It's usually weird when used as a noun more than as an adjective. If you heard someone say "look at that female over there" or something you'd probably find it weird
Yes. Using "male and female" instead of "men and women" is like using "humans" instead of "people", or using "sodium chloride" instead of "salt". It's still weird, but in a different way
I feel like we really should separate "human" from "people" though, as one is describing a species, and the other a societal thing
All humans are people, but not all people are humans
All known fully accepted people are humans, but there are some humans who argue that animals such as Orcas and Dolphins are intelligent enough that they should be considered people despite not being human
And that's not even getting into the possibility of intelligent aliens and how we'd also have to refer to them as people despite them not being humans (I'll admit to being unrealistically optimistic here)
Why tho? If you're a science guy you know Male and Female refer to the reproductive biology of most species. You don't interact with the things that make a person Male or Female on a regular basis. You interact with the social aspect of being a Human Male or Female, for which we have alternative words.
I was a part of the American Imperial War Machine and thats how it was referred to and the habit kind of stuck around. I didn’t think too hard about it, but I use whatever pronouns people prefer.
No, that was an error on my part. It’s supposed to say “a part”. I figured people would understand what I meant based on the context, but I see I was making further mistakes.
yes. not a bad guy but it's still gonna be off-putting for people, because the majority of folks who call women "females" are incels or misogynists. IMO it's worth trying to change the habit, but not worth actually worrying about, you feel?
I say male and female a lot because I work in marketing and that's how demographics are presented.
It does slip out in the real word and I remember the incel connection and I do have to correct myself, but I can imagine that a lot of people in my profession make the same mistake without knowing the connection.
That's kinda the point of a dog whistle I suppose. Take something inoquous that makes sense in certain context and assign a new meaning that allows you to perpetuate your message without using the words.
Even then, people can jump on that when people have used the words but in different sentences and different contexts. I think it's something modern internet use has made us overthink tbh.
We don't stop and consider the word's histories as to why they might feel wrong and it very much comes down the the Germanic/Romance bifurcation in English vocab. Man and woman are from old English and old English words form the core part of our daily vocab. Male and female come much later from Latin (although not initially related, the two were later grouped and spellings changed to match) and of the time, this represented a more cerebral, high minded and analytical style of speak and even today, despite French/Latin/Italian etc forming a collective majority of our vocab, is far more reserved for more elaborate and less often used words than our core. That's why I think it's perfectly fine when using an analytical tone to use male and female as nouns and the pushback is silly.
I suppose the ironic thing is that the biggest advocates of the word woman might not really like the extra baggage it has etymologically compared to female. It means literally wife-person, originally as wifmann. Wife sort of got extended to eventually mean all adult women and in some dialects is still used in terms like wifey which doesn't necessarily mean a married female.
Also I think the casualness of man Vs male and woman Vs female might lead us to to use the more casual one for our in-group and formal for our out-group, as language has long made us do (particularly with older pronouns like thou Vs you where thou was actually more casual). In some ways English has simplified so much in regards to gender that it leads to what's left of it being over analysed compared to its cousin languages that still retain it in its full, scary glory. When you learn french or Spanish and see all those gendered words, English used to have that too, and is by far the outlier in European languages for not having it.
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u/genius_overflowing 19h ago
Imo it's specifically weird if you say 'men and females'. Otherwise in some contexts 'female' does make sense.