this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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When I was in the military, the shooting instructors said they preferred training females because they haven't been trained poorly by somebody else.
EDIT: Designating recruits as male and female is the way the military does things. I don't use the terms male and female when referring to groups of humans. I felt the need to clarify since somebody already took offense.
It's "women".
"They said"
If only there was some generally agreed upon symbol to denote direct quotes as opposed to paraphrasing an idea in your own words. If only...
If only there were fewer dickheads looking for a fight online. If only.
You sound like a miserable person
I'd rather sound miserable than incel.
Go back to reddit
Really? You sound both miserable and incel. You failed.
I don't understand what you're saying
They already gave you a downvote lol. Redditism has arrived.
You've obviously never been in the military, because it's definitely "females".
I'm from a country with mandatory conscription for men, so yes, I've been in the military and I've seen the misogyny (among countless other varieties of bigotry) rampant in that system from front row seats. We had a handful of female volunteer conscripts, as well as one of my NCOs was a woman, and it was blatantly obvious they were not recieving the same treatment as the majority of us who were men (and not in a good way, if there was any room for confusion).
Experiences like that are among the key reasons I'm not happy to see people keep perpetuating that kind of behavior, especially in other traditionally male-centric contexts like the IT industry and even here on this forum.
Whether or not you personally agree with the military's choice of language is not relevant. You're assuming the trainer agrees with your political views, but you weren't there, so you have no idea what they said or didn't say.
"Males" sounds just as awkward in such a context.
Perhaps because people aren't going around calling others "males" to demean them?
These are not difficult concepts if you turn on your brain.
Nah. In the military, you aren't "men and women" you are "soldiers" (or sailors, Marines, or airmen). If you are referring specifically to a specific gender such as a "female" soldier, then that's what you call them.
No one says "women soldiers" except maybe a civilian.
And I'm not telling you to, stop putting words in my mouth. Female as an adjective is fine, "female soldier" is fine, calling a group of human women "females", as in a noun, is demeaning and incel lingo.
In French, the literal translation of female and male, are only used for animals in the common language, but I have been taught that in English it is ok to use those for humans in common language. Is it not the case in your region?
It's technically grammatically correct, but outside of a medical context (or military, as stated above), it has, in recent years especially, been heavily associated with incels and other creepy kinds of people. So in effect no, it's not generally considered good to refer to women as "female" in day-to-day speech.
Examples:
"Females simply don't have the emotional capacity that men do, which is why they're so quick to cheat and betray" - typical incel line
"Today on the train I saw a beautiful female with silky hair and clear skin" - kinda sounds like a serial killer
I don't really see a problem with saying things like "my female friends" or "my female colleagues", when it's used as an adjective.
Adjective is fine! As a noun it's creepy and makes you sound like an incel
No one claimed it is, when used as an adjective :)
This, people just being weird about terms
Female/male are used in English as adjectives when describing humans, but as nouns they only refer to animals. "She is a woman" and "She is a female actress" are both okay but calling women "females" is purposefully demeaning and sexist. I do not believe there is any regional difference in this, nor should we really care about such since there are no regions when we're on a global forum.
English being a third language for me, I'm actually interested in understanding the differences coming from different cultures that I may not be aware of. I find global forum to be nice for this reason, although they tend to be dominated by the Northern American culture.
I can't speak with certainty, but I can speak subjectively on this -
I have family and friends all over the US (I'm only missing someone from both Dakotas to complete the collection), so I've heard damn near every accent, regional dialect, language, etc that there is to hear in the US, including some near dead native languages and Pennsylvania Dutch.
The only people I know that use "females" instead of women are either in the military like OP or they're sexist. Sometimes it's blatantly misogynistic, sometimes they're casually sexist.
Or they're both. It's frequently both.
Whatever.