Meh, as you wish.
Except for all the women talking to you now.
I got in trouble for this once from a micromanaging boss I hated, and I think my hatred for that boss overrides my other feelings about this issue. I remarked to a client that such - and - such coworker was “a nice girl.” She was all of 23 and I wasn’t much older. That horrible lady corrected me for it and I was so mad. I asked my coworker what she thought and it didn’t bother her.
All of which is to say, some women find it offensive, others don’t, but you never know which one you’re dealing with, so it’s best to be polite and not do it. “Ladies” is a perfectly acceptable alternative.
Yes, i have. You seem to assume things about my manner of speaking to people is harassment. If so I take offense to that.
Well, mostly if you also call the men “gentlemen”.
I’m saying that the specific wording you’ve said you’re using is likely to be taken by some people as denigrating. You are free to take offense. So are they, and they may do so without telling you about it.
Ah. I understand why that would be confusing. It might be helpful if I quote the post that states what I’m describing most clearly:
You thus took two ideas, that (1) calling an adult “girl” is disrespectfully sexist and (2) that some (common) definitions of hate speech include disrespectfully sexist comments, and treated that like a math equation to get (3) Some people will consider using “girl” to be hate speech.
My point is that the two statements are not like equations, but will include some level of overreach due to being descriptions of social phenomena They won’t perfectly map onto each other. Hence why you’re finding that most people say that “girl” is not hate speech.
I’m suggesting that, instead of trying to synthesize ideas from two different points, you take a step back and look at the overarching logic. Why is hate speech bad? And why do people assume “girls” is sexist? If you do, I think you get a closer idea of what people would say.
I’ve seen you make these sorts of logical leaps before. You find two different pieces of true information, and then use them to synthesize new information that connects them both. This isn’t wrong, per se, but it can lead to some bad conclusions if you don’t also look at the bigger picture.
It’s not like math where you can take two true statements and logically deduce a third true statement. Social issues are more messy than that.
I hope that makes more sense.
(I do, BTW, love that you asked instead of just assuming your were correct. Sanity checks are always good, especially by asking people with more real world experience. That’s a lesson I had to learn when I first got to the SDMB.)
That reminds me of something that happened on Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. Fred has a song where he sings that “a girl may be someday a woman, and a boy may be someday a man.” His previous version used “lady” for “woman,” and his feminist costars (including one Betty “Lady” Aberlin) insisted that not every woman wanted to be a “lady”, associating it with certain gender roles of how a “proper lady” should be. It took a little while, but he eventually changed it so that they were the same level of terms.
http://www.neighborhoodarchive.com/music/songs/what_do_you_do.html
(I learned the reason for the change from Ms. Aberlin herself during the Twitch stream that played every Neighborhood episode. It was interesting hearing someone talk about Mr. Rogers as a proper person who you might actually have disagreements with or might have a bad day.)
Well summarized.
I think both of you are inadvertently mixing up a parental perspective, in which your own offspring are always on some level “the kids” to you no matter how elderly and white-haired they become, with your role as a stranger dealing with an adult female worker who is entitled to adult dignity and respect.
No matter how much older you are than some adult female stranger you encounter in any kind of public/formal/business setting, it’s by default inappropriate and patronizing to refer to her as a “girl”. Even if you aren’t deliberately trying to sound sexist or patronizing or disparaging, you can’t change the fact that it comes across that way.
It’s true that a lot of older men tend to cling to older patronizing/paternalistic ways of speaking to or about women, especially young women, in almost all contexts, as a way to reassure themselves or persuade other people that they still have superior male authority and status despite their age. But they shouldn’t be puffing up their own self-image at the expense of the adult dignity and respect owed to fellow adults, no matter how much younger they may be. Don’t be those guys.
Aha, I understand what you’re saying now. Yes, I agree with your explanation.
~Max
I wonder if Bootb or Si_Amigo might concede that calling adult female strangers ‘girls’ because of an age gap is patronizing.
~Max
Having not actually read the thread before I posted I may have started shooting from the hip since I had actually just came from an opticians office that was being manned (not girled) by 3 rather young females. 
Of course i do not go around calling every female I meet a girl. I work with many professional women who are both below and above my pay grade and status, referring to them as girls never crosses my mind.
As for social situations with strangers it is not always a straight go to response. Like sometimes l call a worker by her name if she is wearing a tag or introduces herself by name and if we start having a back and forth conversation I may thrown in the word girl in the conversation. I do not apologize for that as it us not patronizing to be yourself and speak freely. People are free to be people and speak in a manner that is appropriate forp the situation.
The fact that you feel like saying something doesn’t make it not patronizing. And your ideas as to what’s appropriate for the situation do not determine what’s actually appropriate for the situation.
That’s not a social situation. That’s a work situation.
I agree that calling adult women “girls” isn’t hate speech. In most circumstances it’s rude, condescending, and inappropriate; but it isn’t hate speech. And it’s all right in certain specific social contexts – mostly within families or among close friends, and when applied by members of an in-group to themselves.
I do not think that “girls” is “hate speech” in any kind of way and roll my eyes at the thought, but this statement is idiotic. What you are saying makes it patronizing or not, just because an old man says something doesn’t mean therefore it’s ok.
Thank you thorny, exactly my thought. Especially in a profesional setting, it’s almost always better to use an entirely gender neutral term. Dear colleagues, Hello Everybody, etc.
This tends to be more difficult for somebody who grew up speaking a gendered language. In German the default is Damen under Herren, which is translated directly to Ladies and Gentlemen.
Only one of my male coworkers uses girls to refer to his female coworkers. The others never did it. At least, not in my hearing.
Of course it’s patronizing if you’re (general, not specific “you”) being your patronizing self and speaking freely. “Speaking freely” is never an excuse for patronizing people.
Agreed that people are free to be people, since we don’t really have a choice in the matter. However, assuming using a term like “girls” is appropriate because the women in question don’t object to your face or because you’re just being yourself is pretty shaky logic and indicates you have some learning to do. I hope you’re open to doing so.
I think the usage of “girls” quoted in the OP is clearly minimizing and derogatory, but does not appear intended to incite violence. So, is it hate speech? Depends on the definition you use.
The UN recently used this definition: “the term hate speech is understood as any kind of communication in speech, writing or behaviour, that attacks or uses pejorative or discriminatory language with reference to a person or a group on the basis of who they are” which would include the quote.
Cambridge Dictionary defines it as “public speech that expresses hate or encourages violence towards a person or group” which I think would not include the quote.
Only one person in that original thread ever called it hate speech, and others either let it go by without commenting, or disagreed with it and explained why. I’m not sure why this thread was even started. It’s a non-issue.
Because @Max_S likes to present shades-of-gray social issues as black-and-white problems of reductive formal logic.
I’m not accusing him of bad faith here, just of having a rather perplexing hobby.
There’s a lot of things that I read here where I’m thinking to myself, wait, does anybody actually believe that? am I completely out of touch with the rest of the board?
This time I just said, oh, what the heck I’ll make a poll. Well, we have the poll and what, maybe 7 or 8 out of 67 respondents said “yes, it is reasonable to presume that’s hate speech”.
~Max
I think it’s rude, infantilizing, sexist and, as BigT said, a clear microaggression.
But it takes more than that to make something hate speech, and IMO this doesn’t rise to that level.
Your choices are weighted. The “No” condition implies it could still be hate speech, and it’s possible somebody feels the quote doesn’t fill that criteria at all.
It reminds me of Trump’s “How am I doing” poll, where the choices are Outstanding, Very Good and Good.