Is There A Problem With Chicks?

A Couple Of Hot Chicks...Or Warm, At Least. First of all, rest assured I have no problem with women. We love women around here.

Actually, I have no problem with chicks, either.

And by that I don’t mean the fuzzy future KFC delights seen to your left . In fact, I’m not even referring to actual female human beings.

I’m talking about the very term “chicks” itself.

But apparently someone else does have a problem with “chicks”.

Granted, it doesn’t happen often, but every once in a while I get an angry e-mail purporting that I should immediately cease and desist from usage of the word in my favorite context for usage thereof.

Almost invariably it’s the name of the podcast, The Chick Whisperer, that gets them going.

Typically, the rant centers around my allegedly wanton and outlandish implication that women are “animals”.

Interestingly, about half of those complaints bypass the word “chick” altogether. I guess some who are offended apparently forgot to be offended by the whole title.

Instead, they key in on the fact that the first recorded instance of “whispering” was done unto horses. “Reducing women to mere beasts of burden, are you?”, read one particularly noteworthy message.

That one is so silly I’m not even going to glorify it. By the way, my 9-year-old daughter called and she says to stop insulting horses by equating them to ghosts and stuff.

But I digress. Indeed, it’s usage of the word “chicks” that’s the focus of this post.

I have yet to receive a concrete answer to what exactly is so “offensive” about referring to women as “chicks”.

When I ask them if referring to men as “dudes” is equally an affront, I’m typically met with dead silence.

And when I have the utter audacity to mention that the name of the show was actually coined by a woman, dead silence often gives way to gasps of disbelief.

Particularly interesting was an e-mail I received just yesterday from a reader, claiming that using the word “chick” to describe a woman was likely to scare women away, and further demonstrated that I lacked social skills in general.

Now granted, I was sure to zip up my “fire suit” as I wrote that latest newsletter addressing social dynamics. After all, any time one dares write about social skills, one can fully expect to hear from everyone who has no social skills complaining about how the author obviously has no social skills.

Well in the case of the e-mail I noted, I actually responded…ill-advised as it was to do so.

Not wanting to burn a lot of cycles on something so preposterous, I simply said, “Oh please. A woman named the show.”

It was the response to that which prompted this blog post.

“Well that says it all, a woman who’s not supportive of her own gender or is pandering to socially inept males. If you can’t see the problem, you are perpetrating the crime!”

Not “supportive” to one’s own gender? Pandering to socially inept males? Perpetrating the crime?

Are you kidding me?

Now here’s the kicker. I hope you’re sitting down for this.

As it turns out, these e-mails were being written and sent to me by a man. (Let’s not insult him by calling him a “dude”, or anything.)

He has one of those ambiguous names like “Pat”, at least sort of. Everyone else I’ve ever met with his name was female.

But, of course, he was offended that I’d assume he was female too. Go figure.

After going on to insult me freely in the context of hammering me for daring to insult “girls” by calling them “chicks” (did you catch the irony there, party people?) he failed to answer a simple question for me: “Okay, tell me exactly WHY the word ‘chicks’ is so offensive?”

Could it really be because anyone who uses the term is equating human beings to mere “animals”?

Assuming the worst, is that even so bad? I don’t remember “Hoss” from Bonanza getting his boxers all up in a wad over this sort of thing, dawg.

The truth is that the term is NOT offensive. Read this definition from The Online Etymology Dictionary:

chick

c.1320, abbreviation of chicken (q.v.), extended to human offspring (often in alliterative pairing chick and child) and used as a term of endearment. As slang for “young woman” it is first recorded 1927 (in “Elmer Gantry”), supposedly from U.S. black slang, in British use by c.1940, popularized by Beatniks late 1950s. Chicken in this sense is from 1711. Sometimes c.1600-1900 chicken was taken as a plural, chick as a singular (cf. child/children) for the domestic fowl.

By the way, I went to Urban Dictionary and SlangSite and the word “chick” wasn’t even listed. Go figure. The term is so mainstream it isn’t even slang anymore.

But the important part here is, did you catch that? “Chick” is a term of endearment. (Then again, The Online Etymology Dictionary used other offensive terms like “black”, “Beatnik”, “Elmer” and “singular” in context; so what do they know, right?)

My new friend with the ambiguous name had claimed that the word is “almost always” used in a derogatory sense, as in “those darn chicks” or “hot chicks”.

That’s just not so. “Cool chicks” are thought of quite highly, believe me.

in fact, I think even the argument that “hot chick” is a pejorative is questionable, at best. It’s my firmly held belief that the vast majority of “hot chicks” go out of their way to be such…perhaps even looking themselves in the mirror after getting ready in the morning and verbalizing it aloud to themselves.

Every woman I’ve ever met who was “offended” by the term “hot chick” wasn’t one.

But all of that is moot. The point is that the word “chick” is meant as a fun, playful descriptor (just like “dude”) to be used by fun, playful people…preferably with a sense of humor.

And by “people”, I mean men and women alike.

If you want to stick to “man” and “woman” and rid yourself of any sort of fun, playful descriptors in life, that’s fine. Have at it. But find something better to do than tell other perfectly decent dudes and chicks that there’s something wrong with them because they aren’t like you. Last I checked, that was the very definition of “intolerance”.

Go insert your penises into each other’s vaginas and conceive infants by procreate amongst yourselves. Or something equally as politically correct and clinical sounding.

Okay, with that off my chest, I’m done. Next time well discuss the terms “babes” and “hunks”. On second thought, no we won’t.

Be Good,

Scot McKay

P.S. Enjoy the latest episode of The Chick Whisperer, which as fortune would have it is called “Women Are NOT The Enemy”. You can find it on iTunes or on the RSS Feed.

My co-host is Nick Sparks of The Social Man, who along with Christian Hudson has just released the Unbreakable program…hot stuff.