Where did the concept of grammatical gender come from?

The words for female and male humans take after the nouns, not the other way round, so it’s basically because women tended to be thought of in terms of their attributes and men in terms of what they did.

..  Besides European and Semitic languages, most languages don’t have gender – it’s mainly a European and North Indian phenomenon.

How Self-Tracking Apps Exclude Women

Despite there being little written documentation of these records, women have long kept notes on their own cycles. Before apps, they used spreadsheets and online calendars. And before that, they used plain old paper. Today, there are hundreds of period-tracking apps available in the iTunes store. And yet, in a health app Apple describes as “comprehensive,” there is no way to simply tick on the calendar that your period has started, and when it has stopped.

..  “When you look at those types of apps they’re completely about the surveillance of pregnant women and making them ever more responsible and vigilant about their bodies for the sake of their fetus,” Lupton said.

..  “It feels like the product is mansplaining your own body to you,” said Rivers, who is now an engineer working on other projects. “‘We men don’t like to be blindsided by your hormonal impulses so we need to track you, like you’re a parking meter.’”

.. Tin said she’ll sometimes hear investors say thing like, “I don’t invest in products I can’t try myself,” which rules out any female health-tracking products for male investors. “I’ve never been treated badly,” she said, “but I think it just takes more to have them write the check for a female entrepreneur tackling a female health problem.”

Lumbersexuality and Its Discontents

One hundred years ago, a crisis in urban masculinity created the lumberjack aesthetic. Now it’s making a comeback.

.. At the turn of the last century, middle-class white men were, everyone seemed to agree, in crisis. They were effete, anxious, tired, and depressed. Magazines and advice books worried that they had lost their vigor—the industrial economy and urban life demanded too much time inside, too much brain-work. Clerical jobs in dingy offices provided few opportunities for advancement to the ranks of the industrial elite, much less for feats of bravery and derring-do. Men trapped in cities began suffering from neurasthenia, a new disease that skyrocketed to almost epidemic status in the 1880s and 1890s. Neurasthenia was the overtaxing of the nervous system, a sort of male hysteria. Some wealthy and educated urban men suffered from what historian T. J. Jackson Lears called “cultural asphyxiation … a sense that bourgeois existence had become stifling and ‘unreal.’” While women were ordered to bed rest for hysteria, the cure for men seemed to be just the opposite: They had lost their vital force, and they needed it back by getting in touch with their primitive, masculine nature. To do so, they looked westward.

The archetypal lumberjack—the Paul Bunyanesque hipster naturalist—was an invention of urban journalists and advertisers. He was created not as a portrait of real working-class life, but as a model for middle-class urban men to aspire to, a cure for chronic neurathenics. He came to life not in the forests of Minnesota, but in the pages of magazines, including this one.