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Is "female" offensive?
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2024
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It’s potentially offensive when people say men and females, which is often why it comes up online. Using either male or female as a noun is dehumanizing, in that it’s not commonly used to refer to people, but mostly animals (law enforcement and military use them as nouns, but they’re also intentionally distancing themselves from the people in reports).
Basically, “women” feels weird for a lot of English speakers, but “girls” sounds creepy, so they try for something else. Just go with women, 99% of the time, it’s perfectly fine
As a non-native speaker I find woman more offensive than female. Noun male/female puts all as equal. Girls, boys, birds, ponies. Woman, though, seems to be de-attached. Especially when talking about humankind it’s common to refer to humans as just „man”. „No man been there”, „for all mankind”, „dog is a man’s best friend”. As it applies to man only and woman doesn’t count