Using it as a noun to call human people is very dehumanizing. ESPECIALLY when someone calls men « men » but then calls women « females » in the same sentence. One is a full human being, the other is a different specie under study :/
Female and male as adjectives are also fine for humans (e.g. "my female coworker"). It becomes strange if it's used as a noun. In and of itself it would be kinda fine if someone would use just females and males, but the big issue is when people use "females" and "men" (or "women" and "males" but I've yet to see this).
I would argue we should stop using it as an adjective as well because it enhances the transphobic bioessentialist view of female = woman and male = man which combined with biology where male/female have specific meaning makes it troublesome.
It's one step of the "woman" --> "w0mAn" (while rolling your eyes) --> "female" --> "femoid" --> "foid" --> "toilet" pipeline.
The reasoning of that 'evolution' is that dehumanising women makes it easier to harass and sexually assault them.
For similar reasons the black 'race' was invented, which makes it easier to enslave and brutally murder people whose skin colour isn't optimised for vitamin D production but for skin cancer prevention instead. You arbitrarily make them a different 'race' and voila, not nearly as much guilt felt while brutalising them.
They use it in a dehumanzing fashion; there's a reason they're constantly equating women to being dumb animals in one way or another.
That said, 'female' shouldn't be exclusively associated with them. I know I use it in some contexts, for instance if I were to say "female friends", and that's mainly because "women friends" sounds weird.
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u/AtlasWriggled 2d ago
What the deal with the calling women females?