It’s only since the mid-2010s, as interest in the gender spectrum and sexual equality have exploded back into our consciousness, that both everyday folks and linguists are asking these questions again. Like, is it sexual harassment for a male lawyer to call his female colleague sweetie in the courtroom? Is it possible to use the word slut without being problematic? Do women apologize more than men, and if so, is that a bad thing?
English speakers are hungrier than ever for these answers, giving linguists new opportunities to collect data and correct the mistakes that so many people still believe about how men and women use language. It’s time for their research to spread beyond the confines of classrooms and scholastic journals and make its way to our boardrooms, brunch tables, and lawmakers’ desks. Because these findings could be instrumental in the movement toward gender equality.
One of the most exciting concepts this new crop of research shows is that women possess a secret, badass arsenal of linguistic qualities that are profoundly misunderstood and deeply needed in the world right now. (Among these clever tendencies are the proclivities to adapt more quickly to linguistic change and to ask certain types of solidarity-forming questions.) By diving into the discoveries of contemporary feminist linguists, we can learn how the language we use every day operates on a structural and cultural level, and this will help us snatch it back from the forces keeping us from getting a word in edgewise.
That’s exactly what I’m here to help us do.
I’m not going to talk about myself very much in these pages, but I want to take a moment to tell you a little bit about how I fell in love with this language and gender stuff in the first place. It started long before I knew anything about linguistics, when I was just a loquacious kid growing up in Baltimore, Maryland. I had long, disheveled hair and a thirst for conversation, and by three years old, I was already the most nauseatingly talkative person my parents—mild-mannered biologists at Johns Hopkins Medical School—had ever met. I grew up enchanted by language: how speaking in a certain dialect or foreign language could entirely change the way people see you; how there seemed to be infinite ways to combine words to paint a different picture in someone’s head (the varying emotions you could incite in a listener depending on whether you used the word recalcitrant, with its daring surplus of syllables and dynamic pairing of hard and soft c’s, versus stubborn, which always called to mind the image of some fool stubbing a toe on his own obstinacy). My parents got me a thesaurus for my tenth birthday, and it continues to be my all-time favorite gift.
Then I got to college and signed up for Linguistics 101, and you can imagine my delight when suddenly there was a whole room of people just like me, all desperately curious to know why we talk the way we do. Out of everything I studied, I was most bewitched by a course called Sex, Gender, and Language. It had actually never occurred to me before spotting the class on NYU’s registration system in 2011 that gender had anything to do with how we speak. Sure, when I was in preschool I was irrevocably labeled “bossy” after expressing that I should be the director of the class play instead of little Danny Altman. (I ended up winning, and the play was a smash—though it earned me the nickname “Demand-a Montell,” which I put up with until middle school.) My speech had also been reprimanded for years by teachers and workplace supervisors, who thought I spoke too loudly and said like too much—not to mention their distaste for my premature fondness of four-letter words. But I figured, or at least hoped, that all of this was less because I was a girl and more because I produced an abnormally high volume of language in general. After all, I was, and continue to be, a wordy gal.
In my college sociolinguistics classes, I started learning about some of the subtle ways gender stereotypes are hiding in English . . . like how the term penetration implies (and reinforces) the idea that sex is from the male perspective. Like sex is defined as something a man does to a woman. The opposite might be envelopment or enclosure. Can you imagine how different life would be if that’s how we referred to sex? If women were linguistically framed as the protagonists of any given sexual scenario, could that potentially mean that a woman’s orgasm as opposed to a dude’s would be seen as the proverbial climax—the ultimate goal? Questions like that blew my mind.
It didn’t take long before I realized that linguistics students aren’t the only people who should be learning about these ideas. It became clear: language is the next frontier of modern gender equality. We just have to help the world see it.
In the coming chapters, we’re going to learn about things like the hidden sexism in your favorite insults and curse words, why talking with vocal fry and saying like are actually signs of linguistic savvy, and what the hell is going through catcallers’ minds when they scream, “Hey, sexy!” at strangers in the street. We’re going to talk about how speaking in a more gender-inclusive way is a very cool idea while being a grammar snob is not, and why the “gay voice” is a thing while the “lesbian voice” seemingly isn’t. We’ll discuss the history of the word cunt, what gossip really is, how language might sound if men were wiped from the face of the planet (not suggesting, just theorizing!), and what we can do with all of this information to effect real change.
