I also referred to men as males in the post, but that didn’t seem to bother anyone.
Though I do admit female was a more used term. I was trying to explain some of the differences (to the best of my knowledge) of why males are more agressive and just generally not so in touch with their emotions, as opposed to females. I mean, come on, I wasn’t trying to offend anybody, but I do suppose that some people just saw “female, brain”, thought I was talking smack about women and just started downvoting me 🤷. I was trying to explain that that is not the context and that those 2 terms were just the first ones that popped up in my mind, but it was too late.
I get the likely reason why you don’t find it offensive, but I also get why plenty people do.
Note how the complains are usually towards the usage of “female” as a noun, not as an adjective. That’s because of a small quirk of English, that marks adjective nominalisation rather heavily. To show it with a non-offensive example:
I got two cats. *The young is a tabby, and *the old is *a bicolour.
That likely sounds fine in the other language[s] that you speak (as it would do in my L1 and L2), but it sounds weird for English speakers - they’d expect “young”, “old” and “bicolour” to be followed by nouns, not to be treated as nouns.
As a result, when you “promote” an adjective to a noun, people usually take it as creating a category aside from whatever category the relevant entities were formerly assigned to. And if the former category was “human beings”, the nominalisation becomes dehumanising.
Another example [now offensive] to highlight this would be:
“Alice is gay” - most people wouldn’t raise an eyebrow to that
“Alice is a gay” - since the usage of article forces reading “gay” as a noun, it suddenly sounds dehumanising.
The same process actually does apply to “male”; the main difference is that men aren’t seen as a disfavoured group by society, and people often take that into account when judging the offensiveness of an utterance.
I also referred to men as males in the post, but that didn’t seem to bother anyone.
Though I do admit female was a more used term. I was trying to explain some of the differences (to the best of my knowledge) of why males are more agressive and just generally not so in touch with their emotions, as opposed to females. I mean, come on, I wasn’t trying to offend anybody, but I do suppose that some people just saw “female, brain”, thought I was talking smack about women and just started downvoting me 🤷. I was trying to explain that that is not the context and that those 2 terms were just the first ones that popped up in my mind, but it was too late.
I get the likely reason why you don’t find it offensive, but I also get why plenty people do.
Note how the complains are usually towards the usage of “female” as a noun, not as an adjective. That’s because of a small quirk of English, that marks adjective nominalisation rather heavily. To show it with a non-offensive example:
That likely sounds fine in the other language[s] that you speak (as it would do in my L1 and L2), but it sounds weird for English speakers - they’d expect “young”, “old” and “bicolour” to be followed by nouns, not to be treated as nouns.
As a result, when you “promote” an adjective to a noun, people usually take it as creating a category aside from whatever category the relevant entities were formerly assigned to. And if the former category was “human beings”, the nominalisation becomes dehumanising.
Another example [now offensive] to highlight this would be:
The same process actually does apply to “male”; the main difference is that men aren’t seen as a disfavoured group by society, and people often take that into account when judging the offensiveness of an utterance.
Because there’s no history of “males” being used in a derogatory way.