I have a pretty awesome story about this. The person who faced vengeance is dear to my heart, but it all ends well and he was being a jerk at the time so it's okay.

I accidentally undertipped once! My friend and I were drunk as hell and decided it would be fun/visually satisfying to get the total bill to come to a whole number. Then, halfway home from the restaurant, I realized I'd only tipped like $2.65. Pretty mortifying, but nobody called me on it and when I went back on a…

Paul McCartney is my fucking number one idol and I am so happy about this. Dear lord may I be this cool at 72.

I think if the child won't survive birth or much past birth, I can accept that as an inevitable tragedy and respect the mother's right to terminate to spare her baby and her family from suffering. If it won't live to experience life either way, I can accept that. However if the child is disabled in some way but…

I also think it's weird but not in a bad way.

Agreed on all counts :)

Yeah, I feel you. And being an ally to social progress can get frustrating - I've been on both sides of that equation. As a queer person I sometimes really wish that all the well-intentioned straight "allies" would shut up and stop overstepping boundaries and saying demeaning things even by accident, and as a white…

Seriously diggin the fact that the older one is barefoot

I am capable of pregnancy and I hold the same opinion that you do.

I vehemently disagree. If we drew the line at the point of totally independent survival, we'd be "aborting" toddlers. You can't donate a kidney and then take it back after the surgery. At a certain point, you have committed to ensuring the survival of a human being.

The thing is, age of consent is also a very blurred and confusing line developmentally but we still agree that it should be drawn somewhere to protect people from being violated. I feel the same way about viability. No, I don't know when exactly it happens, and no, there is no perfectly scientific place to draw the…

I think the right thing for us both to do is to identify however feels comfortable and right, and then explain ourselves if that offends anyone. Personally I'd rather have the opportunity to say "hey, I am A FEMALE, I know that sounds harsh and cold to you but it's my gender identity and it just is kind of harsh and…

Eyyyyyy let's not get carried away, dude. I'm pretty sure even the people who think using "female" as a noun is always offensive don't think guys who do it are always doing it on purpose. I think they think it's a more of a subconscious sign that one is thinking about woman in a generalizing/condescending manner. …

Yeah. I think "female" as a noun is seen as offensive because it implies body parts more than it implies humanity, whereas "woman" can only refer to a human female. Not saying I necessarily agree with this analysis but I do understand it... and to be fair, I have definitely also heard it used in a derogatory way by…

Hey - thanks for weighing in! My motivation for commenting was that, since "female" being used in a value-neutral way seemed to me to be dialect-specific, I didn't think it was right to let a generalization like "Whenever I hear somebody use female as a noun while referring to humans, it is an immediate sign to me…

No, none of them had military associations that I knew of. This is what I know about the group of people who I heard use "female" in this way:

Who knows. That does make sense. I never really talked to them about it because these were mostly tangential friends/I ghosted out of a lot of people's lives when I left high school, and I didn't learn that "females" was considered problematic until I'd been in college about a year.

Thanks!

OH MY GOSH THIS THIS.

I've said this once before on Jez and was met with the internet comment section equivalent of blank stares, but here goes: Maybe this is a generational thing, and maybe this is a regional thing, heck if I know, but a large percentage of the African American people I know refer to women as "females", and it isn't used…