We will also come across a few complex questions (like, is it actually possible to fully reclaim the word slut? And, will we ever put a permanent end to verbal street harassment?) that we can’t answer with 100 percent certainty. At least not yet. But by the end of this book, you will have all the nerdy know-how you need to sound like the sharpest word ninja in the room. Which, I can tell you from experience, feels pretty damn good.
Here is a story of one of those experiences—a time when just a little dash of linguistics expertise helped me convince someone from a very different background from mine, someone with their own steadfast beliefs about how women should talk, to consider a new idea. I was nineteen, working between classes at NYU as a babysitter for a professor’s daughter, who attended a prep school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The kid was in the same grade as another girl with a mother who wore tweed skirt suits, had hair the color of a daffodil, and grew up in a family that valued proper elocution and manners above all else—principles she was intent on passing down to her own daughter.
I met this mother on the 6 train, headed downtown to Bleecker Street, where we were shepherding our respective fifth graders. After taking our seats and exchanging a few pleasantries, I scooted over to chat with the two girls, and at a point, I used the contraction y’all to address them: “So how did y’all’s French test go?” I asked.
The tweed-clad mother did not approve. “Y’all?” she gasped, taking a palm to her sternum. “You can’t go around saying the word y’all, Amanda. It’s terrible English! People will think you’re stupid . . . or worse, Southern!”* She made eye contact with her daughter and shook her head.
I live for moments like this.
“Actually,” I offered, sliding back across the seat, “I like to see y’all as an efficient and socially conscious way to handle the English language’s lack of a second-person plural pronoun.” The mother raised an eyebrow. I continued, “I could have used the word you to address the two girls, but I wanted to make sure your daughter knew I was including her in the conversation. I could also have said you guys, which has become surprisingly customary in casual conversation, but to my knowledge, neither of these children identifies as male, and I try to avoid using masculine terms to address people who aren’t men, as it ultimately works to promote the sort of linguistic sexism many have been fighting for years. I mean, if neither of these girls is a guy, then surely together they aren’t guys, you know?”
The mother gave me a skeptical smile. “I suppose,” she said.
“Exactly!” I carried on, delighted to have been given an inch. “There are other interesting alternatives: I could have said yinz, which is standard in Western Pennsylvania and parts of Appalachia, but I personally don’t think it rolls off the tongue quite as nicely. All things considered, I simply find y�
��all to be the most fluent solution to a tricky lexical gap. I also know that the word is highly stigmatized, as it’s associated with a certain geographical region and socioeconomic background, much like the word ain’t, which, by the way, was actually used abundantly among the English upper crust in the nineteenth century.”
“Is that true?” the mother perked up.
“It is,” I confirmed. “Anyway, I’d love to learn more about your opposition to the word y’all. Tell me about your upbringing.”
For the next ten stops, the mother proceeded to unload her whole story—her immigrant parents, the impossible elocutionary standards set for her as a child—and by the time we all stepped off the train at Bleecker Street, I was certain she’d think twice the next time she desired to chastise someone for using the word y’all. Part of me was confident she’d never do it ever again.
I wrote this book to help women (and other marginalized genders) feel as empowered by words as I did on the 6 train that day. To arm us all with the knowledge we need to reclaim a language that for so long has been used against us. Sick of being told how you should and shouldn’t use your voice? Good news: linguists are sick of it too. This is our chance to change it.
1
Slutty Skank Hoes and Nasty Dykes
A Comprehensive List of Gendered Insults I Hate (But Also Kind of Love?)
If you want to insult a woman, call her a prostitute. If you want to insult a man, call him a woman.
No one is more familiar with this formula than Laurel A. Sutton, a language analyst and copywriter who has built her career on the delicate art of name-calling. In 1998 Sutton founded a “naming firm” called Catchword, a business dedicated to dreaming up zingy brand names for business owners who don’t have an ear for that sort of thing. (Catchword’s client list includes everyone from Allstate to McDonald’s. You know the fast-food empire’s famous McCafé Frappé Mocha? Catchword named that. And come up with a more appropriate name for a two-dollar, 420-calorie coffee milk shake—I dare you.)
