Ma’am land
No one in the future says “Ma’am”
Ironically, one of the first signs that you’ve entered your Ma’am years is suddenly being called Miss.
“Will that be all, Miss?” you’ll be asked. “Can I help you, Miss?”
Did I just time travel to Edwardian England? When did I become a Miss?
Soon the gloves come off and it’s Ma’am everywhere. At the grocery store, the restaurant, the bank. In line for absolutely anything.
“Thanks, Ma’am.”
“Have a nice day, Ma’am.”
“I can help you here, Ma’am.”
“Is there anything else I can get you, Ma’am?”
How did people get my attention before? Did they just call out, “Hey you”? I don’t remember being called Miss a lot in my youth, but there’s no denying that I’m in Ma’am land now.
Ma’am is a call to action. It’s meant to move you along. You’re holding up the line, Ma’am. Everyone is waiting, Ma’am. Unless you’re into a certain kind of kink, no one ever stared lovingly into your eyes and called you Ma’am.
Ma’am is the dark side of Mom. She’s someone you feel obligated to serve.
I know that many of you disagree. You have always thought Ma’am was respectful—and even a compliment. But that’s not how I perceive it. Maybe it’s cultural bias.
If I’d grown up in the American South, maybe Ma’ams would roll off my tongue like Sweeties, or Childs, or Darlin’s. Being Ma’amed with love is like melted frosting over cinnamon rolls. A “Yes, Ma’am” in this context is an “as you wish.”
But lately, for me, every Ma’am is a suckerpunch. Especially when I’ve been feeling good. I have actually put on clothes and left the house. Maybe I’ve stopped at the coffee shop and it’s bright and sunny. There’s fun music playing and the barista is chatting up the person in front of me. They’re having a great fucking time!
Then I step up to the counter and . . . the barista’s face falls. I try to give them some space by loitering in front of the pastries. Sometimes they take advantage of this moment to step away. I’m often asked to “just wait a minute.”
Eventually they manage a, “What can I get you, Ma’am?” and then throw in a, “Will that be all, Ma’am?” and then for good measure, “We’ll have that right out for you, Ma’am.” Where each successive Ma’am gets sharper and more direct like an approaching war drum.
To be fair, Ma’am is one of the annoyed cashier’s few defenses. They are trapped in a power structure that demands subservience to the customer (in this case, me). And their only weapon is this word that says it all while hiding in plain sight.
Ma’am is a fuck you, a rebel yell against the middle-aged women who buy the lattes that make the world go round.
Other times, we might have a perfectly pleasant conversation. We might laugh. I might admire their shirt or their hair or their choice of music. I might think we had a moment of connection. Right up until they say, “OK, we’ll have that right out for you, Ma’am.”
This Ma’am rips me up inside. This Ma’am is a reminder. It’s a put-you-in-your-placer. It says, “You’re not one of us. You’ve crossed over into the Land of the Ma’ams.”
My first reaction was to rage against the Ma’am. I’ve even stopped some people mid-Ma’am, especially if they’re just pounding me with them and saying it mechanically. Telemarketers and customer service reps use Ma’am as punctuation on every sentence, “Hi Ma’am, … OK Ma’am … And then Ma’am, Ma’am, Ma’am.”
“You know,” I’ve interrupted the droning Ma’am machine, “I really don’t like being called Ma’am. Could you call me something else? Or just leave it out.”
The phone goes silent. Her brain does not compute. I can tell she is embarrassed as she tries to stop it, but within a few minutes she is back to Ma’am, Ma’am, Ma’am. I see with a new sympathy that she wasn’t choosing to say it. It was an unconscious tic, a broken record. It was how she did her job. She could no sooner stop saying Ma’am as she could stop herself from breathing.
I will never be able to stop the world from calling me Ma’am. I can’t control that. It’s going to keep happening for the next 40 or 50 years. So maybe I can get curious about why it bothers me so much.
“Ironically, one of the first signs that you’ve entered your Ma’am years is suddenly being called Miss.”
