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Notes -
Is it associated with misogyny, or is it associated with accusations of misogyny?
Who has produced and maintained this association? As far as I can tell, it's the same people who would find it convenient if those using the phrase "adult human female" were tainted by association with misogyny and whose claims could be safely ignored on that basis.
"Female" is allegedly misogynistic in certain contexts, specifically those where you would say "woman" or even "girl", or if the genders were swapped wouldn't say "male", especially when there's already ambiguously implied misogyny.
Because we refer to animals generically as males and females (although there are specific words for some animals like "cow" and "bull", other animals like mice or fish), while we have specific words for humans, "man" and "woman". Also, incels at least used to frequently use the term while most people do infrequently.
For example, "my cousin is a cool female, you should meet her", "I met a nice female at work the other day", "I like to hang out at that cafe because of all the females". Personally, I think those do sound creepy and imply depersonalization, like the "female" is an exotic species whose main characteristic is sex appeal. I wouldn't call out someone, maybe they're autistic, but would (subconsciously) pay more attention to other signs they think like that.
But when talking about biology, or used as an adjective where gender is relevant, it's OK at least to anyone reasonable. "The disease only affects females", "not 'he', the bus driver is female". Women are no less human than men, which means they are beings capable of reason and complex emotion etc.; but humans are ultimately still sexually dimorphic animals.
"My cousin is cool; you should meet her." is the "normal" way to say this sentence and conveys the gender; straight substitution of "woman" sounds similarly odd in place of "female".
"I met a nice woman at work the other day" does sound more natural to me when "woman" is substituted, and I take your point that it sounds at least a bit odd with "female" used here as a noun. I'm not sure why I should assume misogyny, though; none was conveyed.
"I like to hang out at that cafe because of all the females" is creepy for reasons entirely unrelated to diction, and I suspect you'd side-eye someone who told you, "I like to hang out at that cafe because of all the women" in much the same way. In fact, the value judgment you make in the next sentence accrues here with "women" in place just as strongly!
I think we're on the same page as far as how the flow of things sound when "female" is used as a noun (vs. an adjective), and this seems like an apt place to point out that "woman" has usurped (!) the use of "female" as an adjective in quite a few places despite (to my ears) sounding far clunkier. "Woman doctor" and "woman engineer" don't exactly roll off the tongue, and my brain goes "noun -> noun" internally every time I hear them...and yet, I have never once heard misogyny attributed to their speakers! I think what I'm trying to say is that both words are used validly as nouns and adjectives when referring to humans, we have aesthetic tastes for when a sentence flows and when it doesn't, and it doesn't make much sense to me to assume anything about the speaker's intent (edit: or beliefs).
I mean, I agree; I'm just not sure how this applies.
In old fashioned British English, "lady doctor" was idiomatic. It fell out of use alongside all non-fossilised uses of "lady" (we still have ladies' toilets and begin formal speeches with "Ladies and Gentlemen") around the time it became acceptable to speak in Estuary English on BBC news bulletins. My experience is that if you talk about a "woman doctor" you will be accused of sexism regardless of the words you use - she's just a doctor after all. (There is the obvious exception if you are doing feminist activism. They use people-first language and talk about "women in medicine".)
Yeah, I also just always called them "doctors", which probably added to how jarring "women doctors" sounded to me. Somehow, the latter became the "socially conscious" verbiage, though it seems counterproductive to highlight it.
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There's a few reasons:
English is in a rough spot where the simplest way to say "a person who's a woman or a girl but age doesn't matter" is "a female", and yet the simplest way to say "an animal who's got the larger gametes but species doesn't matter" is also "a female". Connotations from the latter use case leak over to the former and make it sound dehumanizing.
In your "met a nice female at work" context, as in many others, the "age doesn't matter" use case would be a bit creepy too!
Talking about "males" and "females" is a natural way to discuss gender differences that are meaningful regardless of age. But normal people think that such a discussion is at least risky if not inherently problematic, so the people who discuss it anyway are more likely to be weirdos who want to analyze everything (i.e. mostly men) and who have ingroup bias (i.e. everyone, but "mostly men" means mostly the ingroup is men), so at one end of the range you've got people trying overcome their biases but at the other you've got outright misogyists.
