Is it demeaning or empowering to call a woman a “girl”? Seven Culturess writers weigh in on the term and its complicated, often personal usage
LOS ANGELES, CA – JUNE 02: A view of the Ban.do penthouse at ‘Super Deluxe and Sarah Ramos present a live reading of City Girl’ on June 2, 2017 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Emma McIntyre/Getty Images)
How do you feel about being called a “girl”? For people who are actual minors, it’s largely no big deal. After all, a girl is literally defined as a “female child.”
It gets complicated when we apply that label to adult women, however. For some, the term is simply a fun way to mark someone as a friend or to describe a fun event. “The girls and I are going out to celebrate!,” for instance. Yet, for others, being described as a girl is demeaning.
Women get called “girls” all the time in pop culture. There’s The Golden Girls, HBO’s Girls series, New Girl, Gone Girl, and Alicia Keys singing about a girl who is metaphorically on fire. Culturess itself draws a lot on the “fangirl” image. Women are “girls” everywhere in pop culture.
But do we have to be comfortable with something just because it’s ubiquitous?
In American culture and beyond, women are persistently infantilized. We are often made to feel as if we are less capable and more childlike simply because of our gender. Think back to all of the lame jokes you’ve probably heard about women—how we all love spending money or how women are the worst drivers—and you should get the drift. Fangirls themselves are often subject to “fake geek girl” scrutiny, be it a surprise test of their fandom knowledge or unwanted attention at comics shops, conventions, and more.
The good side of “girl”
Like many things in life, however, the word “girl” isn’t entirely good or bad. A lot depends on context. A group of friends affectionately calling each other their “girls” can be a powerful way to establish friendship.
Neither are “girls” instantly degraded in pop culture. After all, look at comedies like New Girl or Girls, which have gained success thanks in large part to their focus on female leads struggling with adulthood.
Supergirl, Ms. Marvel, and Wonder Woman have shown that even the world of comics, despite its “boys only club” past, can be welcoming to strong, smart girls and the women they become. That’s to say nothing of other comics publishers—in other words, here is your periodic reminder to go read Lumberjanes.
Others have made a good case for reclaiming the word “girl.” Why be ashamed of being a girl when you can make it an honorable thing? Beyoncé’s right on this point.
So, what to do with the word “girl”? Is it okay to call an adult woman one? Who should use the word, and when, and how? What about other terms like “ladies” and “miss”? When is it a vehicle to demean and demoralize, or one to strengthen bonds and build pride?
Maybe you think we’re all getting worked up over nothing. However, consider that impact of words. A single word can set the tone for one interaction or an entire relationship. It can establish divides or build bridges. Words are undeniably important. Whether or not you feel that a term like “girl” really matters to you does not negate the fact that it can be a big deal to someone else.
We’re not here to dictate how you should feel one way or another. Instead, we present seven different opinions from Culturess writers on the word “girl.”
(Image courtesy Shea Corrigan)
1. Shea Corrigan
So, first, I think there’s a distinction to be made between the vocabulary used in formal, professional contexts and that which is used conversationally. In the former, it’s easy: Woman or women. There is a word for a grown girl and that word is woman.
But conversationally, that’s a little harder, because many women, myself included, will admit that “women” sounds stiff, especially in contrast to the magically chill designation, “guy.” “Guy” can apply to any man from the day his voice cracks until he begins to receive AARP fliers in the mail, regardless of whether he’s a stranger, coworker, acquaintance, ex, etc.
And so I face the girl question most when telling stories about women I can’t describe any other way and whose ages I guess to be between 19 and 35. (I am horrifically bad at gauging age though, so, really, that window is even wider.) A woman, to me, is a grown-up and I don’t often think of women in my peer group, plus or minus five years, as grown-ups, because I forget I am a grown-up, even though we very much are.
As an aside, I don’t like particularly like “ladies” either, because ladies feels oppressively positive and, to me, has become tied to a certain style of white feminism about which I, for lack of 3,000 more words at my disposal, feel a type of way. Which is to say, my problem with “ladies” is very much a me-thing.
“Gals,” I’m told, is another option for reclamation. And then there’s still “girl.” I actually like and use “girl” quite a lot, but only in direct address and mostly as a less intense synonym for “bitch”—as in “Girl, what?”
But the more I think about this—the more I think about how I use language and slang, the more I think about the words I use and why I use them, which is a thing I do a lot these days—the more I’ve become comfortable with using “women” anecdotally too.
(Image courtesy Cheryl Wassenaar)
2. Cheryl Wassenaar
I am neither a full proponent of “girl” nor a full opponent. For me, it’s always been on a bit of a case-by-case basis. For example, I’ll call some of my friends “girl” in casual conversation, because it’s an easy way to inject a lot of commentary into a single word and because we’re friends! Like a lot of words, the usage of “girl” totally depends on the tone, even in text.
