NewTime wrote:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BputcRHN6rg
This Pitbull feat T-Pain song has the lyric "you can be my girl I can be your man"
Is this line sexist? He's using "girl" and "man" as equivalents instead of using "woman" and "man", or "girl" and "boy".
Yes it is sexist, however largely only in that double standards are applied. In our society...and many others, youthfulness is considered a positive female trait, by both men and women, thus the intention of calling a woman a girl had often been a complimentary one. Calling a man a boy, on the other hand, seems to be the equivalent of calling him immature, or unworthy of respect, and thus an insult.
This recent backlash to calling women girls comes with the idea that there is no honor in being a woman, as there is in being a man, and that it's insulting to view women as perpetual children....in western culture, we don't really have an idea of the concept of womanhood in the same way that we have a concept of manhood, where it is something that must be earned or achieved in some way. Not all cultures, are like this, however.
In many tribal cultures, where there are male initiation rites (usually something dangerous and painful), successful childbirth is often considered a female initiation right, and females are not considered women until they successfully bare children.
I stopped referring to myself as a girl when I began to think it was silly to do so, after my body matured to it's final adult form in my late 20s. It's interesting, that in my grandparent's era, girls were typically women who were unmarried, or assumed to be, and once married, they were more often referred to as "ladies". I think they had a little more of a concept of "womanhood" than exists today. My great grandmother once showed me a photo of herself when she was 15. She looked like she was in her 20s, and she said it was because they didn't make clothing specifically for teenagers in those days. She used the fact that she could pass for a grown woman to secure a job as a nanny.