coward/cowardly/cowardice

nonsexist per se, these terms are almost entirely reserved for men/boys. From the Latin cauda for "tail," "coward" refers to a dog with its tail between its legs. According to Stuart Berg Flexner (Listening to America), "It doesn't seem to be until the 1850s that boys began to taunt each other with being timid, cowardly, or unmanly, perhaps because earlier frontier days had produced fewer such boys, or because now new diversity meant tough frontier and rural youths were meeting some milder boys." Variants on "coward" that are technically inclusive but that are generally applied to men: big baby, chicken, chicken-hearted, chicken-livered, creampuff, featherweight, fraidy cat, gutless, gutless wonder, jellyfish, lily-livered, Miss Nancy, nebbish, pantywaist, pussyfooter, quitter, rabbit, shirker, sissy, softie, spineless, traitor, twerp, weakling, weenie, wimp, worm, wuss/wussy, yellow/yellow-bellied/yellow-bellied coward. Try to describe the actual situation. The man may be called a coward because he opposes violence, killing, or war.