But I also usually mirror that behavior. That is, I’m usually not the first to call the other person in conversation “girl,” just because it’s not a word that everyone likes having applied to them, and my general assumption is that if you’re comfortable enough to use it with me, it’s okay using it with you.
(This also gets more complicated when I don’t think I’m at the friendship level of being called “girl” by someone. “Girl” is totally a friendship level. I did not make that up, nope.)
And, of course, it’s complicated by when a guy calls me girl, because there’s a whole extra layer to decipher, and that layer is “Am I being patronized right now?” Because if the answer is yes, we are not having conversations anymore, or if we are, the conversation is going to include at least a question about how that guy would feel if I called him “boy” to his face and was condescending on top of it.
Not great, right?
In public discourse, the idea of adult women still being girls is a little bonkers and should basically be avoided, though; sure, New Girl is a cute comedy but we probably shouldn’t call Zooey Deschanel a girl because she’s an adult, and as for men being called boys or kids in the public sphere … yeah, that’s not fun either, even if it is less common. If you’re an adult, you’re an adult and should be spoken about as one.
(Image courtesy Buckie Wells)
3. Buckie Wells
I totally get why some adult women don’t like to be called “girl.” I mean, it’s a little juvenile. Of course, I’m in the camp that’s trying to reclaim the word “dude,” too. Maybe it’s because growing up is scary or because I’m a little bit juvenile myself for a 25-year-old, but I don’t typically correct anyone. In fact, I’m the type of person who says, “I’m an adult” ironically multiple times a day. Then again, there’s always a lot of confusion when your name is “Buckie,” so maybe I’m just used to it.
I’ve never actually had someone say “girl” to me like it was a bad thing. Instead, I look around at all my faves, like Batgirl, Supergirl, Wonder Girl, Elastigirl, and I don’t consider them to be lesser superheroes … but I mean, I literally sat down and worked on this while watching The Incredibles and drinking chocolate milk.
I don’t correct people when they call me “girl,” because I often feel childish and I don’t feel like I’ve got everything figured out. But I realize now that this is unfair of me.
Why? Because words matter. I’ve been trying to figure out my relationship to the word “girl” for an entire week, and when I realized that I don’t care, it also hit me that other people do. And that’s what matters. Solidarity. Progression. Equality. If we’re living in the day and age where people put their preferred pronouns in their profile bios and women have to march against the president of the country for equal rights, the very least I could do is respect someone else’s wishes and understand that calling a grown person “girl” can be demeaning.
Women bear and raise children, fight back against oppression, and rise to the occasion in ways that don’t deserve to be overlooked. Girls don’t do that, women do. And if I go around calling grown women “girls” or don’t bother to correct someone when I hear them doing it, I become a part of the problem that is this perpetual cycle of seeing women as less than, which they most certainly are not.
If what you say can affect the way people view an entire gender, and if I’m not doing everything I can support to my sisters then I’ve done something wrong. I pay bills, I take my cat to the vet for $300 worth of booster shots and preventative medicine, and whether I’m ready to accept the responsibility or not, I’m a woman. And until “fanmen” becomes a thing, I can be a woman and a fangirl at the same time, so that about closes the case for me.
Courtesy Alice Stanley
4. Alice Stanley, Jr.
Recently my mom and I went out to dinner and our waiter began every check-in with “How’s it going, girls?” I might feel, like Britney, I’m straddling “girl” and “woman.” However, my mom is definitively not a girl anymore. We both talked about it at length. Was he trying to compliment her in some creepy way? Was he on auto-pilot? The next day my 70-year-old white male manager asked me to do something and I responded, “Girl, of course,” to which he took no offense.
These two unrelated incidents are proof of how complicated the word “girl” is. On one hand, I often refer to myself as a girl. Usually in the context of, “I’m a cake vs. pie kinda girl.” On the other hand, last week when a stranger told my all-lady improv team were “a nice group of girls” I wanted to sock him.
On the third biologically-incorrect hand, I much prefer “Girl, please” to the misogynistic “Bitch, please.” To be honest, I have never minded being called a “guy” when someone is corralling a group of people. Guy to me never meant men. It just meant people. And if girl becomes to equivalent to that semi-androgynous meaning of “guy,” I’m down!
But if “girl” is an insult or a way to depower women, I’m less down. In fact, I’m not down at all. So, how to avoid that? From my perspective, we should always refer to female-identifying people over 17 as women. That said, they can and should call themselves whatever they want! Okay, girl?
(Image courtesy Rachel Leishman)
5. Rachel Leishman
Being called a girl isn’t the worst thing in the world but it also isn’t great. Context is really key. For me, I tend to call my friends “girl” and use it as a slang term. I don’t mean for it to be derogatory or anything and it is more of a term of endearment than anything else.
