this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2026
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Look, I get the incel version on fEmaLeS isn't liked. But male/female is a perfectly valid way to refer to the 2 sexes. And if you aren't doing some incel putting down women shit in using the word, I think acting like using female is the same as referring to someone as the n word is just stupid. There was nothing in that statement that sounded disrespectful to women.
I'm sorry, but I this just isn't true. Calling women females is definitely an incel thing (although admittedly has come more into mainstream (male) lexicon because of the algorithms).
Female/male is an adjective. Woman/man is a noun. A woman is female (not in a TERF way, lol), but she isn't a female any more than she is a short.
While I've not done a deep dive into the origins, incels pushed the female thing it seems largely because they don't see women as human and want to make them sound like they're a different species. It might have even started off from incels calling women "the female species" because that's a term I've definitely seen before in those communities.
thank you for explaining it better than I could.
It objectifies the woman in question, showing that you have no respect to her as a person, and that you just see them as mating material, or a specimen.
Even outside incel context: bad.
You are definitely being downvoted here by men who realize that they've used females as a noun and don't want to admit why that was wrong. I'm sure I will be downvoted too, so let's be friends!
Yeah! But I was going to say something stupid, then thought about why the thing might be, so I reached this conclusion.