Gender-neutral language and storytelling

Today, I saw this blog post about dogs and smurfs. It discusses how stories about women are often viewed as stories for women, rather than stories for people to read, and it suggests this has to do with our language, in which we usually assume that unknown people or creatures are male, as well as a kind of tokenism, where in most children's stories, the main group of protagonists contains only one girl, and her main character trait is that she is a girl.

I've believed for some time that our language shapes our thinking. We hear "he" often enough and we come to assume "he" ourselves. We don't have a gender-neutral pronoun in "proper" English.

Now, for some time, I've assumed that it must be a worse problem in languages like Spanish and French. The very nouns are masculine and feminine. How does it affect you to hear that this object is masculine, and that one is feminine? If the language sticks objects into a male/female category, wouldn't that make it harder on some subconscious level to break yourself out of male/female stereotypical behavior?

But then I read some of the comments following that blog post, and saw people from France and Iceland saying that in their native languages, they have stories about different kinds of creatures, and the different creatures have different default-gender implications. So they get a broader spread of female and male protagonists in their children's stories, where the turtle is generally a girl, in keeping with the femininity of the noun for "turtle", or the gorilla is a boy.

Here in the English-speaking land, we don't assume a gender via our nouns, and then the result is that we just assume everything defaults to male, and our stories come out weighted with a male population. Which I believe feeds into hesitancy and underconfidence in many women whose favorite childhood female role models always follow the lead of the (male) hero/prince/leader in the end.

Serves me right for assuming things about other cultures without talking to natives about it.

I'm still jealous of Japanese and its ability to comfortably refer to someone as "that person" instead of "he" or "she", though.