I'm sure this won't be news to most people here, it's just something that's been on my mind.

Third-wave feminism in particular took aim at out society's language conventions, pointing out how gendered language was often either unnecessary (ex. saying "fireman" instead of "firefighter") or demeaning (ex. "you throw like a girl").

That's all well and good, but after a while the feminist paradigm on gendered language shifted from "it's wrong" to "it's okay when we do it" (as is the case with many aspects of feminist thought, but I digress).

The most obvious example is "mansplaining". Commonly understood as "when a man condescendingly explains a concept to a woman (specifically a concept she already understands)", it took me a while to realize that "mansplaining" was really just a manifestation of the Dunning-Krueger effect, where a person with entry-level knowledge claims themselves an expert on a subject without realizing they still have a lot to learn.

But the difference between "the Dunning-Krueger effect" and "mansplaining" is that the former isn't a catchy slang term that generates clicks on Buzzfeed.

Even terms like "the male gaze", which was coined decades ago and originally intended as a morally neutral term meant to describe an observable artistic phenomenon, were swept up into 2010s pop feminism and gained much more negative connotations. But the *female* gaze? That's widely encouraged, and seen as empowering.

Many of the most powerful and biting insults in terms of modern Internet discourse, such as "dudebro", "boys' club", and "manchild", are explicitly gendered and explicitly negative, with both of these attributes feeding into each other. These terms in particular have no female equivalents, at least none that are widely in use.

With these terms, the message is clear: the maleness of the subject in question is the problem.

Anybody else have any thoughts about this?