Is it sexist to use the word "girl" in reference to adult

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Yeah, me too.

I get treated like a teenager cos I look like one. I hate it. I'd really rather be called an adult and addressed as an adult.

They do it cos they see my physical appearance, not my degree or the books I've read or my life experiences.

The only things I respect more about someone who's young for their age is open mindedness and imagination. Things more commonly found in childhood than in either adolescence or adulthood.

More likely he's just avoiding it. People avoid it cos it can lead to some heated discussions.

The other thing that's really awful about people who've simply aged into adulthood, there's hardly anyone more authoritarian about social conformity. They're the types of people who can barely function in their lives, outside of complaining or rattling on about banalities, and anyone who isn't 'just like them' needs to be bounced out that work environment on their heads. It seems like when people lack both intelligence and maturity they tend to make up the difference in Darwinian game theory and with that cooperation only works for people who've voluntarily abdicated any truth to themselves on a social level (or for whom conforming in that environment really does fit them like a glove).

If I had to take a guess - this is what it looks like to live in a region that's had a 'brain-drain' or intelligence drain to other parts of the country where jobs have been more plentiful.

Thank you, KT67, stuff can be confusing without context.

It isn't that.

I think one of the big challenges when people try to grapple with the loaded meaning of words - race, gender, relgion, etc. hardly cover human diversity and even within an exact-match group you can offend someone by saying something or equally offend someone by saying something else. I'd agree with other posters that when singular or group pronouns are forced out of me it feels awkward, and generally I avoid it for the reasons just stated (let alone outside of niche cases of language use they tend to seem redundant).

Needs an option to say: "It is very, very context-dependant"...

Barbaric

Sorry to hear that, Monsieur Le Pew, and sorry for derailing, I didn't know where else to ask.

In response to the OP it's a respect-based thing.

Calling someone a girl is seen as disrespectful if they are over the age of 18. The same way you would call someone a boy.

They should be referred to as young women because that's just a nicer thing to say and doesn't leave any suggestion of calling them immature. You can get some really well behaved and very mature younger people so calling them boy/girl is more of an insult.

I think when you reach old age though everyone kinda just looks like a kid and this is where calling them boy/girl comes from because elderly people just get straight-up confused.

...I say "girl" in a few situations where it seems OK or expected, but otherwise avoid it. The factors that affect whether it's OK include:

Who's talking- woman to woman,woman to man, man to woman? Who else is present?
What's the situation? Formal, social, romantic?
How well do the speakers know each other? Strangers, colleagues, acquaintances, friends, family, partners?
What age group, or mix of age groups?*
What's the intention? Affectionate, playful, belittling?

All these thing intersect in ways that I'm aware of, but find hard to track in real time.

*Also worth noting that different cohorts seem to change their usage of "girl" and "boy" differently as they age. Nowadays, 40-year-old women talk about "meeting boys" in a way that didn't happen 20 years ago!

That. On rare occasion I use "girl" (in context) and on rare occasions I hear it used in an overtly belittling way and mostly it's just uncomfortable for me.

Having fun exploring cultural norms... (Disclaimer: I know very little about comics - I am merely grabbing Google headlines.)

Interestingly, Batgirl (1961) morphed into Batwoman (2006) so she was at least 65 years old (I'm joking here) --- seriously the web estimates the new Batgirl is about 15 and Batwoman is early 30s. Superwoman is more convoluted but wiki says Supergirl (1959-1985) was killed while Superwoman (the current one?) evolved (1981) - the actress who played Superwoman was in her late 20s (from Canada). In any case, I see a cultural pattern over time.

Imagining living in a world (in order similar to website below):
* Batwoman
* Superwoman
* Spider-Woman
* Iron Woman
* Icewoman
* Wonder Man!
* Invisible Man!
* Ant-Woman
* Black Windower
* Superboy (or Superguy if you prefer)

I stopped just past 60, apparently alternate-universe Batboy (or Batguy if you prefer) didn't make the cut.

