I felt bad for not being on topic, so I went back a few pages and found a couple of posts more in line with the thread title:
There are fewer issues in English, but it doesn't mean it's immune.
Far from it. Problematic words include: women (literally wife person), chairman (nowadays chairperson, or simply chair), fireman (nowadays firefighter), and probably a load more that I can't think of for the moment.
I always like to go back to the actual meanings of the words myself, but when you're complaining on this topic, you can't have it both ways. Either you hold to only the modern understanding of a term, or you must allow for both older and newer understandings of the terms to be weighted.
'woman' does
not mean 'wife person'. It's from Old English 'wīfman', and means 'female human' (wīf = female, man = human being). [Also, 'wife' simply means 'female (human)', or what today would be termed 'woman']
And with 'man' explained, all your other examples simply resolves into 'chair human (being)', 'fire human (being)'.
The Old English term for 'male human' was 'wer' by the way. It went out of fashion, but is still found in cognates such as 'werewolf' (man-wolf).
And the fact that only married women change their name to their husbands surname (not obligatory but certainly the overwhelming convention) and also indicate their married status with "Mrs".
To some extent I can get the unifying of family name, since they are getting married and thus becoming one single family. And with property rights most commonly passing to the male heir, it seems "logical" that the new family adopts the male's name.
Though I suppose that just kicks the can further down the road, and the question becomes why it is the man who inherits and not the woman?
To that I will simply point to culture, and point a finger and sex- and woman-hating Christianity (or simply bad Middle Eastern cultural imports)!
Scandinavian women at least could inherit and had several rights until the introduction of Christianity, though I'm in no way stating that they were "equal" to men.
Oh, and about the Mrs. thing. A quick glance in a dictionary suggests that Mrs. was an abbreviation of mistress, which first started showing up in the 17th century, as a title in front of a woman's surname, an equivalent to Mr. I suppose (I guess until then, only noble women had titles in front of their names?). Didn't use to indicate anything about marital status it seems.
The use of Ms. on the other hand: [Btw, it
also is an abbreviation for mistress!]
Ms. came into use in the 1950s as a title before a woman's surname when her marital status was unknown or irrelevant. In the early 1970s, the use of Ms. was adopted and encouraged by the women's movement, the reasoning being that since a man's marital status is not revealed by the title Mr., there is no reason that a woman's status should be revealed by her title. Since then Ms. has gained increasing currency, especially in business and professional use. Some women prefer the traditional Miss (still fully standard for a woman whose marital status is unknown and for an unmarried woman) or, when appropriate, Mrs.
So it seems that at some point Mrs. took on the meaning of a married woman. Seems like a more "correct" way of doing it by the women's movement would have been to insist on the use of Mrs. in all occasions instead. Then again, English has lost the way Mrs. used to be pronounced, so with the similarities we can all simply go over to Ms. and end up at square one again (or square 17th century, I suppose).
Mr. is, as I've written earlier, the equivalent of Mrs. and Ms. (and also Miss.), or in other words, an abbreviation of 'master'.
Master and mistress are simply polite English honorifics you see!
Also, God is almost invariably male.
That's a Jews/Christian/Muslim thing. Blame the bad ancient Middle Eastern culture or something...
Oh, and why does the number one swear word refer to the female private parts?
That's just because Americans are so hypocritically obsessed about sex. The equivalent in Norwegian is also rude of course, but not much more than the equivalent word for the penis, and neither is considered as bad as the c-word IMO.
I know men in the Netherlands who have adopted their wife's name.
I imagine that it will become more common with time. With inheritance, stable family units and divorce abilities what they are today, there's really no reason to bother much with unifying the names any more. Now it's simply for fun, or so...*
Let's be serious for a moment, you have redpillers, MRA's, etc such as "Roosh" literally advocating for the legalisation of rape on private property because it would incentivise women to "take responsibility" for their actions, Paul Elam advocating for men on jury duty in rape cases to vote not guilty even if the evidence shows otherwise, pick-up artists advocating disgusting treatment of women etc and rather than be treated as the pariahs that they are, there are people that gravitate towards them.
Say what you want about "extreme" feminism, but it pales into comparison to those mentioned above.
Eh. Both extremes are still minorities within minorities. I suggest we avoid dragging them into the debate whenever possible.
* PS: Names are a hell of a thing in themselves!! I'll post a thread about it tomorrow, cause I'm going to bed now, and those things always gives me a headache.
