🅰🅻🅸🅲🅴 (🌈🦄)<p>I just got a reply that sent me down a rabbit hole of "am I a pickme girl?", and the ride was kinda wild.</p><p>My initial reaction to the comment was "that sounds like they're implying I'm a pickme".</p><p>Followed by "oh shit, do people think I'm a pickme?"</p><p>So I started looking for some meme image to use in a reply to deflect the implication (though I don't *think* they meant it to read like that). As I was scrolling past an endless wall of images, I noticed three main categories of result: "am I a pickme girl" quizzes and articles from "women's" sites/magazines, "pickme girl" memes featuring a specific girl and some text calling her a pickme, and "pickme girl starter packs" which (as far as I can tell by the phrasing and sources) seem to have been written mostly by guys.</p><p>And the more I scrolled—looking for proof that I either was or wasn't a dreaded "pickme girl", the more pissed off I got at the whole concept.</p><p>Then I searched for "pejorative slang terms for women" and "pejorative slang terms for men"...</p><p>Then I started yelling at my phone.</p><p>The sheer number of derogatory terms for women is astounding (yes, I know, thanks captain obvious), but what got me was that there were shitty slang terms for roughly *every* way a woman can present—"girly girl", "butch", "princess", "ice queen", "drama queen", "pickme", "bitch", "cunt", "karen", "soccer mom", "dyke", "camgirl", "attention whore", and so on.</p><p>Contrast that with the results for men; there are significantly fewer terms, and many of them are derogatory *because* they're comparing them to women or perceived "girl-like" behavior such as being penetrated—"bitch", "pussy", "femboy", "fag", "twat", "girly", "space karen" etc. The common ones that aren't comparisons to women seem to center around body parts or "degrading" sex acts ("dick", "asshole", "asshat", "cocksucker").</p><p>So now that this post has earned an R-rating for language, where am I going with this?</p><p>Well, you may have seen it coming, but "blah blah patriarchy bad, stereotypes bad, and word choice matters". Almost all of the pejorative slang we use comes from a male gaze, punishes anyone who isn't Chad Thundercock, and creates a catch-22 where any presentation of—or association with—femininity is deemed bad.</p><p><a href="https://lgbtqia.space/tags/Feminism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Feminism</span></a> <a href="https://lgbtqia.space/tags/Rant" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Rant</span></a> <a href="https://lgbtqia.space/tags/FuckThePatriarchy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FuckThePatriarchy</span></a></p>