Source: https://www.ranker.com/list/superheroes ... ker-comics

Yeah, it's like they stay fixed in secondary school/high school forever. For most people, that's the most conformist and cliquey time in their lives.

I think men who call women 'girls' as a compliment and never say 'woman', don't respect women. They don't respect their brains anyway. And they prefer the bodies of someone young and perky (though hopefully still a woman, not a literal girl).

Bit different to 'my boss is a woman, so is my girlfriend' for eg.

I guess there is barely any sexist intention if somebody does and there is nothing wrong with it. There is a bit of fun in it if somebody uses it but a language doesn't has to be formal and correct and without humor and fun. Do you know 'The Golden Girls'? Want to rename that for political correctness reasons because some snowflakes think it may be insulting to refere women over 20 as girls? Why do you even care this that much?

I don't think anyone thinks you should never say it.

Ok maybe in the 70s. But not nowadays.

I support a team nicknamed 'b(h)oys'. There's even a team called 'Young Boys'

There's a difference between saying it in a media context like that where it's lighthearted and never using the word 'woman' or 'man' or using it out of context.

Media context again: boy bands and girl bands. Not man bands and woman bands.

Honestly, boy/lad gets passed about almost as much. Just like you said, in an informal/fun setting.

It doesn't show respect but not everything has to. It can show fondness. Like the distinction between 'tu' and 'vous' in French, it would be seen as weird to call your friends 'vous' but rude to call someone you didn't know or of an older age 'tu'.

When used for grown ups, it's just very informal and therefore can be sexist in a professional context where things are meant to be a bit formal.

It's kind of like what I was saying a little farther up, I think the eggshell walk is endemic to the human condition and there really aren't many ways to win this one aside from avoiding those sorts of words.

As far as misogyny goes I've had the chance to listen to some of better MGTOW for a while, like Thinking Ape and huMan, I think huMan's about at this point but the overview that I get - 'red pill' makes a particular kind of mistake in that it misses the heterosexuality component of it, ie. it puts you in a place where your natural dial for evaluating the opposite sex is magnified (and I would think the same is true for any men or women who are strictly gay or lesbian). In a manner everyone's looking for a partner who can add something to their lives, many of the most disenfranchized are people who are highly intelligent or creative and find that they're single because no one can match their wavelength, and coming from a place similar I'm sympathetic to people being in that space for this reason - it's not simple egotism, it's that people who are less intelligent or less creative tend to be very destructive and judgmental of things they don't understand, hence it's like throwing beautiful art in a trash compactor for the sake of biological imperatives, need to be loved, etc..

That's one of the things that I think a lot of the current gender tribalism that's going around might miss. I tend toward the view that we're all rather brutally oppressed by nature in different ways, and in the first world now that tends to be more often in terms of internal needs and psychological room to explore ourselves.

That's probably a lot to cough up but it's one of those things where I think that's the forest rather than a specific tree, and I've really wondered what can be done. There are other species that have one gender or the other rated on strong visual queues, among many species like peacocks and cuttlefish it's the males, that's actually reversed with humans (something Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying have mentioned). That reversal actually has women fighting harder to find where they get force to defend their autonomy, it has men fighting harder to figure out how they can be significant enough to make the rating curve of being able to get their genes into the next generation, and like any other species it tends to be a very painful dance because each individual among the genders is having their absolute value - in a way their right to live into the future - being rated by externals or even society's understanding or lack of understanding of them (and where some MGTOW miss that - men have no monopoly on that hardship).

It's a deep topic and one that needs it's proper review. My take - knowing the actual ground rules seems to be required to then rehumanize the landscape, otherwise we're just repeating mistakes that we'll either figure out how to not repeat or we'll get so tired of making them and so tired of the fallout that we'll figure out how to bring things to a new normal that works better for everyone involved.

Hey girl (or should I say ma'am?) you are allowed to call me that here as well as in real life. Has really somebody a problem with that? May be it's disrespectful towards customers and people who are a lot elder then you or very stiff and formal at all but otherwise and especially among friends?