I have been a part of this community for close to 30 years. For the past 20 years, I have been attempting to find the best way to work with young men and helping them build their capacity for connection.

Along this path, the challenge that I see — as a Black man — are the blind spots we see when misogyny is used flippantly in common language. The specific topic that I am speaking of is calling a woman a “female.”

One of the first steps I’ve witnessed toward patriarchy is the loss of humanity. Calling a woman a female is dehumanizing. Example: When we use female, it could be referring to a racoon, millipede or giraffe. The fact that we use a word that casts such a wide net is dehumanizing. The word for an adult woman is WOMAN. The word of a young woman is GIRL. It’s simple. Context is everything.

Then there are the layers of intersections between gender and race. Most of the times I hear the word female when referring to women, it is coming from a Black man and sometimes a Black woman. It wasn’t ever used in a positive sentence about women.

You never hear, “Females be out here empowering each other.” It’s usually something along the lines of, “Females be complaining when you take them to The Cheesecake Factory.”

Using this vernacular makes me cringe as I’m writing this, but this is how I hear it. I know folks of all races use this term, but it ultimately harms Black women. This is called misogynoir.

Merriam-Webster online defines misogynoir as “hatred of, aversion to, or prejudice against Black women.” It’s much more than that.

It is as Moya Bailey, African American feminist scholar, author and activist, writes, “how people perceive and treat Black women and understand them to be worthy of respect and care — that’s something that has to change at the structural level of our society, not just the individual behaviors.”

I think that it’s important to add that as someone who works with middle schoolers daily, the term female is used less and less among youth. The young women that I work with are empowered to say, “I have a name.” And young men are understanding how much weight that word holds. Parents are doing an amazing job raising the expectation of young men. I appreciate everything that I’ve learned from young folk and families. My intention is to continue to grow.

Submitted by Howard Hayes

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