English evolved in a time period, predominatly ruled over by men. Hence, the default term is: "Mankind", "Man", and the default, when gender is uncertain, is to use "Man", "Him", or derivatives of such.

In Old English, the word "man" was gender-neutral, while the words for male and female were something like wer and wif. The compound word wifman, meaning "female human" is what evolved into the modern word "woman" (interestingly, the word wer survives most commonly in "werewolf", which as you can see literally means man-wolf, and distinctly male). Cognates of "man", such as the German Mensch in fact remain gender neutral.

The gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun is "they", with documented use at least as far back as Chaucer and Shakespeare.

Most people here seem to be giving reasons why pain is GOOD. It's a warning system, etc.

Pain is bad, because it causes us to abandon our higher thoughts, and react impulsivly, occasionally making the situation much worse. Sharp pain typically demands a swift response, like the automatic jerking of a hand away from the flame. One can learn to train themselves to surpress this automatic response, but then the damage from the flame is greater while they take the time to think out why and how they should remove thier hand from the flame.

In short, pain is bad because it, more oft than not, forces an unthinking instinctual reaction.

I'd support this entirely, were it not for the bit

"Casual use of masculine and/or heteronormative examples in posts and comments that aren't explicitly about gender. It's just not that hard to come up with an unsexed example. Be especially careful when using the second person. If you need to use an example with a gender, there's no reason to consider male the default - consider choosing randomly, or you could use a real person as an example (who isn't presumed to archetypically represent anyone in the audience) instead of a hypothetical one (who might be)."

English evolved in a time period, predominatly ruled over by men. Hence, the default term is: "Mankind", "Man", and the default, when gender is uncertain, is to use "Man", "Him", or derivatives of such.

The others I can support. Objectification of anyone is an insult to thier intelligence, heck, even thier sapience. Sweeping generalizations about anyone are just that. Generalizations. Just as statistics are meaningless when applied on an individual level, so are generalizations, and men, please support me in this when I say: True pick up 'artists' know that each woman is a unique challange in and of herself. There may be certain techniques that may affect a large slice of the demographic, but even then, if you attempt to apply them without extensive knowledge of the subject, more often than not, you fall flat on your face. Even peeling oranges cannot always be done in the exact same manner, and women are far, [b]far[/b] more complex than mere fruit. Any who challange this, I respond with a challange of my own. Choose a pick up line. Any line at all. Go to a diverse number of clubs on multiple nights, and try it on enough women to provide statistical rigor, then come back here and try to tell me that it has a success margin wide enough to even be [i]considered.[/i]

Greetings. To this community, I will only be known as "Whisper". I'm a believer in science and rationality, but also a polythiest and a firm believer that there are some things that science cannot explain. I was given the site's address by one Alicorn, who I've been trying to practice Far-Seeing with...with much failure.

I'm 21 years old right now, living in NY, and am trying to write my novels. As for who I am, well, I believe you'll all just have to judge me for yourself by my actions (posts) rather than any self-description. Thankee to any of you who bothered to read.