I have this online female friend and we have been friends for almost 4 years now. We met in an online game. She’s the one who asked my social media ID so we can play together. And she seems to have done to a lot of people as well. So she was kinda collecting a lot of friends. Have seen people get nto her lobbies and say “Thank you so much for listening to me the other day,” “You are really a kind person” and so on. There was this one guy used to address her as his “bi*ch”. At this I thought they were a couple but apparently they met on the game and known eachother for only a few months and were just friends.
She used to text me first whenever she was about to play. And used to check on me if I hadn’t appeared on the game for a week or two.
Later we got close. I stopped gaming but she still plays other games. But after I got close, she stopped texting me first. Only would chat with me if I texted her first. I asked her why she never texts me about anything. She goes “Uhh I am not that type to text people first” “I never do that to anyone” “I think you’re just busy” and so on.
So all this weird behaviour had me thinking why she is doing all this? What are her motives? What kind of person is she?
I did ask her these questions many times but only got vague answers. She also never gives anything about her other online friends and usually becomes defensive when I bring them up in a conversation.
Here we go again problematizing the noun “female”. Some don’t mind. Seriously. And it’s used self-referentially “in-group”: it shows up in feminist book titles, in dating communities (eg, “F4F/M”), classifieds (eg, “need a roommate […] females only”), etc. In conventional language, it’s an acceptable word.
The problem isn’t so much the word, but its usage, ie, the message. These superficial word criticisms fail to meaningfully engage the fuller context & meaning.
Imagine we make the name for an entire class a derogatory word! Meanwhile, the name for other major gender/sex remains innocuous. Seems like classic stigmatization: who is that serving? Is opposition to the noun “female” unwittingly subscribing to stigmatization & sexist thinking of those who’d welcome the stigmatization?