Is there a name for this thing that seems to happen all the time on feminist threads? It happens on other subjects too,, but it's very noticeable on feminism.

we could call it the "Bubbly Boy Law

Well you could but given how often "bubbly" appears in obituaries of men and is almost the default descriptor for boys and young men, including a 7 year old boy killed in the Barcelona attack, you might come across as a bit crass.

buddy is definitely something I'd see as male.

Friends is becoming used more in schools for young children to try and be gender neutral.

buddy friend folks

In Scotland we have 'pal', which genuinely is used for boys and girls. Probably more for boys, but very definitely for girls too

It's more of a Glasgow thing?

"Guys" is definitely male.

&tiktok thanks for the hand.

Anyway back OT most dictionaries have 'guys' as being gender neutral (including OED and merriam-webster) though I haven't checked the Mary Daly intergalactic dictionary but I would be interested to see if it is referred to.

Helping you out here, Manclif :)

Men more likely to commit violent or serious crimes for which custodial sentence more likely.

Female criminality is more usually fraud, shop lifting, handling stolen goods - rarely violent, usually at the less serious end of the spectrum.

mancliffe - as that isn't really the topic of conversation, why don't you start a thread on that. It wouldn't be a TAAT as it has very little relevance to this one.

Otherwise, it just looks like you want to derail this thread, rather than engaging in the topic of this one.

But just to get you started - this book makes a good starting point. Enjoy the read.

Manclif but guys is absolutely NOT gender neutral, is it? It makes 'honorary' men out of the women....and not in a good way.

@BertrandRussell
For excellent and well researched and understood reasons.

Could you supply a link to support this? I ask as all the stats I can find suggest otherwise.

"Males get harsher sentences than females". Yeah like that accounts for them being 95/96% of the prison population.

In Scotland we have 'pal', which genuinely is used for boys and girls. Probably more for boys, but very definitely for girls too.

Mate is almost always used for boys and men, apart from during a short period during the nineties when Men Behaving Badly was all the rage.

'Guys' isn't gender neutral, it's a male term that is stretched to a group.
'Folks' is about the best I get to, otherwise no, can't think of a female collective that could comfortably include a man without it appearing you hadn't noticed he was there.

It's the same as in French where a group of women takes the feminine but add in just one man and the group becomes masculine.

The mate thing, is actually regional, I lived in a place were everyone said to each other. it was grim

It's was said very much like duck is in Nottingham.

And Tiktok is right - 'guys' isn't gender neutral, it just neutralizes women within men. As proven by the fact that nobody says 'Sally is a top guy', they only use it to the group.

I know people who use 'folks' in preference to 'guys' - it never comes naturally out of my mouth for some reason. And if you're American you can get away with 'you all.'

I don't think there are any that have gone from women to men. The recent 'you lad' thing, my dds have said to me in jest. ('pie for tea? really? you absolute lad!'). But I can't see anyone calling Jeremy Corbyn (for example) an absolute lass any time soon!

Sounds strange but I'm sure one woman in particular wants to defend men in front of me because I'm a lesbian.

Beryl, I had a very similar conversation at work this week. Female coworkers convinced that women sexually abuse children at the same rate as men but are just not caught for it.
I felt very hot

@elfinpre it is closer to the prison population but males are more likely to get a prison sentence than females. I'm not starting a debate as to why this is the case, it's just statistically the case.

@tiktok I used to use 'guys' when in front of a class as it's supposed to be a gender neutral albeit an Americanism.

I think that there are 2 different ways in which this happens.

1. For a genuine reason, the outliers in a discussion do need to be recongized and remembered, e.g. if discussing who gets to use which bathrooms, the smaller number of people who would be most traumatized by mixed bathrooms shouldn't be forgotten just because they're a small number.
2. It's just another example of whataboutery. There's a discussion going on about how women find it hard to walk in certain shoes, and how women's shoes are really uncomfortable. Someone comes on and says that they've always thought men's shoes are uncomfortable because they rub so badly on the heel, and then starts trying to prove that men's shoes are more damaging than women's.

In the second example, the person is putting their own personal example as being a better form of 'proof' than the average statistics for an entire nation, and THEN (and this is the shutting down part) insisting that people ignore the main topic and discuss Oxfords v. brogues etc. To ignore that derail isn't shutting down the discussion - the discussion is how much women's shoes hurt feet. It isn't denying that person their experience, it's having a discussion based on large-scale data rather than personal anecdotes. If someone wants to discuss whether men's shoes rub their heals, that's fine - but off they pop to another discussion.

It's a bit like being in a history class and suddenly wanting to discuss poetry on a similar theme. The teacher would say something like "thank you for that interesting point, but let's get back to the dates. Perhaps you could ask you English teacher to follow that up."

I try not to call men 'boys' ...don't think I ever do :)

Talking of gendered language though - have you noticed that you can call a group of women 'you guys' (as well as a group of men, or a mixed group), but you don't call an individual woman 'a guy', whereas you can certainly do so with an individual man.

'He's a nice guy' = perfectly acceptable

'She's a nice guy" = weird and never done