Princess, love, girl – when is a term of

endearment not welcome?

Rebecca Nicholson
While it’s possible that Mel Giedroyc, Sue Perkins and Mary Berry enjoyed
being referred to as ‘the girls’ by Paul Hollywood, gendered terms are usually
patronising and possessive

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/22/princess-love-
girl-when-is-term-of-endearment-not-welcome

When I think of Paul Hollywood, TV’s floury-haired fox and staunch upholder
of a strong crumb, I think of a man who only ever seems to be one pint of
bitter away from turning into your dad hitting the dancefloor at the end of a
very long wedding. The Bake Off judge has been all over the tabloids this week
– happily, not for wearing a Nazi uniform as fancy dress this time (it was
an ’Allo ’Allo!-themed night and he’s sorry, OK) – but it was one particular
answer in one particular interview that raised the bristles on my broad, lefty,
feminista chest. You’ll remember that when the Bake Off moved to Channel 4,
Hollywood was the only original host to stay with the programme, and for a
while, he says, this made him the most hated man in the country. In his
defence, he told the Radio Times this week: “I stayed with Bake Off. The girls
abandoned it. But I was the one put under siege.”

This “girls” conundrum came up again this week at the Girls’ School
Association’s annual conference in Manchester, which must have made any
branding for the event tricky. The former children’s mental health tsar
Natasha Devon said she would not refer to pupils as “girls or ladies” because it
is “patronising”. She suggested that gendered terms are not useful, and that
boys, as much as girls, are constrained by them. There have been some
objections to this, and people have howled that it is the snowflake PC brigade
getting their gender-neutral underwear in a twist for no good reason.

But those upset by her ideas might be interested in seeking out a fascinating
documentary that was on BBC Two in August, called No More Boys and Girls:
Can Our Kids Go Gender Free? It explored the idea that pupils were treated
differently depending on their gender, often unthinkingly. One male primary
school teacher called the girls “love” and “darling” and the boys “fella” and
“mate”. It concluded, fairly convincingly, that it provides a better start for
everyone if the language used for girls doesn’t imply that they are cute and
small and sweet, and the language used for boys doesn’t suggest that they are
strong and macho and stoic.

Crucially, of course, it’s all about context. Any debate around language will
never succeed in black-and-white terms because it will always depend on the
who, what, when, where and why. Recently, a man walked past me in the
street and made himself jump with a loud noise, a noise he had produced from
his own body. “Sorry, princess,” he said, immediately, and as we passed, both
startled, I heard him shout to his friend: “I just popped one off in front of that
girl.” In that instance, I did not mind being called “girl” or even “princess”, not
one little bit, because he wasn’t patronising me, and he wasn’t trying to put me
in my place – he was apologising to me for accidentally farting in my vicinity,
and in that brief, passing moment, I felt like a princess. It was the funniest
thing that happened to me all week.