Why is Female devolving into a derogatory?

[Sam_Lowry]

I forgot to mention that the term “females” to refer to women does seem to be in some American dialects as a neutral thing. And another commenter said it’s used in the Marines, since a lot of things are more clinically referred to there. There are some exceptions to when “females” is okay to use.

@Shagnasty

I have heard the objections and I think it is a stupid complaint in general. I use the term ‘males’ all the time even on this board and it is just as inoffensive as ‘female’ is. The reason that it isn’t offensive and is often necessary is that there aren’t any other formal terms that are inclusive of either sex that are not also age or class specific. ‘Gentlemen’ or even ‘men’ don’t always fit just like ‘ladies’ and ‘women’ don’t if you are writing about something that applies to all members of the sex from newborns to the elderly. That distinction is important in some contexts, especially biological and medical discussions among many others.

BTW, ‘Female’ can function as either a noun or an adjective. For this type of usage, it is a noun just like the competing terms.

I looked searched for “males” in posts in the board here, and it does seem that some people do say “males” sometimes. It does seem strange linguistically to me, since most of those times people aren’t referring to the full male spectrum of from baby boys to elderly men.

And seeing just “males” or “females” makes me think more of animals. Like from a nature documentary hearing the narrator say “the female is stalking her prey.” Like here is one of your posts where you say males:

@Shagnasty

I always wondered about that too. I am of 100% American Southern descent with deep English, Scottish and some Scandinavian roots. I am either 6’1" or 6"2 depending on the time of day that you measure me. I have always been slightly taller than average but it wasn’t really notable until I moved to the Northeast. I feel like an absolute giant compared to most people here no matter where their ancestors came from (largeky Southern European). However, even the English, Irish and black people aren’t nearly as big as they are in the South. Every time I go back home, I am immediately struck by the fact that I am far from the tallest person around for the first time in a long time. Some of them are just fat and moderately tall but certainly not all of them. The younger males, both black and white just tend to be unusually big compared to people in Boston or NYC.

When I was just scanning down the thread for your post, and saw mention of “the younger males, both black and white” I thought at first you were talking about dogs or something, then I scanned back up and saw that you were talking about men in the Northeast. I’m an engineer, we’re not known for our language skills, but it just reads weird to me.

I know that some people use the term females neutrally, but a lot of people do use it in a derogatory manner. A lot of times it doesn’t seem to be a substitution for “women” or “ladies,” it seems to be a substitution for “bitches.”

And I don’t want to be the final arbiter of language that people use. But if a decent number of people say that they are bothered by a term, even if it doesn’t make sense to me or even seems dumb, I try to do as they ask.

@tapu

This has been discussed for decades in Linguistics. If you’re interested in that aspect, you might search “female lawyer” “lady lawyer” “woman lawyer”.

I want to make it clear, using “female” as an adjective is fine, using “female” or “females” as a noun is what’s off. “Female lawyer”, “female director”, “female students” are fine. But “I was talking to this female, and then…” or “the class was full of females” or something like that is not as good.

And language always evolves. Some terms that were acceptable 50 years ago are now derogatory, and vice versa. Maybe “females” and “males” will become words that can be nouns or adjectives. But for now, it most cases, I’d say it’s not the best choice of word to use for noun.