Just like I asked in the subject line, I'm pretty lost in this, as I wouldn't know how to say a sentence like the following, speaking with a fem
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3By "girl" do you mean a grown-up woman? – Cascabel_StandWithUkraine_ Jul 12 '19 at 18:43
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2I don’t see a following sentence. I thought you accidentally posted before you were done writing... – Jim Jul 12 '19 at 19:05
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2Also “referring to” and “talking with” are completely different things. – Jim Jul 12 '19 at 19:07
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"I referred to him as @Jim, when addressing him via the comments". I think the tchrist's answer has nailed it. The question is about "hailnames". As a fairly tolerant woman, I don’t take offence at "man" or "dude" any more than "Miss". – Pam Jul 12 '19 at 20:00
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3“A fem” doesn’t mean what you seem to think it means. It’s also quite offensive. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 12 '19 at 20:05
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1@JanusBahsJacquet, we may have to assume "cut off mid word" in this case. Never attribute to malice what can be easily explained by technical fault! – Pam Jul 12 '19 at 20:32
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@Pam Yes, I do hope that’s the case. The ‘following sentence’ mentioned is also missing, so it may be the true explanation. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 12 '19 at 20:39
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You can avoid these sorts of problems by just addressing everybody, male or female, as "baby". – John Smith Jun 07 '22 at 18:28
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Native speakers don't talk with fems. :)
There are certainly speech communities where various sorts of hailnames are used by men to address women with when for whatever reason they don’t want to call them by their given names or using the standard personal pronoun you.
Because virtually all of these risk insult, you should probably avoid trying to use any of them even if you are a native speaker.
And if you are not a native speaker, then you would do well to heed this advice about hailnames:
There are oodles of these, but most of them occur only between men, often young men, in casual situations. Many are strictly regional. Some say something about the age, sex, race, education, or social class of the speaker or the person addressed. Others carry a tone of irony, aggression, or condescension. They impose a faux intimacy if used on someone you don’t know, something many take offence at.
Whenever you address someone by something other than their name or the pronoun you, you risk offending them. Name-calling is risky business indeed.
It is impossible for the non-native to judge the appropriate connotation of these for any given situation. Even for native speakers they risk coming off as artificial or insincere; for non-native speakers, they are a mine field of assured self-destruction that may well get you sneered at or even punched in the face.
Since so many of them are regional or from one particular subculture, whenever someone with an accent other than the region they come from uses one of these, it sounds fake. Fake is bad.
You have been warned. Just don’t do it.
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I would say that real men don’t call them fems, because that’s a pretty derogatory term to use, but do talk to them, because there’s no reason not to that would fall under the category of bigotry that would automatically preclude them from being ‘real men’. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 12 '19 at 20:07
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@JanusBahsJacquet Argh, you took fems to actually mean something! I thought it was just pineapple speech for humans of the feminine persuasion. Oops. – tchrist Jul 12 '19 at 20:08
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3It is in actual usage, though not of a very nice kind (“No fats, no fems, no Asians” is probably the most well-known example of its usage). Clearly the asker thought it meant ‘women’, but I thought it prudent to let them know that it means something quite different! – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 12 '19 at 20:13
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@JanusBahsJacquet My word...where on Earth do you find "no fats. no fems, no Asians". Is that from some Craig's list thingie? – Cascabel_StandWithUkraine_ Jul 12 '19 at 20:30
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2@Cascabel Almost – you find more or less veiled versions of it on a disconcertingly high number of profiles on Grindr and all its siblings. Gay men can be terribly exclusionist pricks sometimes. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 12 '19 at 20:37
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@JanusBahsJacquet Live and learn. If a person is advertising on Grindr, well, as I understand it it is pretty much only a "hook-up". So they are looking for a type, and no complications. The wonders of (un)complicated relationships in the "modern" age. – Cascabel_StandWithUkraine_ Jul 12 '19 at 20:42
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1@Cascabel Many people use it only for hookups; others use it for finding dates, relationships, or even friendships. Even for just hookups, though, it’s not a nice thing to say. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 12 '19 at 20:43
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2@Cascabel Well, that’s a new one to me, but it sounds like it might be – it’s simply a abbreviation of ‘feminine’ and refers to guys (and also girls, especially lesbians) who act in a stereotypically feminine way. For girls, it’s the opposite of butch; for guys, it’s the opposite of masc (which is another epithet frequently touted in profile texts, often in the equally elitist form “masc for masc”, i.e., “I act in such a way that people rarely peg me as gay unless I tell them, and I’m only looking for guys who are the same”). – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jul 12 '19 at 20:49
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@JanusBahsJacquet Well, thank you. This has been a education. I have been out of that world in the US for almost 30 years, and most of my friends from there dead from AIDS. Here, the culture is very underground; point in fact, the government is talking about making homosexuality illegal again. Incredible the differences in culture. Imagine if this were occurring in Saudi Arabia... – Cascabel_StandWithUkraine_ Jul 12 '19 at 21:28
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I assumed this was a mispelling of "femme", which I don't believe is offensive as long as you're actually referring to someone who identifies as feminine, or an abbreviation for "fembot", presuming OP often finds themselves in the company the company of humanoid robotic assassins. – John Smith Jun 07 '22 at 18:30