Girls, Girls, Girls
What to call us? We can decide for ourselves
BUSTLE called it — what else? — “problematic.” Digital magazine “Everyday Feminism” went with “sexist as hell.” I’m referring, of course, to the language crime of calling women “girls.”
Recently, Mayim Bialik, star of the TV show “Big Bang Theory,” released a viral video where she implored people to stop using “girl” to describe women. Bialik, generally one of the more thoughtful and less obnoxious Hollywood celebrities, kicks off the video saying she’s going to be annoying — and fully delivers. Bialik says calling women “girls” implies that they’re inferior to men and “we never call men boys.” Really? Two years ago, at a Park Slope bar, a crowd of late 30s urban-living, mostly white liberals went nuts when Missy Elliott’s 2002 smash hit “Work it” came on. “Work it” was back on the billboard charts thanks to Elliott’s performance at the Super Bowl halftime show that year. “Boys, boys, all type of boys/black, white, Puerto Rican, Chinese boys” sang the drunken crowd. Not one person paused and said, “Wait a minute, doesn’t she mean ‘men’ not boys?”
There are a million other examples in popular music. Taylor Swift has songs named “American Boy” and “Stupid Boy,” Nicki Minaj sings “The Boys,” Adele has “I Found a Boy,” while Beyoncé tells us what she would be like “If I Were a Boy.” Britney Spears has an ode to males called, yes, “Boys.” In the 1970s, Joni Mitchell sang about a “Strange Boy” who had been to war.
We refer to men as “boys” constantly and as “guy” or “dude” even more often. Not only do we use “boys” often, but it’s specifically the ones we covet that we call “boy.”
“I’m also just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her” said Julia Roberts to Hugh Grant in the romantic comedy “Notting Hill.” Not just a girl standing in front of a man, but a boy, the boy she wanted.
Bialik says that some women use “girl” because they “don’t mind being diminutive” and they think women should be delicate and men should be in charge. But that’s not it at all. If there’s a societal lesson to be drawn from women who call themselves “girl,” it’s not to be subservient; it’s to seem younger.
Fact is, language changes, and our reference to women as “girls” or men as “boys” or “guys” often suggests someone’s our own age. “Women” or “men” convey those older than us. Here’s a quick guide: When a friend mentions “that woman at the bank,” she’s probably older than you; when that same friend refers to “this guy at work,” the dude’s likely the same age or younger.
Maybe there’s an argument to be made about the language we use and our obsession with youth, but in 2017, in a society where girls are told frequently they can do and be anything, there’s no segment of the American population that is rearing its girls to be submissive to males in the way Bialik suggests.
I happen to prefer being referred to as “girl” as opposed to “woman” and it has nothing to do with me being deferential to boys. Certainly Lena Dunham’s HBO show “Girls” isn’t trying to portray women as delicate flowers acquiescing to men. “Golden Girls” wasn’t a show about obedient women. The “girl power” of the 1990s wasn’t about anything but female strength.
Everyone has potential to get sensitive about the language used to describe them. I’ve written in these pages about how I don’t enjoy when people to whom I did not give birth call me “mom.” But I also noted that no one meant me offense, they just didn’t know what to call me and so defaulted to something I find awkward.
Unless we’re planning to walk around and get everyone’s preferred descriptors in advance, we have to start letting it go.
Let it all go. Don’t turn everything into a grievance to launch a thousand think pieces. Give people the benefit of the doubt that they’re not infantilizing women or attacking womanhood. Stop making everything problematic.
I’m just a girl, standing in front of girls and boys, asking you to please stop it.