Why I Don’t Want You To Call Me ‘Girl’
Is this the society men want their daughters to grow up in?
By Paget Norton
It started with a disagreement. My feminist husband insisted that “girl” was the same as “guy.” I said it wasn’t. My 6-year-old son chimed in. He didn’t like the word “woman” because it sounded like a monster. They were no help at all. Add the fact I have often been known to call a group of people “you guys,” and hang out with the “girls,” and I wondered if I was fighting the losing fight. Isn’t it all just semantics? Or is it?
Why is it that a group of women in their thirties can be referred to as “girls”? What is the difference between a group of 6-year-old girls and a group of mothers? The pre-pubescent, the teenagers, the post-college women, peri-menopausal women . . . how is it that they can be called “girls”? Am I just nit-picking? And why don’t I hear other people talking about a group of 40-year-old men as “boys”? Or, “I’m dating this 35-year-old boy” — unless a man is truly acting juvenile.
Why should we care? The answer is simple. Is this the society you want your daughters to grow up in? What about your mothers and partners and sisters?
In a previous piece I wrote called “Soul Pancake Viral Video Gets Many Things Right and a Few Key Pieces Wrong,” I…
