Calling females as "guys" (collective term)
Professor Deborah Cameron, a feminist linguist at the University of Oxford, said : “If women want to be addressed as ‘guys’, I’m not going to tell them they’re betraying the feminist cause. (Particularly if the alternative is being addressed as ‘babes’ and ‘dolls’.) In language, as in life, you do your best with whatever you’ve got.” She has written a blogpost on this subject, in which she compares ‘guys’ to ‘dudes’, which is “also ‘cool’ in the sense of anti-establishment, rebellious, non-conformist”. She is against banning words, a “blunt instrument”. She rejects the suggestion that many women adopt “guys” because they are “flattered to be treated as honorary men”, as suggested by some linguists. “The question feminists should be asking ... isn’t why they’re talking like men (they aren’t), it’s why they can only express cool solidarity with other women by using prototypically male address terms. Aren’t there any female terms that would serve their purpose just as well?” If we get too po-faced about language, we lose its playfulness. “Yeah, man” as a colloquial exclamation now seems innocuously gender neutral. One of the most popular ways for gay men to address each other currently is “hey gurl hey” - a cheeky subversion of gender norms. For many, myself included, it’s a way to counter the narrow-mindedness, delusion and hypocrisy of gay men who insist only “straight acting” men are appealing, pigeonholing themselves as “masc for masc”, stigmatising femininity as undesirable – all while secretly twerking to Your Disco Needs You. Jessica Valenti wrote last week about the campaign to rid our lexicon of mistresses. And the #banbossy campaign saw celebrities like Beyoncé asking to lose the sexist term.











