"you can be my girl I can be your man" sexist line?

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NewTime
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09 Sep 2017, 6:33 pm

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".



EclecticWarrior
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09 Sep 2017, 6:35 pm

He's trying to portray a masculine image and so it'd be odd for him to use the term "boy" here. And "girl" has fewer syllables than "woman", which wouldn't scan. So I'd say no.


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Raleigh
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09 Sep 2017, 6:38 pm

it's a song.
And not a very good one.
If people want to split hairs about the words used, much joy to them.
Poetic licence, and all that yadda.


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09 Sep 2017, 7:10 pm

I think when a male calls a female, a "girl", and himself, a "man", it's a way of saying: "I'll take care of you"----that might be sincerely "giving", or egotistical, but I don't feel it's sexist (as in, him saying that because he feels the woman can't take care of herself - but, that's the way some really insecure women, IMO, take it).

It's, like, a fad, right now, for black men to call women "Baby Girl" (at least, in MY area - and, it's almost always an older woman, like me), and I don't have a problem, with that, at all----in-fact, I LIKE it, because of what I said, the connotation seems to be.







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09 Sep 2017, 11:22 pm

I vote no.



C2V
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10 Sep 2017, 1:06 am

I thought that just meant the anatomical differences between the binary sexes. As in the two in the song would be companions together, one is a male and the other a female.
I fail at subtext completely.


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Chronos
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10 Sep 2017, 1:43 am

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.