Subconscious Chauvanism

[stephen_speicher]

I'm not following why you could not reverse this and say that a man is a male woman. Neither statement really makes literal sense; both men and women are subcategories of "human being." One is not a differentia of the other.

I agree that what the poster wrote was utterly rationalistic, but note that there are some languages, such as English, which use the same word to refer to the human species as well as to the male members of that species. There are other languages, such as German, which use different words to distinguish between the two. Historically, of course, the male has been the symbol most representative of the species, so it is interesting to ask what prompted some languages, and not others, to make a word distinction between the human species and its male members.