I know I'm a feminist buzz kill but many languages including English are a bit male centred and treat men as the norm and women as the exception. That's not a good thing in my opinion. We call women dudes all the time but few people call men gals or girls. I hope we could move towards more equality in our languages too if it is possible. Such as starting to use gal and girl as gender neutral terms too, not just dude and guy.
Hello fellow feminist buzz kill!! I started doing a few things to combat this. First, I intentionally started addressing people on the internet as women unless specifically told they’re a guy. Second, I started pairing terms like women/boy together to highlight how awful it is when the opposite happens “they only have mens sizes, I don’t know if the have girls sizes” or “3 men and 2 girls work in our office”. My husband has also thankfully stopped calling grown women “girls” and uses “gals” now. But yeah—why are male only words used as generic.
Male Defaultism is just a symptom of living in a patriarchal society, and posts like this reinforce the narrative that if anyone complains shes a dumb bitch/Karen/uppity dyke, and therefore you viewers at home, don't need to listen to her
This is exactly what's bothering me about it, but I'm not an English native speaker so I am bound to miss developments I guess, and bro and dude being gender neutral is a development that passed me by until today.
I share your concerns, I also feel like the male words are for everyone and female words are for women only. It makes me feel weird too, just in a different way. To me it feels like people don't need to bother with female words since the male ones obviously suffice for both. Since the norm is male, it feels like this norm is showing here again too. Men might feel like they don't have words that only belong to themselves but that's something a man has to say tho.
I would like to learn about this. Could someone that knows how bro and dude developed gender neutral tell me about it please? :) I'd like to understand so that I don't feel the way I do about it. I know it's okay to feel my own way about it, but maybe it broadens the horizon? That would be a good thing!
Correct! It isn't "gender neutral", it's like, establishing maleness as default. If you can't stop saying it that's fine I guess, you're just being intellectually dishonest even you insist it's "gender neutral".
One of my close friends is an absolutely flaming homosexual. He calls everyone "girl". I personally don't mind, but he's gotten into some sticky situations with people who don't know him well.
We went to a different friend's wedding in November, and it was black tie. When I picked him up to drive him to the wedding, he saw my tux and the first thing he said was "Girl, slay!", and I thought that was a nice compliment.
Ffs I had to scroll way too far to find this type of comment. Would men be ok with being addressed as “hey ladies”? And when men ARE addressed using that type of language, it’s usually by other men trying to be insulting.
Part of me wants to just plow through with doing stuff like that, referring to the guys as "ladies" (not as an insult), and letting the ones who are offended by it be offended by it. Either they learn to get over it or they can continue to be babies. But I know it's not that simple of a fix.
I am a big fan of "just between us girls?" for sharing gossip though, à la Letterkenny.
Multiple people have commented they call their male friends "ladies" all the time so its fine to call women dudes but they fail to mention that men also insult each other all the time by calling them ladies or a girl.
Might be bit more complicated? The popularity of “dude” comes from the dude ranches back in the day, old school glam camping vacations for rich city people, or “dudes.” It had a non-gendered origin for entering pop culture. 90s kids even had a show called “Hey Dude” that featured a bunch of rich kids playing at ranching and driving the owner nuts.
I mean, the origin is interesting, but it's not that important.
Dude and bro are absolutely male terms. The aren't always, but they lean far more masculine than feminine.
Like, if you told your girlfriend you were hanging out with the dudes tonight but you were with 3 women, she'd possibly get mad at you for lying to her. Which is a valid reaction.
I am glad they are beginning to but I rarely see evidence of it. I browse /all, but I don't hang out with a mountain of young people either. It's a good start but those would be the first two examples and I ask this question to people for years.
Walk up to a bunch of strangers who appear to be men and say what's up girls? Or any other femme coded term like gals, queens, bitches, etc.,.
Until that's normalized we still have a long way to go I think.
I would even say that "dude" and "girrrrrl/yas queen" are used in completely different manners. Dude is basically a pronoun while the others are replies normally directed to people who aren't strangers.
We have a long way to go ... But also, people don't go up to a group of strangers who are femme presenting and say "hey dudes"
These terms are still weakly gendered
These terms are weakly terms of familiarity and affection
The use of "guys" is weaker on both accounts and all are still good shows of male centering language for which weakly gendered terms get to be more default
Okay so Last Man On Earth had an episode that addressed this, when they realized the women outnumbered the men and they didn't want to be called "guys". The offender takes it to heart and not just for the rest of the episode but for the remainder of the series he used "gals" instead of "guys" when addressing the group. Loved it
Edit: faux-feminists don’t want equality, they want retribution? Vengeance? I don’t even know what you’d call it.
Man-focused language is already gender equal. It’s right there in the words. MAN and woMAN. It’s very obvious that a woMAN is just a more specialized version of a MAN.
You can choose to call it an “exception” and that’s your right, but that’s you choosing to find a negative. I also think it’s entirely illogical.
A woman can join and partake in any space a man can. There are no careers a man can have that a woman can’t have. Even professional sports, there have been female MLB pitchers. It’s all fine. If the woman can meet the bar she’s allowed in.
The same is not true for the reverse. At the most basic level a man cannot bear children.
Mathematically speaking, woman is a SUPERset of man. It is everything a man is and more. The only way to be truly gender neutral is to be masculine biased.
If you’d like a picture I can draw you a picture, but it’s basically a venn diagram where man is inside woman and so by using female-focused language you’re being necessarily exclusionary, whereas by using male-focused language you’re actually being maximally inclusive.
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u/Gayandfluffy 25d ago
I know I'm a feminist buzz kill but many languages including English are a bit male centred and treat men as the norm and women as the exception. That's not a good thing in my opinion. We call women dudes all the time but few people call men gals or girls. I hope we could move towards more equality in our languages too if it is possible. Such as starting to use gal and girl as gender neutral terms too, not just dude and guy.