Masculine as Weak Gender

In western Indo-European languages, the masculine is the “weak gender” in that it gets used for things that are male, but also things which are unspecified. Where you want to emphasize that something is feminine, use the feminine declension. The experience of a male in a language class is that he must learn all of the grammatical forms, but many of them he will never be able to use, whereas a woman gets to use all forms. “He who laughs last may not always laugh the loudest,” could apply to any gender, while “She who laughs last always laughs the loudest,” only applies to women. One result of this is that there is a linguistic space exclusive to females, i.e., if males intrude the usage must be different, but there is no space exclusive to males — even if females intrude, it is not reflected in usage.
Sorry to run on…

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