Interesting perspective difference there. I hear “man” and think very gender neutral, just a human being. Glad to know you found it so offensive. I kind of had a picture of a sexless human when I heard gender-neutral “man.”
I just watched “The Great Race” the last two nights and found the early feminism theme circa 1908 to be interesting (movie was made in 1965, so it had that viewpoint of 1908). It was the era of suffragettes, women fighting to get jobs that men had always held, the classic “battle of the sexes” between Natalie Wood and Tony Curtis, and how they were trying to resolve the conflict between an enlightened, emancipated woman and old-fashioned love.
I was a feminist in those days to the extent that I believed in equality between the sexes - as much as biology allowed, of course. I believe men should be equal to women in rights in divorce and child custody. I believe I should have had the chance to do the Zeiss lectures after I checked out on the Zeiss Planetarium.
You can’t imagine the wonder of bringing up the stars in a black chamber. But I gave Rand-McNally lectures in the hallway on the earth globe. I knew no geography - one of my mental defects - so I gave geophysics. The spin of the earth is affected by the sap rising in the trees. Or so my geophysics teacher taught.
I still remember retreating backwards to the offices as this gentleman followed me telling how he used to want to stab his sister before he found God. Maybe it’s all for the best I ended up in an office behind a computer screen and not in a museum hallway with the public.
And I LOVE romance! Never saw a conflict there with enlightment. I’ve thought boys and men are absolutely glorious since at least the age of six when I slept with our next door neighbor’s picture under my pillow. He was three. I’m wandering, but he found me online once and I mentioned in my return email that I was going into NYC. That and nothing else. He had retired as a Coast Guard rescue pilot and was working there. I turned around in the train station bookstore and there he was. I couldn’t imagine how he found me but he said he just figured out where I’d be by what he remembered about me. He should have been a detective.