The Truth about Being One of the Guys

FEMINIST - I opened an email earlier today forwarded from a friend in Canada and it started off like so...

"I think they're trying to contact you guys."

What I thought was amusing was that it was an email being forwarded to two women, and yet he had chosen to refer to us as "guys".

Not gals.

Not chicks.

Not Utero-Americans.

Guys.

And I think this is a positive thing, because what it implies is that guys is now an unisex word which means a group of females or males, and there doesn't have to be 1 male in the group.

Unlike French/Francais, in which if there is 1 male in a group its automatically upgraded to the masculine form of the word. We should be so fortunate that in English we don't worry about masculine and feminine words on a constant basis.

But we do pay attention to specific instances, and being referred to as a guy is a positive sign feminism is headed in the right direction.

So now that we femmes are "one of the guys" what should we do next?

Should we also become dudes? (As opposed to dudettes, a word I find annoying.)

Or how about man? As in "Hey man, wazzup?"

I think I shall start calling all my female homies "man" from now on. If I stick with it maybe we can start a trend that spans the globe.

Which begs the question if men and man becomes an unisex term, should we use a strictly masculine word for people with penises? Perhaps 'heman' or 'He-Man'?

Repeat after me...

"Hey He-Man, wazzup?" (Masculine only.)

"Hey man, wazzup?" (Unisex, singular.)

"Hey guys, wazzup?" (Unisex, plural.)