Bitches or Females: Which do you least like to be called

[Little_Bird]

@Scathach

I think I prefer bitch frankly - at least it seems sort of honest. Bitch is straight up insulting, whereas “female” just seems sort of dehumanising.

Exactly. It’s like someone calling me a female is talking about a creature of a completely different species from themselves, not a human person.

[gallows_fodder]

@by-tor

SciFiSam, do you have a cite to back up your assertion that: “a man who casually refers to females instead of women in everyday conversation tends to also be the kind of man who doesn’t treat women as if they were full humans” ?

Go to reddit.com and have a cite field day!

[kayaker]

Is “babe” cool? It’s a term I tend to use lovingly.

[Lamia]

@Johanna

The German cognate, Weib, still means woman, but it isn’t the usual word any more. Now they say Frau, which originally meant a noblewoman. The plain, basic words for woman sometimes undergo pejoration, a stigma of lower prestige, so that to keep from insulting anyone you have to say “lady.” This is also true in Malay, where wanita (lady) is what they actually call women nowadays, while perempuan is often considered somewhat coarse language. I hope English doesn’t get like that.

I can’t remember the context now and I’m not even sure of the author, but I remember reading something by IIRC Steven Pinker where he pointed out that in English we do frequently use “lady” instead of “woman” to refer to certain types of women who are generally considered to be of low status, such as cleaning ladies and bag ladies. I think his point was that the word “lady”, which isn’t otherwise used that much in American vernacular English, is applied to low status women precisely because their dignity and respectability might otherwise be in doubt.

[Gleena]

http://manboobz.com/ (link somewhat safe for work, no nudity, lots of pointing out the mysogynistic weirdos out there.)

The Mens Rights Activists out there have made the use of ‘female’ to mean bitch an artform.

[Johanna]

Please answer one or the other (not both!) of these polls, so we can see just how accepted the various terms are by the people they’re applied to:

Question for women: Which noun do you prefer to be designated by?

[Question for men: Which noun do you prefer to be designated by?](Question for men: Which noun do you prefer to be designated by?)

[Johanna]

Sorry, I mistyped the one for the lads, so if you’re a bloke please go to this one instead, thanks, guys:

Question for men: Which noun do you prefer to be designated by?

[qualityleashdog]

@panache45

This has to be the dumbest poll we’ve ever had . . . and not entirely grammatical.

Second that. But I really like to use the C-Word, especially when I’m talking about a real bitch. Nothing else seems to satisfy.

[SciFiSam]

@by-tor

SciFiSam, do you have a cite to back up your assertion that: “a man who casually refers to females instead of women in everyday conversation tends to also be the kind of man who doesn’t treat women as if they were full humans” ?

Of course I don’t. How, exactly, would I cite that? Can you cite the opposite? I’m simply speaking from my own experience, and it seems to be in line with the experiences of other women in this thread.

[Johanna]

I have a cite to back up SciFiSam’s assertion: the poll I linked to just above. As it stands, 84% of respondents prefer “woman,” while the vote for “a female” is precisely zero (0).

[by-tor]

That doesn’t prove the assertion but whatever.

[Scathach]

@by-tor

That doesn’t prove the assertion but whatever.

It’s kind of an impossible assertion to prove though right? All that’s been said is that in the experience of several responders here, they find that people who call women females have negative views about women and that therefore they have unpleasant connotations with the word.

Incidentally, it’s mainly something I’ve come across online actually, I’m not sure I’ve ever really seen it in real life, so perhaps the people who are saying that they don’t understand it just haven’t been hanging around in the same places.