I didn't really say that though, I just said that I don't think there's much reason to be offended and truthfully I've never met anyone offended by the gender topography of computer peripheral cables.
That's because literally no one has ever said they were offended by it. But it's not about being offended. Nor is it about cables.
I don't believe thst saying that males generally have penises precludes there being males that don't have penises, or that penises are uniquely male attributes or a requirement for maleness. Hence my roundabout point about male birds not having penises (that wasn't merely an excuse to insert a large duck penis into the argument, but hey, why forsake the opportunity to insert a penis anywhere).
You're thinking about it too much like a biologist rather than like a geek.
The metaphor only works on the basis that the plug-socket relationship is analogous to the penis-vagina relationship, within a narrow binary understanding of gender. And it doesn't even work very well within that limited definition, as Kim's description of various different connector pairing combinations shows. If you start bringing non-mammalian reproductive systems into the picture, you're just creating extra layers of confusion.
As for "commonly understood"... Well, that's the same argument that's used to justify stubbornly clinging on to miles, pints, stones, furlongs and barleycorns a mere 50 years after we stopped teaching kids that nonsense in schools. Why didn't we as a nation properly embrace sensible units in the 70s? Simple - because you can't force people to accept change, and if some people stubbornly refuse to stop living in the past, there's no point getting angry or offended about it. All you can do is plant the seed of an idea and hope that the more progressively minded members of society embrace and nurture it.
Eventually you end up in a situation like we have now where among the younger generation, imperial units really are not commonly understood at all.
And for an increasing number of kids growing up today, describing cable connectors as male or female would make literally no sense either. It doesn't make an awful lot of sense to me, to be honest, and I'm an old duffer who was brought up believing that girls were the ones in skirts and boys were the ones in shorts. I don't generally use gendered language to talk about inanimate objects because a) they are inanimate objects, and b) I'm not French.
Maybe in another 50 years, using gendered language to talk about inanimate objects will have fallen out of fashion too. But by then, I'll either be dead or will have found something else to not be offended by.