Now, I have had men use the world “girl” as an insult towards me. One told me that I was smart for a girl and others use it to make me feel badly about myself. But I don’t think the word girl in regards to a grown woman is a bad thing.
Like any word, if the intention behind it is negative then the word itself becomes such. I could say “you” and it could be a negative thing depending on the context of the situation. So I don’t necessarily see being called “girl” as something bad.
But I get why other girls do. It’s a hard thing to swallow because we don’t typically call men “boys,” unless you’re me where I look at my favorite actors and say “that boy need to stop” to men who are older than me.
At the end of the day, though, it isn’t about the word itself but rather how we use it. If someone calls us “girl” and means it to be an insult then yes, it sucks. But sometimes, it can show strength. Because after all, girls can do anything and everything we put our minds to.
(Image courtesy Sarah Crocker)
6. Sarah Crocker
In most cases, being called a “girl” by a stranger gets my hackles up.
Maybe it’s because, most days, my gender presentation leans more androgynous than feminine. Being called a “girl” can feel like another person’s attempt to place me into a more understandable category. I can’t entirely blame them. Sometimes it’s easier to frame someone as a “girl”— identifiable, compliant, nonthreatening. Who’s afraid of a girl, after all? A woman, however, could present a serious challenge.
That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with being outwardly feminine or enjoying traditionally feminine things. If you prefer “girl” for whatever reason, go for it.
Still, there’s something about being called a “girl” that feels off-key. “Woman” is fine, but, for me, “girl” recalls a childhood identity and culturally-approved love of pink that never quite fit.
There’s also a lot to say here about adulthood. Is it easier to call yourself a “girl” when you feel like you haven’t earned adulthood? HBO’s Girls, with its anxious young women, made that unease one of its main themes.
It could also be a way to reclaim our youth. Wouldn’t you rather hang out with “the girls”, instead of “my adult female friends who have jobs and obligations and, sorry, we have to cut this short so I can pick up my kid from violin practice and get a flu shot”? Being an adult is hard. Being a girl is (sometimes) easier.
But I’m not trying to be a total buzzkill. It’s good to establish that kind of trust with friends, even if they’re sick of my Lumpy Space Princess-inspired “hey gurl.” And I’m not so lame that I want to stand in the way of, you know, actual fun.
At the end of the day, though, teachers, coworkers, waiters, and any other stranger who wants to call me a “girl” can kindly step down.
Courtesy Gwen Purdom
7. Gwendolyn Purdom
When I was first contemplating my feelings toward the word “girl,” a musical refrain popped into my head. “I enjoy being a girl,” all sweet and twirly in my memory, though I wasn’t even sure what musical the lyric came from and couldn’t for the life of me recall any other words from the song.
Well, I looked it up (Google’s handy that way). “I Enjoy Being a Girl” is from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Flower Drum Song. I’ve never seen it, and don’t actually know anything about it (which, for a musical nerd like me, is actually pretty surprising). Though, I can’t say I was shocked to read cringeworthy 1958 lines like:
"“When I hear a complementary whistle That greets my bikini by the sea I turn and I glower and I gristle But I’m happy to know the whistles meant for me”"
or
"I flip when a fellow sends me flowers I drool over dresses made of lace I talk on the telephone for hours with a pound and a half of cream upon my face"
Yikes.
The song’s lyrics, in all their chauvinistic glory, do a good job of capturing what’s so problematic about the word “girl” as we’ve come to know it. It’s a patronizing way to infantilize women; to position them as vapid, and lesser, and helpless without the protection of a good, strong man (we’ll save my thoughts on toxic masculinity for another day).
But then some of the song’s lyrics bring up another idea—one that crosses my mind somewhat frequently and tends to tip me closer to the pro-“girl” camp. If you take away the default “in relation to men” framing, being traditionally “girly” isn’t inherently bad. And the fact that we tend to think it is is problematic in its own ways.
I’m always troubled, for instance, when I hear parents say they have a blanket ban on anything princess-related. Of course parents have the right to do whatever the hell they feel is best for their children and the lore of pop culture princesses is intrinsically tangled with sexist ideas about women’s worth, and needing rescuing, and the like. But I worry that some of that is also a rejection of the color prink, and liking ponies and frilly gowns. If it’s “girly,” it’s automatically thought to be inferior. The shift toward celebrating girls and women that do traditionally masculine things like play sports and get dirty and wear pants in pop culture is so great and important. But there’s also nothing wrong with celebrating girls and women that would rather garden than play basketball, or girls and women that, as the song says, “drool over dresses made of lace.”
Next: The Pirates of the Caribbean ride won’t sell women anymore
Which is all a very long way to say I enjoy being a woman, but I appreciate all the good stuff that comes along with being a girl.