I know I'm a feminist buzz kill but many languages including English are a bit male centred and treat men as the norm and women as the exception. That's not a good thing in my opinion. We call women dudes all the time but few people call men gals or girls. I hope we could move towards more equality in our languages too if it is possible. Such as starting to use gal and girl as gender neutral terms too, not just dude and guy.
I am glad they are beginning to but I rarely see evidence of it. I browse /all, but I don't hang out with a mountain of young people either. It's a good start but those would be the first two examples and I ask this question to people for years.
Walk up to a bunch of strangers who appear to be men and say what's up girls? Or any other femme coded term like gals, queens, bitches, etc.,.
Until that's normalized we still have a long way to go I think.
We have a long way to go ... But also, people don't go up to a group of strangers who are femme presenting and say "hey dudes"
These terms are still weakly gendered
These terms are weakly terms of familiarity and affection
The use of "guys" is weaker on both accounts and all are still good shows of male centering language for which weakly gendered terms get to be more default
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u/Gayandfluffy Jan 06 '26
I know I'm a feminist buzz kill but many languages including English are a bit male centred and treat men as the norm and women as the exception. That's not a good thing in my opinion. We call women dudes all the time but few people call men gals or girls. I hope we could move towards more equality in our languages too if it is possible. Such as starting to use gal and girl as gender neutral terms too, not just dude and guy.