“I was actually talking about this with my boss last night, because one of our local basketball teams calls themselves the ‘women’s team’ but they’re (in) high school,” she said. Remi Monaghan, a sports anchor and reporter with FOX 17 in Grand Rapids, added that it’s a respect thing, through and through, on top of being a professionalism, appropriateness thing. There’s a subtle implication in calling women girls that they aren’t mature, responsible adults.” “It’s similar to the trajectory of infant to toddler, to child, to pre-teen, teenager, young adult, etc. “Language and word choice matter, and distinguishing developmental terms exist for a reason,” Hudak wrote in another email. Maddy Hudak, who holds many positions down south as a writer for USA Today’s SaintsWire, a reporter for ESPN covering the New Orleans Saints and a sideline reporter for Tulane University’s football program, agreed with Gertsner. Gerstner said she sees this as a way to portray women as, and ultimately make them feel, less empowered. However, #girlboss and #girlpower are slung around and have become cemented slogans for women, whether they wanted it or not. You never see anything like #boyboss or #boypower trending on Twitter. Like I said earlier, men are always called men and less so as boys, unless it’s in a cutesy or colloquial way, Gerstner noted. “It diminishes the adult aspect of women.” Joanne Gerstner, professor of sports journalism at Michigan State University and creator of Open Court, wrote it simply and effectively: The AP Stylebook said that doing this can be perceived as demeaning and call to mind historical, out-dated language used by some to address Black men.īut, race-related coverage when it comes to age differentiation is a whole other story and right now we’re focusing on why ‘girls’ and ‘women’ need to quickly become independent of each other. These nuances and unintended implications can be, for example, referring to Black males of any age and in any context as boys. While it is always inaccurate to call people under 18 men or women and people 18 and older girls or boys, be aware of nuances and unintentional implications.” The AP Stylebook defines boy or girl as: “Generally acceptable to describe males or females younger than 18. Proper terminology usage has become a more prevalent issue to address and fix over the last few months, especially on Twitter. It could be to make female athletes less potent versions of themselves to fit them into this strategically small box, the unconscious stereotypes and fulfill the grotesque male desire. It could be due to the societal projection of the female image, how society wants women to look and act, and how sports, where you need to be powerful and strong, goes against this entirely. Now, how we as a society got to the point where we began interchanging the two terms so casually remains unknown – because it’s definitely not the same for differentiating boys and men – but a few fellow female sports journalists have their opinions, as do I.
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