Here’s my two cents. It’s hard for people to keep up with the euphemism treadmill. There was a time when the word “female” didn’t have the negative connotation that it does now mostly thanks to co-opting by incels. It should also be stated that the word “male” doesn’t have the same negative connotations and it’s similar to how there’s slurs for black people but none for white people.

So why do people find “female” offensive? Well for starters it’s dehumanizing. Women is a less academic term and female implies some biological essentialism. I think the crux as to why it’s a big deal now is that women do not refer to themselves as females in the manner that men do. Men do not think of themselves as males, they do not call other men males, men call themselves men. male and female are simply outdated terms.

I suspect one day as society moves towards a more genderqueer position men and women will become unacceptable to say too. Idk. Like I think we need to acknowledge that there is such thing as a euphemism treadmill, that languages change, words become offensive or nonoffensive over time, and like all we can do in order to be a fucking decent human bean is to conform to society’s standards as to what is acceptable as according to the treadmill. Unless it’s some shit like calling the homeless, the unhoused. Then in those specific instances we got to run against the treadmill. But in this specific instance, we need to run with the treadmill on this one. Nothing feels better than conforming with society.

8 points

The “you sound like a ferengi” insult in response to people saying Feeeeeeeeeeeemale has brought us to this point. It has singlehandedly been a phenomenally effective tool in pushing people into seeing negativity in the word and has done most of the heavy lifting.

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7 points

its not incels my parents did that, and only when talking about women they dont like. Female is just what you say when you cant say bitch. also women do this too, women can also be misogynistic. my mom only called the women she hated at her job females “those females are always gossiping” “females cant get along, they all love drama” but her friends were girls or ladies.

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2 points

I found a thread about this whole thing on r*ddit and the first page of replies were variations of “What? Why would they do this??”
Not one actual answer visible

People just do things for no reason because wokeness or whatever I guess.

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3 points

Interestingly, my partner and other friends who are women and whose first language is not english usually use ‘female’. It usually rubs me a weird way, since the only other people I interact with who use the word aren’t the most respectful towards women.

In my mother tongue, the word for women implies subservience, my mom told me not to use that term when referring to women close to me, instead to use another term which is for endearment (cousins, good friends, etc) or yet another to refer to them respectfully.

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17 points

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12 points
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They figured this shit out in the 80s guys

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