It’t interesting how working on dialogue in strips like these reveals embarrassing double standards, starting with trying to find a female synonym for the word wingman.

A brief search suggested “wing woman” but in all cases defined it as women who would help their male friends score, and besides, not getting into the snarky comments that since all men are horn-dogs a woman wouldn’t need tactical assistance, the three syllables just didn’t sound right to me. I finally settled on chaperone since I figured Nancy would see her reluctant status in this situation to be keeping her kid sister from getting killed. (yes, I know chaperone is also three syllables, sue me.)

After that the word boy comes up. I was hoping for Nancy to use a word that was the equivalent of “chick”, but for the life of me I couldn’t think of anything. “Stud” occurred to me briefly but after a little bit of thought didn’t seem quite patronizing enough, and besides a lot of us shallow types might consider it a compliment. I finally settled for “boy” but to my ear I don’t think it’s quite as much as a diminutive as girl is in our modern usage.

Amy is referring to the Bechdel test. Something I fail with depressing regularity.