First of all, Ma’am is a power-over word. It’s class-based, meant to show the woman was someone of status who commanded respect—although usually tied to her father or husband. To be a Ma’am meant you’d done your duty to society and found yourself a man.
To be a Ma’am was to be served, not to do the serving. Ma’ams hosted afternoon teas, while the cooks, cleaners, shopkeepers, bakers, grocers, and dressmakers dispensed the Ma’ams in pursuit of the lady’s favor and her husband’s money. And, of course, that sweetness of Ma’am in the American South tried to gloss over the realities of a “polite” and “civilized” society that enslaved other humans.
Today the lines between server and served are not quite as clear. We are a service industry society. Almost all of us are in the business of serving clients and customers in some way. Not that housekeeping is the same as designing logos at an ad agency, but if you back out far enough, then on some level even those of us who spend our days pitching CEOs have something in common with those of us asking if you want hot sauce with your order at Taco Bell. We’re all dealing in transactions of human connection.
Even celebrities are expected to serve us with constant content. If Kim Kardashian walked into that coffee shop, would she be called Ma’am? Somehow I don’t think so. In an ironic twist, the way to show a powerful woman you respect her these days is by not calling her Ma’am—which begs the question: Why do we need to be called anything at all?
If you drop the Ma’am from the examples I gave earlier, you end up with:
“Thanks.”
“Have a nice day.”
“I can help you here.”
“Is there anything else I can get you?”
I might believe you when you tell me to “Have a nice day.” But if you say, “Have a nice day, Ma’am,” I’ll spend the next 45 minutes wondering why I didn’t wear more makeup or do my hair differently. And why are all my clothes so stupid?
Because I’m a single woman without kids, Ma’am feels like an accusation: We told you so. You’re done. You had your chance. Now you’re old without a safety net.
And I think that starts to get at the real paranoia behind why we still use this word that we know deep down is no longer respectful, but is actually a backhanded compliment, an ironic honorific, a microaggression meant to make older women feel small.
Behind the word Ma’am is our unresolved anxiety about being forced to take care of others we feel no connection with. As I said before, it’s the dark side of Mom. We don’t mind caring for Mom because we love her and she gave us life after all, but Ma’am is a different story. Ma’am is just some lady.
“Behind the word Ma’am is our unresolved anxiety about being forced to take care of others we feel no connection with.”
I would like to ease this anxiety. When I walk up to the counter, I’m not expecting any kind of show of reverence. I don’t need to be entertained. I’d just like to be seen. Even if it’s just for two minutes of chit-chat while I get my latte, maybe you can see me as more than a Ma’am. Maybe we can find one little thing to connect about.
I might not look like Kim Kardashian. I might remind you of your own mom. I might seem like someone you could never have anything in common with, but we’ll never find out if we don’t drop the Ma’am wall.
Ma’am keeps us from moving beyond the same tired server-served dynamic. What if we just tried something else? Maybe if we stopped the automaticity of the Ma’am and got curious about how we’re interacting, we’d find we have something to offer each other.
Eye contact, body language, humor, playfulness, authenticity, honesty—these all go a long way to connection. Learning names. Taking an interest. Focusing attention and really listening. Kindly (but not condescendingly) repeating and clarifying for understanding. Grooving to a song together. Admiring a person’s style. Expressing your own style so others have an entrypoint into who you are. These are all ways that we might, if we’re lucky, reach across that divide (or coffee counter) and discover something beautiful.
Especially now, as our understanding of gender is evolving, it’s the perfect time to re-examine these worn-out habits. We are in the post-Ma’am era.
And in the age of artificial intelligence, we are entering a time when there is no small interaction. Every other human is an opportunity for connection. There are no throw-away conversations. Every human-to-human moment is a chance to heal the wounds of our “service with a smile” past. Everything we’ve been doing robotically will soon be done by actual robots. All we have is each other. Let’s act like it.
Besides, if you’re in your twenties and I’m in my forties, we’re going to be living together for quite a while on this planet (if we survive the robots)*. We might as well make it interesting. Because if we don’t start changing the world now, I’ll be seeing you in Ma’am land very soon.
*The robots will of course never call us Ma’am. They’ll be programmed to know better than that.
