Why is it often acceptable to refer to a woman as a “girl” but calling a man a “boy” is often unacceptable?
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Like many other cultures, English-speaking cultures tend to associate femininity/masculinity with children/adults and lower/higher places in hierarchies respectively. Referring to someone by childish terms is generally informal, and while informal usage isn’t always insulting (it can be affectionate), it’s usually not what you’d use for a social superior – and until very recently, virtually all social superiors were men. Common casual language often changes slowly, so the current usage is still borrowed from that older world: another example is gender-neutral “you guys”, which is rooted in a long tradition of English and related languages using masculine terms for groups of mixed or indeterminate gender.
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