Use vs. Mention and the You-Know-Who Complex

I have always been very interested in the discourse surrounding the use of terms vs. the mention of terms. On a basic level, the difference between the two is like the difference between saying "he's stupid" and saying "Marion said, 'He's stupid.'" In the first case, I would be using the word "stupid" to describe "he." In the second instance, I would be mentioning the use, which usually has occurred, will occur, or is hypothetical. With use, I am using the word to refer to what it signifies: the quality of being unintelligent, with the connotations that implies. With mention, I use the word only to signify itself: the actual word "stupid." The latter, in theory, allows me to distance myself from the word, and if someone takes issue with the fact that I said "stupid," I can easily point out that the grammatical structure indicates that I did not actually use it, even though I uttered it. Although not all examples of mentions will be formatted this way, every time I used quotation marks in this paragraph, I provided an example of a mention.

The dichotomy of use vs. mention is not this simple, however.

Womanhood: the Desire to Be "Real"

Stop using the term "real women" to refer to curvy girls. Tall skinny girls aren't imaginary. Regardless of how a girl looks:
All women are real women.

(For now, I'm going to ignore some of the problematic language of this quote and just discuss the themes it addresses.)

The concept of a "real woman" is tangentially relevant to the post I recently wrote about person first language, especially in terms of dehumanization. You might be thinking to yourself, "What about all the women on magazine covers who've had plastic surgery, are covered in make-up, and have been airbrushed as much as possible? Aren't they fake women?"