this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2023
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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.
No one claimed it is, when used as an adjective :)
Adjective is fine! As a noun it's creepy and makes you sound like an incel
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.