I’m not the language police. I pretty much never jump on people for using a term like “fireman”. I wouldn’t have said anything about “duuude”. But if folks are going to claim that it’s no longer the 50s and there’s no masculine bias left in English, I’m going to disagree stoutly.
I absolutely agree with you.
I’d say there is a gender neutral “dude,” but it’s when it’s used as an exclamation of surprise or wonder, similar to “wow” or “whoah.”
“The blue whale eats up to six tons of krill a day!”
“Dude! That’s a lot of tiny shrimp!”
It can also be used as a sort of vocalized pause at the beginning of a sentence to allow the speaker time to gather their thoughts, similar to how “like” is often used.
“What do you want for lunch?”
“Dude… how about burritos?”
The problem is it can sometimes be difficult to distinguish these usages from addressing the other person as “dude,” which leads to the perception that “dude” refers to both men and women. But it doesn’t often get used that way, except in false inclusivity scenarios, where a mixed gender group is referred to by masculine word (“The dudes who work in IT…”). The relatively rare instances where someone refers to a specific woman as a dude usually occurs in a context where the woman in question displays supposedly “masculine” characteristics or interests: Molly the flannel-wearing skater is a “dude,” Cindy the skirt-wearing cheerleader is not. This usage also generally only applies to women that the speaker approves of, while it gets applied to men more universally: “Some dude cut me off in traffic,” is almost never going to refer to a female driver.
I find it hilarious that a thread about posters picking arguments is hijacked by posters picking arguments. Good show, good show!
I’m amused (but not smugly or condescendingly 
) that the arguing over patriarchal norms in this thread has got me musing on the pronounced male to female gender migration of personal names in the United States. I get why the reverse isn’t happening and I’m sure it is indeed patriarchal in a machismo sort of way (i.e. the A Boy Named Sue problem). But I’ve always wondered why the migration has been occurring at all. Surely it can’t be 20th century parents disappointed in not having boys deciding to name their daughters Taylor or Madison?
I’ve even found myself exclaiming “Dude!” when I’m by myself. It’s not being addressed to anyone, it just essentially means, “What the fuck?!” It can be good or bad; my car won’t start for some reason, or I find out that a show that I really like but expected to be canceled was renewed another season. It’s like “wow” just as you said.
I very rarely use it to refer to a specific person unless they are male. Though I might use it as an exclamation while talking to them. But I’m not labeling them with it, it’s just a generic expression.
Why do I do that? I grew up in the 80s and I was exposed to that usage often, and it got imprinted on my brain. It’s also often that I say “dude” to one of my daughters in a scolding way, but this is again just the same way you might say “hey”. My wife does the same thing, she’s my age. I think it’s just how we grew up.
Whereas I thought it interesting that a thread about the difficulty of discussing anything of substance has sparked a fairly substantial discussion about gender in current English.
Maybe don’t do that? Specifically, don’t respond petulantly in a thread if you can’t be bothered to read it?
Wait, ignoring the obvious strawman bullshit of “conspiratorial”, but it seems you’re in denial about the existence of the patriarchy itself? This keeps getting better and better. I mean, dumber and dumber.
Again, strawman bullshit I never said - in fact, explicitly said otherwise, by referencing other kinds of women.
No, I find them amusing. It’s the repeated wobbliness of your convictions that really draw a chuckle, though. You know how to avoid that? Don’t make a song-and-dance of flouncing, then immediately unflounce. It makes you look silly.
Yes, yes, Mr Munroe, whatever you say, whatever you say.
A little bit, but it’s hardly “houghed”.
But it doesn’t have the baggage of being used as a pejorative for all kinds of people with disabilities, the way “cripple” has.
…and offensive to some people with disabilities.
Close enough for government work.
Why am I sure that “significant” is going to be some impossible-to-satisfy fraction for you?
Why am I getting an image of some grudgy asshole who’s been turfed from more than one social NGO for being an annoying pedantic twit? Either that or someone who’s never actually worked with a social NGO in their life but has a vivid imagination for how they must work.
Exactly.
The board does have many posters more interested in dispelling ignorance than arguing, and that leads to useful hijacks, so it’s a classic SDMB trope.
This I can agree with (rest of your post too).
It is kind of weird how other languages have gender for nouns that has little to do with human gender, whereas English takes words like “dude” and “guy” and even “bitch” and incompletely de-genders them. I won’t jump down someone’s throat for using these words (unless there are other factos that make it worse), but it is worth thinking about how we use them.
The reason that the name migration is mostly one way is that women are at a disadvantage in this society. It’s the same reason women wear pants but men don’t wear dresses. Women want access to the advantages that men have assigned solely to themselves. A gender-neutral name is a kind of signaling of this.
Shel Silverstein captured the flip side of this (and I do mean flip) in A Boy Named Sue, when the titular character tracks down his long-lost father and beats him up and gets an explanation:
In other words, merely having a traditionally feminine name would be such a horrible threat to a man’s life that he’d have to compensate through supremely exaggerated masculine aggression just in order to survive.
The patriarchy harms us all.
Sure, that would make sense if one were consciously choosing a name for themselves (I have female relatives that have gone a similar route as adults, rejecting their birth names). But were parents making that call, especially going back many decades to less enlightened times (say the name Kelly, for example)? Seems unlikely that Bob and Norma Everyday-American in 1970 were naming their baby daughter Kelly as a protest to patriarchal genderism.
The question isn’t why it has been mostly one-way, the question is why at all in the days before people thought much about the importance of gender in language. I mean Joyce started out as a masculine name.
Consider my mind blown. I never knew the Johnny Cash song was a word-for-word version of a poem. 
No, they were naming her Kelly to minimize the damage the patriarchal genderism would do to her. Just as some Black and Asian parents intentionally pick “boring White names” for their kids.
Were they? I just am skeptical of that argument for earlier generations - I wouldn’t think any but academics and intellectuals were allthat consciously cognizant of patriarchal genderism in language in the 1960’s when Kelly was hitting an early peak in popularity for girls. But I’ll admit I might be wrong here…
My mother wanted to be a doctor. But women couldn’t. She wanted to write an honors thesis in college. But the department didn’t want to waste the time of a faculty member supervising a woman. Those were in the 50s. How can you think that women weren’t aware of patriarchal genderism in the 60s?