Something that is so often ignored, so often discredited.
Hint hint, word work..
On calling female athletes 'girls', and why we shouldn't shrug this off as just-plain-vanilla semantics:
"The language of any culture not only reflects the ideological biases that characterize it; it replicates and reinforces them. And while the attempt to oppose this particular phenomenon of calling, in all spheres of society, adult women "girls"... seems now to be regarded as an irrelevant or passé "old wave" concern, reality... reveals it to be more urgent than ever. What we need be attuned to is the fact that the way we speak is, to some extent, inextricable from the way we act, both as individuals and as a society. That men - and women - persist in calling adult females "girls," cannot, legitimately, be decoupled from such disturbing cultural trends as the media sexualization of increasingly younger girls, or from the rise of eternal prepubescence (slim, hairless) as the expected standard of adult women's bodies, nor, ultimately, even from such horrors as honor killings and aerobics room shooting sprees."
