Girls2Women

I have to confess that I really hate it when people call women "girls." I reserve the use of the term for, well, actual girls meaning those under the age  of 16 years old. Although I perfectly understand why people continue to describe grown women as "girls," somehow it strikes me as a means to demean and diminish.

Jane Elliott, a diversity trainer, famously said in her Blue-Eyed exercise to a young woman, "Get over cute, because you'll be cute until you are about 45. And then at 45, you won't be cute any more, you'll just be an old broad. There'll be whole bunch of 18 to 40 year olds there who are cuter than you are. And at that point, you'll say "I want that promotion". And somebody will say to you "Well, let's see, I don't think of you as qualified, I just think of you as cute". And then you're going to howl "sexism". Females, get over cute! Get competent! Get trained! Get capable! Get over cute! And those of you who are called Patty and Debby and Suzy - get over that, because we use those names to infantilize females. We keep females in their little girl state by the names we use for them. Get over it! If you want to be taken seriously, get serious! Get over it!"

Yet I'm sure if you asked someone, "Do you describe women as girls as a means to infantalize them?" s/he would vigorously object that s/he was doing so. And add to it that popular culture continues to reinforce the use of the term from the HBO series "Girls" to numerous book titles. At the same time what does it mean to take time to critically think about how we use words to describe one another?

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