That is the response from this woman.
Thank you. I'm glad you've brought this up, not least because I care about words, too.
Note first of all the thread title. (Which I see someone now has.) To end the OP with "female" is therefore somewhat balancing, don’t you think? I guess not, as it provoked your ire. And I'd done so well until that point, having not used "men" at all...
I started off with the colloquial "guys", followed by a self reprimand. This comes from my long experience on cycling forums, where despite that it is indeed mostly guys, I’ve never been comfortable with posts that start off that way, e.g., "Guys, what do you think of disc brakes." Outside of forums it depends who I'm talking to.
Parenthetically, the OP was specifically formulated for the CC audience, which like most, wouldn’t bat an eye about "guys" let alone "female". I bring it up because I was actually a titch nervous about posting a word-for-word reprint, not having read the room first. On the other hand, though it certainly hadn’t been my original plan, it would be interesting to see how the same post went over in two completely different forums. But that’s academic. In the end my decision came down to laziness. I had put fair amount of work in already, and didn’t want to do more.
In the perhaps unlikely event you want to see deeper inside my head,
here's a view from a thread that also got locked. It's off topic to our discussion, but I thought it worth the link to show I have given gender politics a fair amount of thought.
Yet another thread I tried to get going across the road was about the difference between sex and gender. That too was binned.
One of the simplistic things people can do to be more inclusive, is to use better, more inclusive language. Calling women female(s) without that subject is really exclusionary.
Why are women described using a term more from science, than every day language…. It's always Man/men. But female/females.
Speaking of inclusiveness, and science, it's only when I started following
trans issues that I realised how many new minefields have opened up. It began with four words (to be persnickety three and a duplicate): Trans Women Are Women. This is an excellent example of word choice being fraught, and veering far enough off topic that I'd better wrap things up.
In closing, I don't remember exactly what was in my head when I wrote that last sentence. Probably it was a combination of things: the 'male' in the title... the fact that I was mostly addressing men... that to reword it to say "I'm equally interested in the response of women", while also getting the job done, would rob the post of the sexual connotations of "the female response", which seemed more apt.
. . .
It appears
a thread has been launched in my absence, initially partly about my absence then moving on to the larger issues concerning the treatment of women on the board. Devotees of forums might find it interesting.