little rather than actually treat women as if they had the same rights as men. 
> I bet you a pound to a penny that whoever came up with that idea didn't work for
> a living.

  I think feminists who oppose the usage of "he" (or "man") as the
gender-neutral pronoun should put things in perspective.

  English lacks a gender-neutral pronoun for people (unlike other languages,
such as Finnish, where the third person pronoun is gender-neutral, and in
fact there are no gender-specific pronouns at all), so there are only three
possible options available:

  1) Use the established gender-neutral pronoun "he" which has been used
in that role for a long time. Forget *why* it was chosen as the generic
pronoun hundreds of years ago. That's not relevant today.

  2) Use awkward grammar-breaking over-PC artificial constructs such as
"he/she" everywhere, interrupting the normal flow of text.

  3) Invent a new word for the English language and establish it as the
gender-neutral third-person pronoun.

  For some reason nobody seems to opt for number 3.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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