it’s very difficult to post when you’re madly in love with the post that’s currently up [not to mention all the awesome comments!] that said, there’s some stuff swirling around in my brain that i want to get out.
firstly a couple of definitions according to the google:
A woman is a female human. The term woman (irregular plural: women) usually is used for an adult, with the term girl being the usual term for a female child or adolescent. …
girl:
a young woman; “a young lady of 18″
female child: a youthful female person; “the baby was a girl”; “the girls were just learning to ride a tricycle”
girlfriend: a girl or young woman with whom a man is romantically involved; “his girlfriend kicked him out”
a friendly informal reference to a grown woman; “Mrs. Smith was just one of the girls”
woman:
an adult female person (as opposed to a man); “the woman kept house while the man hunted”
womanhood: women as a class; “it’s an insult to American womanhood”; “woman is the glory of creation”; “the fair sex gathered on the veranda”
a female person who plays a significant role (wife or mistress or girlfriend) in the life of a particular man; “he was faithful to his woman”
i’ve been thinking about this girl/woman problem for a while now and i confess that i have yet to come up with an answer that pleases me. with apologies to chelsea and always aroused i find it interesting that three women, including myself, who are over thirty-five and, by all reports, smart and together and confident and dare i say powerful all call themselves ‘girl’ in their handles.
this was brought more firmly into my consciousness when chelsea wrote a post about the word va-jay-jay and her enormous objections to its use. in a nutshell she doesn’t like the infantilisation of terms in relation to the feminine. that said, go read HER post and let her words tell you what she thinks rather than my terribly brief summation.
here’s the bit that really got my attention:
And this is exactly the main issue that I have with “va-jay-jay.” It’s precisely the way that the term is feminized through making it sound like baby talk. As a woman, I work very hard not to be viewed as a child. I bristle at attitudes, clothing, rhetoric, manners, music, advertisements, decorations, and language that treats me as if I am a girl. I was a girl. It was fine. I grew up. Now I’m a woman. Treat me like one.
except here this thing… these are words written by a woman who uses the handle chelsea girl. a handle, by the way, which i think suits the person that blog represents extremely well. a handle which i at least reflect with my own badinfluecegirl as does alwaysarousedgirl with hers.
i know that i don’t consider myself to be a child or a youth. i feel like a relatively mature human. i would consider myself a member of the tribe labeled adults and yet? and yet i call myself badinfluencegirl.
i do that because my best friend named me one day while both of us were high off our asses and laughing that another friend had called me the devil. the moment i started this blog (many months later) i knew in my bones that that was the correct handle.
had i heard of the other two before? aag was a distant blip on my radar and that’s all. i had never read her blog (foolish foolish me) nor had a i heard of chelsea and yet here the three of us are using similar naming conventions at relatively similar stages of life [please don’t think that i speak for either of them hey.]
so why do three mature and adult women who by all reports seem happy to be their respective ages and maturity levels call themselves girl? it’s certainly not to diminish who we are. it may be to make our impact more unexpected but… other than ‘call girl’ types i don’t know too many young bloggers using a nickname with the word girl in it.
it seems to me that we are somehow calling ourselves ‘one of the girls’ as the definition above would imply. that in using this word we are proclaiming ourselves to be part of the sisterhood of women.
but wait.
doesn’t that almost mean that there are two words hiding in one here?
that there is the regular word girl that means less than adult female but then there is also the word that means ‘girls’ as in ‘group of women or the collective ‘women'” or um… dammit.
the logic doesn’t hold up. the collective women or group of women should be ‘just me and the women’ … it only sounds funny because we weren’t used to it. it’s not done yet. maybe, with common use, “going out with the women” would actually sound like something i would ever say.
hrm but that doesn’t work either, men say they’re going out with ‘the boys’ to mean their gaggle or group as well and lots of them are seniors when they’re doing it.
so which is it? if i’m a woman but not a girl then why does the handle badinfluencewoman or badinfluencelady or badinfluencechick sound so utterly lame in comparison to badinfluencegirl?
why do i *know* that in calling myself girl i am in no way taking away from my womanness? why do i know that in my gut and yet still *know* that chelsea too is right on this one?
which means, i suppose, that i have no idea.
do you?
badinfluencegirl 