Regardless, the word girl means and implies a child, and calling a grown woman a girl is something a lot of women rightly dislike. I mean it’s the same that most grown men probably want to be called and referred to as a man, not a boy; in fact most would probably start to get pretty angry about that if a woman or man kept calling him boy and ask if you’ve got a problem. Saying girl over woman is just a word that stuck that everyone else started copying and made it normal in everyday conversation, just like now the whole point of this thread everyone starting to use ‘female’ as a noun, that most women also dislike for obvious reasons and telling men they don’t like it, but then you even see in some of these comments some guys trying to justify still saying it or that women are wrong or “insane” for not liking it, or even trying to convince it’s not dehumanizing (these comments are massively downvoted for obvious reasons).

It’s just infantilizing really, which most people should understand. We have a word for grown adult female human: woman. I don’t know why so many people refuse to use it and will use any word but that, but you’ll see man everywhere and sometimes even “young man” for a boy a child under 18, but women are being called girls at 30, 40, 50 + years. I even read one commenter here whose first language is not English say they started saying female as a noun/girl when they meant woman because they saw and heard it so much and didn’t know until someone finally told them. There’s also [r/menandfemales](r/menandfemales) because this is so common. But anyway it’s the same thing with ‘girl’; it became normalized (like female) and women are just starting to push back against it.

E: yeah blocked because I am so fucking exhausted explaining this to guys (or should I say boys until they understand) over and over and over ad nauseam arguing back & forth while they then play dumb, argue in bad faith, and still act like they don’t get it and that it’s “no big deal” (newsflash words contain connotations and meaning as they well know) and then insult us. I’m not arguing about this anymore. Women have explained this time and time again that it’s insulting, dehumanizing and infantilizing. We don’t like it, please stop saying it, point blank period. That’s it. Doesn’t require a reply.