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. "Sir" means you are respected and maybe a little feared.
"Sir" sounds like you are sitting in a castle eating rack of lamb. "Sir" is what knights are and what Paul McCartney is. "Ma'am" is doubly insulting because we hear men being called "sir" all day. 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?ģ. It's a way for a perfect stranger to let us know how old he thinks we are. "Inside Amy Schumer" Writer Jessi Klein on Her New Book and Getting Called "Ma'am"Ģ. "Ma'am" sounds like a woman whose body is mostly Cheez Whiz. "Ma'am" sounds like a species of frog that watches reality television all day. 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. Who made up these words? Women certainly didn't. "Ma'am" is yet another horrible-sounding word that women are stuck with to describe various aspects of their body/life/hair : Vagina. 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). How was I being perceived as a ma'am? And just what is a "ma'am," anyway? And why was I so upset? 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. I didn't expect to be called ma'am any more than I expected Clive Owen to walk in and demand we have sex. And then some waiter, or maybe it was a bank teller, looked me up and down and decided I was a ma'am. In my mind, I was still wind-chiming around town as a miss. I remember I was around 30 and it was a complete surprise.
Which means, on some level, I must have blocked it out. I don't remember the exact place or time I was first called ma'am. "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. "Miss" means you have more in common with Audrey Hepburn than not. 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.