BobLibDem— Doper, please. :rolleyes: No freakin way.
I mean, it all depends on the intent of the person asking! If someone is asking me “How do I ask a female out?” My eyebrow immediately shoots up. A female? A female what? A female elf?
If someone asks me “How do I ask a girl out?” I am not bothered at all because the very question speaks of a bit of vulnerability and so the speaker is putting himself at the same level as the girl.
But hearing “The girls and the men” really irks me, and I’ve heard this in a professional context.
How about “the women and the boys”? That’s just as condescending.
And if my best friend comes up to me and says “Hey, biyotch! What up!” I’m going to respond with some equally silly slang.
But when the mechanic refers me as “hon” (which I have not gotten for a long, long time), it irritates me because I know he’s probably going to start in acting like I don’t know jack shit about my car.
But when someone says “Mika is a ____”. I prefer woman to girl.
I still prefer “girl” to “hobag” though. 
I pretty much always, regardless of gender, approach my friends with “What’s up, bitches?” Hmm, this might explain why I don’t have many friends.
I very recently encountered this dilemma while writing a somewhat formal thank you letter. I had contact information for one person, a man, but wanted to thank a few other men and one woman, whose names I never caught. I finally settled on, “Please be sure to pass along my thanks to the other gentlemen and lady who were present …”
I guess I feel like woman is cool in everyday conversation, but lady just seems more polite and formal to me. I hope I’m not out of date.
What’s up with so many votes for guy? There are very few contexts in which I’d be okay with being called that. Like others here, in plural form I’m okay with chick friends and I being referred to as “you guys” (yous guys, if you’re in Philly), and I will at times refer to myself as the good guy in a situation, or maybe the bad guy if I’m wrong, but I don’t ever want to be referred to as “that guy.”
Guy is (originally) a 17th-century Catholic terrorist in the Reformation wars. Whose face has weirdly been appropriated by anarchists today so as to almost become as widespread as his first name amongst the entire English-speaking planet.
I feel like *lady *is almost as cool as woman. Although in some languages, usage has changed so the regular old word for ‘woman’ has to be replaced with the word for ‘lady’. E.g. in Malay, it isn’t polite any more to say perempuan (a native Austronesian word); you have to say wanita (‘lady’ loanword from Sanskrit, because prestige vocabulary is mostly Sanskrit) every time. I definitely don’t want *lady *to become mandatory.
I thought maybe that was the option for us guys who just wanted to see the poll results, since the question is directed to women only.
Lame excuse. You don’t have to vote to see the results.