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Hey there, ladies.

Women?

Gals?

Broads?

Just… not girls, okay?

We all stopped being girls a long time ago. Calling ourselves girls once we were old enough to menstruate was a slight stretch. Calling ourselves girls once we were old enough to vote was a bit ridiculous. But calling ourselves girls, perpetually? Grown women calling themselves girls? Can we stop that now, please?

I am a mother of girls. I was a girl. I am not a girl now, nor shall I ever be again. I have developed secondary sexual characteristics. I am capable of bearing young. I am old enough to pilot a motor vehicle (my lack of a driver’s license notwithstanding). I am legally an adult, with all the voting/military service/lotto, alcohol and cigarette rights that entails. I am, by physical development, experience and legal standing, a woman.

Nature has already provided us women with shorter statures and higher voices than men. Evolution has tried to fool men into thinking we’re basically overgrown children in the hopes that they would stick around and protect us while our stomachs were comically disproportionate to ours bodies, while we were vulnerable in our care of a tiny, floppy proto-human. We don’t need, in our modern lives full of cars and solid houses and very few sabre tooth tigres at all, to compound the issue by openly referring to ourselves as immature members of our gender.

I could go on about entrenched patriarchy. I could hold forth about disproportionate poverty, access to reproductive health care, illegally trafficked sex workers or a number of other subjects. But ultimately, until we believe ourselves to be fully adult members of the species – believe it inherently enough that we don’t even think about seriously referring to ourselves the same way we do our children – we’re probably not going to change a whole lot of that stuff.

After all, those are adult problems.

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Anna Davey

Known for her distinctive colouring and reclusive habits, the wild A. Davey is a species well-adapted to urban environments. A prolific breeder, this species subsists mainly on pho, gin and the internet.

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