Cultural and Linguistic Sexism

I was working on a paper today, and noticed some very peculiar about linguistic gender-neutrality. I know that we are all encouraged to use female character in our examples to combat the inherent chauvinism of the English language. Despite following the recent gender politics over at Less Wrong (summarized by a post on The Nature of Offense) and hearing Douglas Hofstadter explore the topic in some of his work, I’m still not entirely convinced that enough women feel alienated when males are used in examples.

Nevertheless, the issue has been raised to the level of my awareness, and I’m now sensitive to it. So I find myself in a huge conundrum, as my example involves shopping. So, I’m a bigoted sexist no matter what gender I choose!

Damn, English is sucks!

P.S. Assuming that example involving idiots and geniuses occur with equal frequency, what exactly stops people from using one gender as the canonical example for idiocy and the other gender for genius? Of course this association can be carried as far as one’s bigotry allows.