I couldn't say when it "started," but it was certainly an insult when I was a kid. That would be circa 1960. Of course, they didn't have girl pitchers throwing knuckleballs in Little League then.

"Fighting like a girl" meant kicking -- this was before the days of kickboxing, and working-class American whiteboys never heard of la savate. In that connection, it is an interesting coincidence that savate is a feminine noun.

-- Mal

You hunt like a girl.

my whole life, sometimes aimed at me. Maybe I'm clueless, but I never cared. So what, I am a girl! That's what my middle school brain thought, if I even gave it that much thought.

... in one of the exercises, it was demonstrated how women run differently from men. So that one's been around for quite awhile, and I think your middle-school-self had a very sensible attitude towards it.

-- Mal

I don't have a good answer. I think, though, that it has something to do with men knowing, deep in their subconscious minds, that they owe their very existence to women. That frightens them, so they find ways to minimize that incontrovertible fact as a means of asserting control.

That's been my hypothesis for decades, but I can't support it with data. I still think it's true, though.

Thanks for this!

Wonderful!

or at least a neutral observation?

These are both sentiments my daughter would wear on a t-shirt, for example.

Thanks for the thread, redqueen.

My great grandmas were very strong women of the wild west. My great grandpas were combinations of engineers, artists, ranchers, dairymen and dreamers, mix and match; it's a family tradition. My dad is a gentle artist. My mom is sometimes a berserker.

I've witnessed young women in my family calming and handling horses most grown men would be afraid of. Horses are big animals that can kill a man.

I've got a sister who is a firefighter/paramedic who only got in because she is at least one-and-a-half times stronger, more intelligent, and more enduring than the lowest scoring male applicants accepted to her profession.

Here's a picture of one of my great grandmas, the only one I never met, and her mining engineer husband:



The "girl" in this photo is not the one you would ever mess with.

In my present day family I'm just another eccentric skinny artist.