Don’t Be Such a Girl!
Why it’s not just a harmless joke and why I won’t stop being mad about it
My father has taken a liking to problematic language in recent years, to say the least. One of his latest favourites in conversation bugs me particularly, though: Whenever someone complains about something minor, even jokingly — bad weather, a headache, an annoying colleague — he’ll respond with a jovial “Oh, don’t be such a girl”.
He thinks it’s hillarous. A harmless joke. Particularly funny fwhen he can say it to someone who actually is female. It’s not.
The language we use shapes our minds and our society.
The fact that language matters in re-entrenching patterns and ideas in our minds isn’t new. A common mnemonic in various disciplines that take an interest in the human brain — from biologists to sociologists and psychologists — is, “Neurons that fire together wire together.” (It’s basically a short, simplified summary of Hebbian theory.)
What this complex process breaks down to is, among other things, that we learn from perceiving stimuli simultaneously, and the next time one of these is triggered, the connected neurons will also activate. This may mean that the part of your brain that processes images and tells you ‘what you’re seeing there is a cup of tea’ fires at the same time as your pain memory, because you burned your tongue a few days ago. It hurt and your brain is connecting these stimuli to learn for the future, and to warn you to be careful around steaming hot cups of delicious tea.
However, we don’t even need to look as far afield as neuroscience to understand why jokes like “Don’t be such a girl”, repeated over and over, are harmful. From our school days, we all know that repetition is a great tool for memorising information. Cramming for a biology exam? Trying to remember a sonnet? The first thing most of us do is read that information over and over.
And heaven forbid you recorded a tape (hah, remember those?) to help you learn a poem by heart, and you made a mistake or mispronounced a word somewhere in the recording — that trip-up is now likely hard-coded into your memory of the poem. Damn it.
Repetition prompts you to store information — even if you know it’s incorrect.
Repetition shapes our brains, our associations — even banal everyday information like jokes, commercials, common phrases and the like. If you keep telling people “Haha, don’t be a girl”, they will begin to associate it with the circumstances that typically prompt this joke.
This is problematic because responding to complaints with “Don’t be such a girl” holds some very questionable implications, when you really think about it:
- Complaining is consistently met with a form of criticism (even if it’s humorous), so you should learn not to speak up about your discomfort.
- “Being a girl” is synonymous with being whiny and weak.
- “Being a girl” is a bad thing. You should actively try not to be that, even if you literally ARE a girl. Femininity is an undesirable state of being. Girls are less-than.
This is the heart of the information we are really spreading when we say, “Don’t be such a girl.” And because constant repetition reinforces even information you disagree with or know to be incorrect, jokes like that are harmful.
Of course, you’re capabale of contextualising a joke. Even if the implications are, perhaps, a little sketchy, you know it’s all in good humour. Not to be taken to seriously. Right?
Well, another issue with spreading problematic jokes and stereotypes through repetition — even and especially when it’s intended as humour — is that not everyone understands the context that may be obvious to you. Aside from neurological conditions that make parsing tone and humour more difficult, and aside from the fact that some adults just don’t place that much value on critical thinking, there is a whole, huge demographic out there that is notorious for misunderstanding the lines between serious commentary and humour: kids.
Children hear and see new, confusing, wondrous things all day, and adults seem to have it all figured out. Not all jokes are clearly discernible as such to children, and even if they are, knowing the joke teaches them that the subject is okay to make fun of.
We teach our children which subjects are and aren’t okay to joke about.
My nephew, who spends at lot of time at my father’s — his grandpa’s — place, is now twelve. He’s hitting puberty hard and he’s forming some crucial ideas about sex and girls right now that will influence how he treats women for the rest of his life.
The thought of him internalising that a) girls are whiny and weak and less-than, and b) you shouldn’t speak up about your discomfort — that thought makes me sick. It sets him up for a bunch of unhappy and unhealthy relationship patterns that will make his life so much harder than it has to be, and will involve his partners, too.
It is for his sake and that of thousands of children just like him that I believe we need to stop using language like that. It is our moral obligation as adults and role-models to take care with the words we use, and to question the things we have heard a million times.
So, in short: no, I don’t think that “Don’t be such a girl” is a harmless joke. Statements like that cause real harm to real people, every day. It may be a diffuse effect, hard to trace because of the ubiquitiy of the problematic phrase and the sentiments that prompted it, but it is there.
Don’t believe me? I warmly recommend reading up on internalised mysogyny. And women aren’t alone in this; basically all marginalised groups — BIPOC, people with disabilities, LGBTQIA people, as well as many religious communities — are harmed by stereotypes about them spread through society in similar ways.
If I could have my way, this article would be the last time that joke about being a girl was ever repeated. The irony that writing about it further spreads and repeats the harmful phrase is not lost on me, but I think it’s important to discuss this.
What are the ‘harmless jokes’ you’re sick of hearing from your relatives? Let me know so we can commiserate.