This Star Trek episode was just the first of several in TNG and countless in DS9 to make "female"-as-noun a major verbal tic of the Ferengi race. It may seem silly to list this, but are probably a few tens of millions of people, disproportionately including the types who love to come up with linguistic norms, to whom the noun "fe-male" sounds like it should be read in that accent and with that attitude.
I'm not thrilled by any of this - my favorite author is Heinlein, who often uses "male" and "female" as nouns via category 3, maybe 75% of the way towards the "trying to overcome [his] biases" end of that range - but I can understand it.
No? ‘Girl’ implies unmarried, but referring to a woman as a ‘girl’ would be uncontroversial and normal outside of liberal bubbles, and ‘lady’ is a perfectly normal polite term to refer to a random woman or girl in third person. ‘That lady waiting in the cafe’.
I think calling an adult woman a "girl" is now restricted to dating and sex-related contexts (including sex work-adjacent jobs like Hooters "girls")
It is quite normal to refer to ‘the girls in the office’ referring to secretaries and the like in my dialect, or ‘girls trip’/ ‘girls night’.
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For #1 (& #2), I guess I just don't quite get how baggage a word picked up when someone else used it is supposed to be the preferred interpretation for how I used it when the context for how I used the word is present, unless I uttered some sentence in isolation to a stranger (or I work at a middle school or something, in which case that's more than a bit creepy).
For #3, it's not established at all that the people with ingroup bias wouldn't alter their language to use "woman" in the noun case but keep the bias (clever
girl!), so in practice it ends up being the people more likely to be weirdos who want to analyze everything (i.e. mostlymenmembers of this forum) catching an accusation of misogyny by association. I'm sure some ingroup-biased individuals are also among those using "female" as a noun, but if both groups contain this element, why are the people who insist on using "woman" not also tainted by association with those among them with ingroup bias? What I'm trying to point out is that normal people didn't spring forth from the womb1 with this belief, and the noun use of "female" clearly used to be widespread based on published works of the past, so where did the association between the two come from? As best I can tell—and I am not about to wade through the sewage that passes for sociolinguistics literature to attempt to track it down—it got memed into existence as a tool of social ostracization. Now, that is certainly a flex, but I'm choosing to respond to that flex by giving it the finger2.I'm not sure what to say about #4 except that I haven't seen any of the Ferengi episodes, and I kind of doubt that very many of the people who come up with this stuff have either.
1Perhaps we could figure out a word to refer to people bearing wombs?
2Thus qualifying myself as a
weirdo who wants to analyze everythingmember of this forum :)I would say 100% of the people involved in the Geek Feminism lamewar were aware of the Ferengi connection. I don't know how much of the wide conversation about calling women "females" has passed through that filter, although I first came across it in the Geek Feminism context.
Ah, I was thinking about the wider conversation when I doubted the proportions; seems we were evaluating two different groups.
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It doesn't help that when I hear "female" in a non-technical context I immediately picture in my head a Ferengi talking about "fe-male hu-mons".
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Somewhat ironically, this sort of "'female' is misogynistic" declaration by fiat is a microaggression against recent immigrants for whom English is a second language, since referring to some individual as "a female" or "a male" is a natural way to translate from the original language (e.g. Korean, in my experience). And, symmetrically, someone who's still learning English and just doesn't know any better would be committing a microaggression against the types of feminists who consider such usage misogynistic.
Of course, intersectional social justice demands that, on the oppression totem pole, women who complain about this sort of this stuff are placed above recent immigrants and autists.
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Funnily enough, both my wife and my mother have used female in this context. I had to explain to both of them that it sounded weird. Bless their hearts for not being up to date on what they're supposed to be offended by.
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They call them "foids" now.
I also find the idea of trans activists complaining that it's creepy to use the word "female" as a noun more than a little rich, given the changes to the vernacular they demand of the rest of us. Women may not like being referred to as females, but I can't imagine they like it less than being referred to as "menstruators", "birthing parents" or "chestfeeders" (each of which has a "bonus hole").
As RJ Fletcher wisely advised, never call chicks broads.
Indeed; they prefer the long ball.
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