the cooties effect

Despite the earnest efforts of feminists throughout the ages, there's still some inherent inequality in language. Sure, nowadays using they as a singular pronoun for an unknown person has become grammatical English, and the usage of Ms. as the female equivalent is now accepted, but it certainly doesn't mean (in language at least) that men and women are created equal.

There's an underlying factor that's behind this male/female mismatch. While it's completely normal for words to change in meaning and lose/gain power over time (which is why you won't be insulted if I called you a vagabond) It seems to be quite prevalent when it comes to words relating to women. I'm sure there's a jargony linguistics term for this form of language change, but I like to call this the cooties effect.

Cooties: not just for kids, apparently. The difference between guys and girls seems to be the emphasis placed on their gender in determining their identity. So, for guys to traditionally be considered "real men", they have to be macho and manly and dissociate themselves from all things non-manly. So, some of the greatest insults to guys involve questioning how manly they are, i.e. girl, wuss, prissy. The same doesn't exactly apply to girls - calling a girl "a boy", or "macho" doesn't really have the same effect, does it?

So, guys seem to do anything to make sure their masculinity doesn't inadvertently come into question, with potentially ambiguous words. Just look at situations when there's a group of guys and girls - calling the whole group Guys seems fine, but calling them Girls - even if there's 20 girls and 1 guy - seems inappropriate. French has two words that can be translated to "they"
Ils and Elles - one masculine, and the other feminine, and follows the same kind of rule.

So, when words become associated with girls, guys start to stop using it and gradually the word becomes used exclusively for females. Girl used to mean " any young person" (as seen in this post) before the meaning of the word gradually become disassociated with boys. It also happens with names - Some start off being gender neutral end up becoming female names, like Sidney, Meredith & Bethel.

Gee, and you thought you already got over that whole "eew, cooties" stage.