This has reminded me of my deep, visceral discomfort with the phrase ‘becoming a woman’ (or ‘you're a woman now’) and how it ties womanhood inextricably to sex and childbearing. https://twitter.com/veschwab/status/1252986339957575680

You see this a lot in fantasy and historical, often when the character has their first period.

In this context, ‘woman’ can be a threat (e.g. Ramsay sneering ‘watch her become a woman’ in GOT). Certainly it's a cast-iron guarantee that the character is expected to have sex.

Often characters are at high risk of dying in childbirth in these fantastical or historical settings, so ’becoming a woman’ actually implies a threat of death, as well as potential sexual assault.

Of course, there's also the fact that our modern words ‘woman’ and ‘wife’ both stemmed from the same root, the word ‘wīfman’ – yet another link between the states of womanhood and wifehood.

Sadly, using ‘girl’ for an adult woman also has uncomfortable, belittling connotations. Note how many film and book titles use ‘girl’ when they're about adult women.

Now imagine the weirdness of THE WICKER BOY, or IRON BOY, or THE BOY IN THE HIGH CASTLE.

‘Girl’ is of uncertain etymology, but is thought to come from Proto-Germanic *gurwilaz, a gender-neutral word for a child.

So when you call someone a girl, you are, in fact, calling them a child. Which is problematic.

However, you can also see why it may be a more comfortable word for some women (esp. queer women), because ‘girl’ is totally divorced from the connotations of sex, childbearing and constraining gender roles that ‘woman’ carries. In fact, originally, it wasn't gendered at all.

Anyway, what I'm saying is that society has somehow succeeded in making us – women, girls – really fucking uncomfortable with something as basic as describing ourselves.

Both words are a double-edged sword. Both carry centuries of weight. Both are, in their own ways, not good.

Anyway, on this subject, did you know that there is an entire constructed language for women, created for a dystopian novel called NATIVE TONGUE by Suzette Haden Elgin?

It's called Láadan. And I think this exact kind of discomfort is why Elgin decided to create it.

Here's some more on Láadan. While it never took off, you can actually learn it.

I really love some of the words. https://lithub.com/this-science-fiction-novelist-created-a-feminist-language-from-scratch/