No, that’s US Defaultism, fuck off with that shit.

Here it’s all cousin fucking and alcoholism.

I was going to point out the BMW Propeller but apparently it’s a myth from 1929 and now my day is ruined.

Gendered articles, like all things relating to grammatical gender, can be useful to reduce ambiguity and therefore increase information density/redundancy. They’re basically the Roman languages’ way of retaining the usefulness of Latin cases without actual grammatical cases.

“Ami” and “amie” are homophones in French (with some accents you might see /ami/ vs /ami:/, but in casual speech you’d likely miss it anyway). However “un ami” is different from “une amie”.

So in French you’d say “hier je suis sorti avec une amie” which, to convey the same level of detail in English, requires a translation like “yesterday I went out with a female friend”.