A few years back I was struggling to use a gadget that was too stiff for me when another woman stopped to help. She struggled too; then she said, ‘men design things for their own strength, don’t they?’ It brought me up short, because I’d never thought of it that way before – but she’s right. And it set me thinking.
It’s not only ‘manly’ gear such as drills and chainsaws that this applies to (though it is annoying to have to grip a ‘hand-held’ sander with both hands in order to stop it going off on its own) – I don’t have particularly small hands for a woman, and yet I have daily struggles with objects that have presumably been designed by men without any thought taken for the 51% of us who might want to use them.
Take my thermos. It’s one of the elegant metal ones that don’t have a breakable interior; it has no handle and is therefore presumably designed to be held in one hand. Yet were I to try this I would risk spattering myself and the library with scalding tea. Oh, sure, I could’ve got one of those nice pink-patterned thermon (I think that’s the correct plural; if I say thermoses OH will have a seizure) but they don’t hold enough tea for any sentient human being to sustain life. And there’s the rub: if you want any deviation from the supposed norm you have to pay extra and get it in pink. So that living in this world as a woman you can come to feel a little bit like Gulliver in Brobdignag.
Kirk out
Sarada Gray 
The nominative plural is θερμοι (thermoi) and accusative is θερμους – thermous. It almost physically pains me to read “thermon” in this context, though that is the accusative singular.
That aside, the gravity and scale of the female world are greater, partly because it’s a male-constructed world. Everything is heavier and usually larger.
I had a feeling that thermon was wrong, but at least I made an effort