The following comment was received in response to last week’s post:Knowing that this particular blogger is not preoccupied with political correctness, I’m curious as to why he decided to assign the feminine gender to the “leftish reader”? Is it because this blogger believes that the “leftish reader” is happy to complacently identify with any criticism of the U.S. without questioning the validity of individual arguments, perhaps as he believes women just nod in ‘knowing’ agreement – without having any opinions of their own?Now, I’m not going to emulate Monsieur Todd and accuse my correspondent of being a “castrating female.” (I wouldn’t dream of it!) Rather than assuming that women readers nod their head like toy dogs, I merely thought that it was a form a syntactical politesse to use the female impersonal pronoun whenever possible. Maybe it’s a kind of linguistic affirmative action, to counteract the usual assumptions that all writers, doctors, etc. are male. Doubtless my commentator will perceive this gesture as mere condescension.And perhaps such clumsy PC displays will soon be no longer required. As scientists such as Steve Jones tell us, men are on the way out:�Males are wilting away. From sperm count to social status, and from fertilization to death, as civilization advances those who bear the Y chromosome are in relative decline.�Of course, “relative decline” is a open to interpretation…