"The girls are fighting"
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The news has been full of the Musk-Trump feud. Among the linguistic aspects, there's an interesting amount of explicit or implied gender association — here's Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a memic clip widely linked on social media:
From the other end of the political spectrum, check out Nellie Bowles, "The Real Housewives of Pennsylvania Avenue", The Free Press 6/6/2025:
Elon x Trump divorce: It’s the breakup of the year. Elon Musk is turning on Trump, Trump on Elon, and there is no prenup.
Bowles doesn't clearly indicate who's the man and who's the woman, unless this is a same-sex marriage. The title references the "Real Housewives of X" franchise, which featured a lot of woman-on-woman conflict, criticized by Gloria Steinem for "presenting women as rich, pampered, dependent and hateful towards each other."
Meanwhile, Jack Posobiec asserts that this is how men argue, actually:
Some of y'all cant handle 2 high agency males going at it and it really shows
This is direct communication (phallocentric) vs indirect communication (gynocentric)
I understand you aren't used to it
— Jack Poso (@JackPosobiec) June 5, 2025
A lot of the commentary calls it a "catfight" — and then there's discussion about whether that's sexist, as well as a lot of semi-serious suggestions that maybe it shows that men are too emotional to lead…
It reminds me personally less of "Real Housewives" (which I've never watched), and more of pro wrestling "promos" (which I've analyzed as a style of debate).
TA said,
June 6, 2025 @ 10:03 am
Some cultural knowingness from AOC as well, within which the gender association is decidedly more fluid and ironic than the surface suggests. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-girls-are-fighting
jin defang said,
June 6, 2025 @ 10:32 am
OK, the young woman was caught on the fly and made a silly comment. A more accurate characterization would be two alpha males with strong differences of opinion.
BTW, both male and female cats can fight.
Viseguy said,
June 6, 2025 @ 11:09 am
I think not. (We're talking AOC, not MTG.) It was apparently a nod to an established internet meme with clear intent to mock the two feuding principals. I'm 74 and not the target audience for this kind of sarcasm, but I'm pretty confident that it made its point amongst the meme-aware of earlier generations. This does not, of course, include the feuding principals themselves; that would require a modicum of self-awareness on their part, and some minimal sense of irony — both sorely lacking in those individuals, I think it's safe to say. Be all that as it may, as this is what passes for national discourse these days, I'm crawling back under my rock (but planning to re-emerge for the No Kings protests on June 14th).
KevinM said,
June 6, 2025 @ 11:57 am
This is trolling, people. AOC wouldn't think it's an insult to call someone a "girl" (well, not unless they're a mature woman, depending on the context). But she knows that it would nettle Trump. Same reason that SNL cast female comedians as male members (sorry) of Trumpworld (Giuliani, Sean Spicer).
Daniel Deutsch said,
June 6, 2025 @ 11:58 am
But @jin defang, AOC’s point was to emasculate them!
Jonathan Smith said,
June 6, 2025 @ 12:44 pm
given that this pair are so transparently the world's outest betabitches, the open psychological question concerns the Posobiec/Jin profession that they are "high agency phallocentric alpha males" (!!??): "ride-or-die"? "auto-gaslight"? "daddy complex"? other?
ethelg said,
June 7, 2025 @ 2:24 am
"phallometric" would be an improvement on "phallocentric" above
Jerry Packard said,
June 7, 2025 @ 10:28 am
‘The girls are fighting’ is a misogynist comment, period.
J.W. Brewer said,
June 7, 2025 @ 2:41 pm
I can't tell whether Jerry Packard is referring specifically to Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez's utterance of "the girls are fighting" or to all utterances of that meme/catchphrase since it's alleged popularization by Azealia Banks in 2019 commentary about a then-salient feud between Nicki Minaj and Cardi B. I do not know any of those three ladies and am not particularly familiar with their public personae, but I would disagree with a claim that Ms. Banks' original comment was necessarily misogynist. My own recent informal fieldwork tends to show that the use of "girls" to refer to adult women in AmEng can certainly sometimes be belittling (and thus potentially misogynistic) but many other times can simply be familiar or informal. This latter possibility is perhaps especially true when the speaker is female but perhaps not only so.
Use of "girls" to refer to adult males is at a minimum perhaps jocularly-intended? It's the sort of jocularity that needs to at least implicitly refer to sex-based stereotypes or general statistical tendencies in order for the humor, such as it is, to make sense. I'm not convinced that all humor of that sort (whether or not a particular instance is to your own taste) is inherently misogynistic but it should probably all be handled with care if you're not sure of your audience and its likely reaction. But it seems plausible that Jerry Packard is not a paradigmatic member of Congressman Ocasio-Cortez's imagined or intended audience.
Cheng Wu said,
June 7, 2025 @ 5:48 pm
I argue this usage is anti-misogynist. By using girls (which, in the meme origin, was used to describe two adult women) to describe two adult men, this highlights the fact that not only girls/women would fight, but that it is actually men — two misogynist men, you may argue — who would fight even more fiercely and unreasonably than women would. Hence this usage brilliantly challenges the misogynist narrative that women are emotionally unstable.
Philip Taylor said,
June 8, 2025 @ 4:28 am
Not being au fait with American politics, I cannot be sure whether there really are two Congress-persons with surname(s) "Ocasio-Cortez", so may I ask whether the "Congressman Ocasio-Cortez" of JWB’s second para. is the same person as the "Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez" of his first para., and if so, which is the correct (or perhaps "preferred") designation ?
Daniel Deutsch said,
June 8, 2025 @ 9:26 pm
Cheng Wu is correct. It is common for disadvantaged or oppressed groups to coöpt terms that have been used against them.
David Marjanović said,
June 9, 2025 @ 3:11 am
There's just the one in the video, a woman.
Philip Taylor said,
June 10, 2025 @ 7:15 am
OK, so it’s safe to assume that JWB was referring to the same person in both cases, but that still leaves unanswered "what is the correct (or preferred) designation for a female Congress-person" ? Is it "Congressman" (as in "Madam Chairman"), "Congresswoman", or is Congress now gender-neutral and all Congress-persons are "Congressperson" ?
/df said,
June 11, 2025 @ 10:01 pm
"Representative" or "Senator", as appropriate?
Michael Watts said,
June 17, 2025 @ 7:51 pm
That's not really an observation relevant to anything; the English word "catfight" refers to a fight between two human women or girls. It doesn't refer to a fight between cats.