Cougars, Coeds and Chick Lit.

I am here to tell you that I reject the following terms and will not being using them: Cougars, Coeds and Chick Lit. I invite you all to join in my campaign.

Cougars.  This has come into fashion in the last few years, its name even graces(graced) (ahem) a TV show.  A Cougar is an older woman who is dating—or married to—a (much) younger man.  They have now split, but the Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher union comes to mind.

Coeds.  For years, I read books that included the term Coed and I assumed it meant college student, either male or female.  I assumed that once colleges opened their doors to both men and women, the education was coeducational and thus the students were called coeds.  I can still recall the feeling of horror I felt my senior year in high school when the sentence structure I was reading did not support this definition and I was forced to consider that the term only applied to females.  I refused to believe this, at first, but double checked with my mother who confirmed the grim news.

Chick Lit.  First of all, this is an awful term because when it is said it aloud, a large percentage of people think you are discussing gum (Chiclets) and then there is usually a weird cognitive dissonance moment.  Chick Lit is a novel written primarily for women and it usually contains some elements of a romantic story and happy ending, though it should not be considered the same as a “romance novel.”  There is often something of one of these elements:  zaniness, work drama, conversation with best friends.  Sometimes there is great tragedy to overcome.

Why do we need to end our use of these terms?  I reject them all because they are all terms focused on women that have no equivalent for males.  What do you call an older man who dates/marries a much younger woman?  There is no term, as it is an accepted practice in our society.  If you are channeling your inner frat boy, you might call the man in question “lucky” and snigger after saying it.  What do you call a male student at a college?  A student.  There is certainly no term that suggests that they are added on to the scene and maybe it is okay they are there, they are pretty and all, but they are not real students.

As for Chick Lit, are there no novels of fluff written for men?  Of course there are.  What do we call them?  There is no term.  There are many genre specific terms of kinds of fluff novels that are primarily read by men:  science fiction, fantasy, spy thrillers, etc.  Though those genre specific books aren’t looked upon as great literature, they are also not dismissed out of hand with an overarching title:  Sperm Lit, perhaps?

Language reflects our values and beliefs and none of these three terms reflects an equality between women and men we pretend we have in society.  Granted, our language concerning gender is at a disadvantage from the get-go as the common terms we use to describe the not-male part of the population (women, woman, female) cannot be used without summoning the male part of the species.  Undoing this would be quite a feat and it is not what I am here to do today.  Today, I am just asking you to think before you use the above three terms.  If you chose to use them, what are you saying about women’s place in the world?