Robin Wasserman’s Lithub article on the girling of contemporary culture gets to the heart of those niggling questions behind the term ‘girl’ and why, as women, the term raises hackles. How can it be offensive when girl-titled books — Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train, The Girl in the Red Coat — resonate with women readers?

I chafe at girl as much as the next woman when I can sense the judgment in it, the implication that I don’t measure up. And the idealist in me resents my own theory about the semantics of girlhood—believes that if the evolution from girl to woman insinuates an erasure of self, then it’s our expectations of female adulthood that should change, not our terminology. That we should reclaim woman, acknowledge with language what we argue with manifestos: that womanhood can be its own liberated, self-interested state of mind. But the pragmatist in me is glad that, in the meantime, we have the word girl to remind us. Glad that these characters exist, girl in name and spirit, that we’re living through a cultural moment dominated by women of all ages, still and always busy, trying to become who they are.