this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2024
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Females
I, for the life of me, can't understand why everyone is so concerned about the word.
When I say "male", no one bats an eye. Should I say "female", hell breaks loose.
The word "female" exists along with "male", just the same way "women" exists along with "men". It's just an adjective form. There's no need to overcomplicate it, and no inherent intent to do whatever bad you assume when someone says it.
There are people that use females in all contexts. They use it when women would work better. They mix it with "men". They do not use it in the same context that they would use male. And they use it in a derogatory way.
Sad to know it's happening. Though I must assume it's mostly part of cringey right-wing/incel culture along the lines of "your body, my choice" etc. Do you think it's common enough around Lemmy to justify policing of a very regular word? Or do you think it may serve as a common enough trigger?
I think it is common enough in life to police it everywhere.
You gets it
Yet tbf, people usually say that's a problem when it's used alone as in "females and men" because "nobody says 'males,'" but here she says "females and males."
Personally, if I write a post like this I'd write "women and males" even though it's clunky and awkward, just so the sanctimonious crowd doesn't have shit to say, but she did the thing that people say is fine to do and yet still gets accused of being a ferengi. I know it's exciting to feel like you're better than someone and jump to correcting their behavior but it's possible we're jumping the shark here.
Edit: btw, as per OP's post history, she's a "23yo female with a 76 IQ." Lay off man, jeez!
I'm not in the habit of stalking a poster's history before making a reply. But I looked at OPs profile to confirm what you said. They posted that they want to speak better. They edited the post to say girls instead of females. We can get into the problem of referring to adult women as girls but for now I'll just accept that they saw that there was a need to use anything other than female as a win.
"They edited the post to say girls instead of females."
I didn't do that
Sorry. I stand corrected. I only looked at the title when I made that comment.
Tbh I'm not in that habit either, I had wrote "he" but after I posted I caught the :3 in her uname, so I checked and came back and corrected it. Also, I had a feeling from the writing style she may have been ESL which I was going to mention too if so, but yeah both those reasons are why I checked this time.
As to the rest of it, she's already corrected you that she did not edit the "females" out so I don't have to mention it. Instead I'll mention that A) You had no knowledge of her will to speak better before you were rude to her about her word choice, so you can't claim you were "just trying to help bro" or anything like that, B) if you were trying to "help her speak better" being a dick about it isn't the best way to go. Hell even if you're trying to police a woman on how she speaks about women because you think how she does it is immoral, being nice is a much more effective strategy, "catch more flies with honey" as it were (but for fruit flies use vinegar.)
And apologized.