Why, when aiming to make a disparaging comment about a woman, do speakers often choose to use the word female? Cameron postulates that it might have something to do with the desire to point out that women are flawed by biological design. The implication is that female, a scientific term used to describe bodies throughout the animal kingdom, refers to one’s sex (one’s genitalia, chromosomes, gonads, and other reproductive body parts). Meanwhile, woman, a term only used to describe humans, refers to gender, a culturally invented and much more complex concept (which we’ll attempt to define in a
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