social justice league chats
Daily Chat Thread, Partie XV: Suffering Sappho

So for a while, I noticed a tendency amongst Sapiens—including women!—to refer to female people as ‘girls.’ Not exclusively adolescents or children—mature women. It’s not just a gringo mistake either, because in our languages we say chicas, filles, ragazze (or, sometimes, bambine), and garotas. I can kind of understand blokes doing this since a lot of them fetishize youth, but women too? Why? I find it extremely unattractive, same with calling somebody ‘babe’ or ‘baby.’ (And on that note, how frequently do you hear somebody call others ‘babies’ unless it’s an insult?)
Quote of the day:




It's not just 'girls'. When kids are young, boys will want to be kings and girls princesses. Men with grey hair are distinguished. Women with grey hair are old. It's a whole thing around women aging. And don't get me started on how many fucking creams there are to get rid of wrinkles -- just marketed to women. Men can keep their wrinkles. Women can't dare show that they laugh every now and then.
Yeah. The way I live my life means I don't tend to see a lot of advertising so now I'm with my parents for the summer, who, y'know, have a television, I've suddenly seen a lot of advertisements, and it just stands out so much how they go out of their way to create these artificial and superficial needs, especially for women. "You are allowed to laugh again if you buy this cream, because it supposedly prevents wrinkles no matter if you use your face like a human being! Buy our product! Don't you want to be allowed to laugh?"
I was at the drug store the other day, and there was a giant woman's face right in front of me covered in words where wrinkles could possibly appear. Laugh, worry, frown, concern, smoke... etc. WHO THE HELL CARES. From now on, women, look like zombies so that you don't actually develop the dreaded wrinkle that might make you look like you had a human emotion at any point in time in your life.
Ooh! Something like this happened to me just as I was walking in the door coming home from work. Family had the TV on, and not one, but TWO commercials for this medical center dedicated entirely to treating erectile dysfunction played in rapid succession. Advertising for it has absolutely saturated all forms of media in my state.
The ads emphasize just how utterly apocalyptic an inability to sexually perform is, and one comes right out and states that an inability to get a boner can destroy your relationship. It's probably the most blatant example I've ever seen of the societal expectation that men be virile and ready to stick their dicks in something at a moment's notice.
ETA: And not only are these expectations unfair to men, but it's a slap in the face to women when ED is treated like a national health crisis, while more serious afflictions that primarily affect women and are much more costly to treat are ignored.
I'm not making an excuse, but to offer another possible explanation, I've found myself saying "girls" because "women" just feels too old. I'm 19, and I don't feel old enough that my peers would be "women." Of course, that's not really true; "women" is a dignified and professional sounding word and should be used over "girls" pretty much any time (except in like, pop music), and I'm trying to adjust that in my speech. But I imagine that's part of the reason for other people as well.
I really wish there were a good, casual word to refer to women that's equivalent to "guys." "Gals" sounds old time-y, "girls" sounds juvenile, and "women" sounds overly formal. That would be like walking up to a group of male friends and saying, "hey men, what do you want to do today?" But yeah, "women" is definitely the way to go, at least in today's English.
This pretty much. Why is there no equivalent to"guys"?
gals?
It may be worth noting that ‘gal’ was originally an alternative form of ‘girl’, but it seems like we don’t usually notice that. Still, I can imagine somebody calling me a hypocrite.
It is a difficult question for modern English. There’re many words to describe female adults, but none of them sound perfectly neutral. ‘Female’ sounds dehumanizing (when substantive), ‘Goddess’ sounds very affectionate or intimate, ‘lady’ could come across as overly formal (or archaic), ‘she’ sounds weird as a common noun, and ‘frau’ and ‘Jane’ are rare. There’s also a wide variety of impolite terms, but I wouldn’t use any of them for anybody unless she wanted me to.
When in doubt, I would just use ‘woman.’ I’ve seen some female supremacists and archaic feminists respell the word to distance it from ‘man’, but most bipeds would laugh at me if I did that.