Like all women, I started out life as a "miss." "How can I help you, miss?" "Miss, you dropped a dollar." "Miss, can I buy you a drink?" "Excuse me, miss, I'm interested in having sex with you." Everyone wants to be a miss. "Miss" means you have more in common with Audrey Hepburn than not. "Miss" sounds like you're mostly air, like your body has the magic and delicacy of a wind chime, and when you walk down the street, everyone hears little bells.
I don't remember the exact place or time I was first called ma'am. Which means, on some level, I must have blocked it out. I remember I was around 30 and it was a complete surprise. In my mind, I was still wind-chiming around town as a miss. And then some waiter, or maybe it was a bank teller, looked me up and down and decided I was a ma'am. I didn't expect to be called ma'am any more than I expected Clive Owen to walk in and demand we have sex. In that moment, I felt very viscerally the beginning of something slipping away: not just the possibility of fucking Clive Owen but something bigger — my image of myself. How was I being perceived as a ma'am? And just what is a "ma'am," anyway? And why was I so upset?
"Ma'am" makes people crazy. Almost universally, women hate it (with the exception of a few people in the South who have decided that being called ma'am is a sign of respect or something). It makes us crazy for several reasons.
1. "Ma'am" is yet another horrible-sounding word that women are stuck with to describe various aspects of their body/life/hair: Vagina. Moist. Fallopian tubes. Yeast infection. Clitoris. Frizz. Who made up these words? Women certainly didn't. If, at the beginning of time, right after making vaginas, God had asked me, "What would you like your most intimate and enjoyable part of yourself to be called?" I most certainly wouldn't have said "vagina." No woman would, because vagina sounds like a First World War term that was invented to describe a trench that has been mostly blown apart but is still in use. "Ma'am" fits right into this pattern. "Ma'am" sounds like a species of frog that watches reality television all day. "Ma'am" sounds like a woman whose body is mostly Cheez Whiz.
2. "Ma'am" isn't just a form of address. It's a way for a perfect stranger to let us know how old he thinks we are. What is the purpose of this? Why does a West Elm clerk have to let me know he thinks he knows how old I am? The issue isn't my comfort with my age (I'm 40) so much as why, why, why the fuck does this need to be a factor in every interaction I have? Why do we have to be a nation divided between misses and ma'ams? Why do I have to be trained to respond to a different name once the world at large has decided I am no longer a fawn?
3. "Ma'am" is doubly insulting because we hear men being called "sir" all day. And "sir" is awesome. "Sir" is what knights are and what Paul McCartney is. "Sir" sounds like you are sitting in a castle eating rack of lamb. "Sir" means you are respected and maybe a little feared. People don't fear ma'am, except in the sense that they may be worried: Oh no, what if this ma'am starts hitting on me! Men are called sir starting from when they're old enough to be called anything, and they stay sir through old age. Men don't have to deal with the fact that at some point in their life, they will find themselves tossed into a linguistic system that will let them know, in no uncertain terms, that in the eyes of the world, essentially, they've begun to die.
When you're called sir, you're being called the same thing that James Bond is called. When I'm called ma'am, I'm being called the same thing that Senator Barbara Boxer is being called, and she's 75. Except, scratch that. Even she famously got bent out of shape when she was addressed on the senate floor as ma'am. She corrected the person, firmly asking to be called senator instead.
But if you are not a senator and have no plans to be one and probably couldn't be even if you wanted to because of some questionable YouTube videos you've done, what do you ask to be called? We've never come up with a good alternative. But I know you can't complain if you're not trying to solve the problem yourself. So may I offer: your highness, Meryl, khaleesi, or simply, queen.
Adapted from You'll Grow Out of It, by Jessi Klein, copyright 2016 by Jessi Klein. Reprinted by permission of Grand Central Publishing, New York, NY. All rights reserved.
This article was originally published as "Please Don't Call Me Ma'am" in the August 2016 issue of Cosmopolitan.
