It wasn't until I was on the receiving end that I noticed how subtle disparaging language could be. Several years ago, my two roommates and I were hanging around, killing time. At one point during the conversation, one of my roommates addressed me as "kid," and my other roommate as "a guy." I do not recall the context, although I am sure that he did not consciously mean to belittle me. Still, as someone who crossed the five-foot barrier seemingly decades after everyone else around me, the words stuck.
From that point on, I have been determined not to minimize anyone else in the way I felt that day. The words "boy" and "girl" have been an anathema to me, unless they are being applied to an 8-year-old.
This brings me to an incident from a few days ago. Some friends of mine were going out clubbing, and one of these friends was using the word "girls" as often as if it were the noise that accompanied the standard breathing process. Now, this friend of mine is no misogynist, but if he kept up this word repetition around any "girls" that night, he should not have been too surprised to see a plethora of raised eyebrows.
My point is not to mock him; I wish to derive from that story the notion that many of us, especially men, can be unwittingly coarse in our language. I do not feel that the reason for this is anything more complex than the simple fact that males have a median term that falls between "boy" and "man," that being the intermediate "guy."
Women, on the other hand, do not. Unfortunately, society has decided that until a female can show beyond all doubt that she is an adult woman, she is to be deemed a girl. For some men, this requires the woman to become aged and unattractive to him. The male dependence on the word "girl" also implies, true or not, that for a woman to be attractive, she must also be subordinate to the assumed "man" speaking to her.
This is a good time for me to state that I was not raised in a feminist or even feminine household. My mother, the only woman in the family, did not raise me to think my gender was responsible for all suffering in the world. We bond most often when discussing the New York Mets, and how ungodly they will be this year, each of us matching the other tit-for-tat in profanity. When my brother and I are home, we will yell at her in jest to make dinner, do the laundry, be seen and not heard, etc. Please note the phrase "in jest." As for my educational experience, I have had only one professor who described herself as a feminist. I have also dropped a class after another professor complained "a man" controlled the works of Emily Dickinson. She did not go on to say why this person should not own these works, other than that he possessed the wrong set of genitals.
I believe in giving people the benefit of the doubt when it comes to respect. If I am asked to describe a female friend, acquaintance, co-worker or even person across the street, I use the term woman. It is not even a minor encumbrance to me, but it could eliminate any possibility of offense, and that is a pretty good bargain for substituting one word in my vocabulary.
This is not a feminist idea; rather this is one based on common courtesy. Someone who is independent deserves to have another person's utmost respect, and a woman who is putting herself through college is certainly that. Until you discover she is not independent, refer to her as a woman. Afterward, keep referring to her as a woman, anyway.
Seeing as how I am still largely dependant on my parents' income for my education and lifestyle, I would not call myself a man - but being called a boy would surely offend me. Luckily for me, I can fall back on the all-male encompassing term "guy." Women do not have that luxury. So how about giving the word "woman" a chance? The very worst that could happen is that the metaphoric forehead slope you possess may straighten out a bit.
Photo: Meredith Forrest Kulwicki
