I'm not female, hear me roar

July 21, 2005

Bev Conolly has had enough of linguistic gender benders.

I write this as a woman, a lady, a lass, a sheila, a gal and - depending on how far your imagination stretches - even a chick and a girlie. But, dear readers, I am not a female.

For one thing - and my trusty Macquarie Dictionary backs me up here - "female" is, first, an adjective, so it shouldn't stand alone. Therefore, unless you cuddle a noun up to the right of it, referring to me as "a female" feels as appropriate as calling me "an outraged", "a waspish" or "a cranky".

My defining moment of loathing this term came one Saturday afternoon, at a Blue Mountains railway station. Looking around for the toilets, I found "Gentlemen", and then "Females". Why not "Ladies" to go with "Gentlemen", I wondered. I still wonder about it today.

There were other options. The staff could have gone onto eBay and found a pair of those whacky theme signs from pubs in the 1970s. You remember: Knights and Damsels, Adams and Eves, Hens and Roosters. They could have made the toilets unisex. I'd even have accepted the ubiquitous stick-figure-with-a-triangle-body, but I bristle at being labelled a female, as if my gender is so mysterious it needs to be described, rather than named.

Why do so many people reject the idea that "women" is the comparable term to "men"? Why are we females, as if the thing being referred to is a plumbing connection?

Perhaps it starts in adolescence, when lads terrified by the idea of dating women still want to seem more sophisticated than going out with mere girls. Or maybe the term was once regarded as more bookish and analytical, bestowing a certain panache - as if David Attenborough were narrating, sotto voce, a documentary on chimpanzees in the workplace: "And now the female approaches my outstretched hand. Will she shake it?"

Maybe it's part of the larger, and equally regrettable, movement towards making us all "you guys", thereby ignoring gender differences entirely.

Whatever its origin, I submit that it's time to expunge this awkward phrasing from the language.

One option is to equip me and a crack squad of grammar commandos with electric cattle prods, setting us loose on the public to correct users of the forbidden phrase wherever we hear it.

The next best option is to substitute male and female for boy, girl, man, woman and all their variants universally, in everyday conversation and culture, until the alternative terms are so tedious and tiresome they become unfashionable and simply drop out of use.

In no time at all the language would be corrected and I'd be relaxing in my Laz-E-Male, a packet of femalefinger biscuits on the ottomale next to me, listening to classic hits like Lay Female Lay and When a Male Loves a Female on the radio and flicking through a copy of Female's Day magazine.

And, oh male, wouldn't that achievement make me feel like Wonder Female?