Five years before Sutton figured out how to monetize her flair for phonologically pleasing menu items, she was hooked on a different sort of name calling: gendered insults. In the early 1990s, Sutton was a graduate student in the linguistics department at UC Berkeley when she was struck with an unquenchable thirst for unearthing the social subtext behind America’s favorite epithets. So over the course of two semesters, she conducted an experiment: Sutton had each of her 365 undergraduate students compile a list of ten slang words they and their friends used most frequently, plus their definitions. She then entered these into a giant database, like a pre-internet Urban Dictionary. Sutton’s plan was to analyze the terms on the basis of gender—to find out what they said about women’s and men’s places in the greater cultural dialogue.
The students reported back with a veritable pupu platter of colorful words and expressions—3,788 of them, in total—on all different topics. (Remember when people used to say “booyah?” Ah, the nineties.) In total, 166 of the collected terms were either for or about women specifically. Sutton isolated these terms, looked for patterns, and was able to divide them into four semantic categories based on the following themes: sexual promiscuity, fatness, evilness, and level of hotness. Highlights from the database included words such as slut, whore, and skankly hobag (used to describe sexually loose women); bitch and biscuit (for women with an attitude); hootchie and pink taco (to represent a woman by describing just her genitals); and heifer and hellpig (to describe a woman based on her ugliness or unfuckability).
A similar survey of gendered insults conducted at UCLA the year before found that approximately 90 percent of all recorded slang words for women were negative, compared to only 46 percent of recorded words for men. That means there were simply more insults for females in people’s everyday lexicon than there were for males. The survey also found a range of “positive” terms for women, but most of them were still sex-themed, like the insults, often comparing women to food: peach, treat, filet.
Before unpacking all this data, I would like to take a millisecond to appreciate the creativity of some of the terms Sutton collected (Skankly hobag? Hellpig? Such imagination). But there exists a larger issue: Why, exactly, are there so many outrageous insults for women in the English language? Also, why are some of them secretly so much fun to say? Is there a way to negotiate human beings’ love for name-calling without being flat-out sexist?
Sutton is not the first linguist to take an empirical look at our language’s robust canon of sexist slang. “A great deal of work has been done on the ‘ugly names’ for women,” she acknowledges in her paper, pointing out that research consistently shows a much fuller wealth of sex- and gender-based insults for women in English than it does for men. (Linguists postulate this would also be the case in any language spoken under a patriarchal system, since language ultimately reflects the beliefs and power structures of its culture.) In English, our negative terms for women, which usually carry sexual connotations, necessarily mirror the status of women in Western society at large—that being the status of treats and filets, at best, and hobags and hellpigs, at worst. It’s a classic case of the virgin/whore dichotomy—according to our inventory of English slang, women are always either one of two types of sexual objects: an innocent hard-to-get peach or a grotesque, too-easy skank.
In the 1970s linguist Muriel Schulz was one of the first researchers to take a deep dive into these unfriendly waters. Schulz is now retired, but as a linguistics professor at Cal State Fullerton, she published an iconic paper in 1975 called “The Semantic Derogation of Woman.” In it, Schulz describes semantic change, the process of how word meanings evolve over time, illuminating how gendered nicknames—from cupcake to cunt—came to be. There are two types of semantic change: pejoration is where a word starts out with a neutral or positive meaning and eventually devolves to mean something negative. The opposite is called amelioration.
Nearly every word the English language offers to describe a woman has, at a point during its life span, been colored some shade of obscene. As Schulz writes, “Again and again in the history of the language, one finds that a perfectly innocent term designating a girl or a woman may begin with totally neutral or even positive connotations, but that gradually it acquires negative implications, at first perhaps only slightly disparaging, but after a period of time becoming abusive and ending as a sexual slur.”
The main piece of evidence for this tendency toward women’s linguistic disparagement appears when you examine certain matched pairs of gendered words. Compare, for example, sir and madam: Three hundred years ago, both were used as formal terms of address. But with time, madam evolved to mean a conceited or precocious girl, then a kept mistress or prostitute, and, finally, a woman who manages a brothel. All of that excitement while the meaning of sir just stuck where it was.
A similar thing happened with master and mistress: These terms came to English by way of Old French, and initially both of them indicated a person in a position of authority. Only the feminine term contaminated over the decades to mean a sexually promiscuous woman with whom a married man, as Schulz puts it, “habitually fornicates.” Meanwhile, master continues to describe a dude in charge of something, like a household or an animal (or a sexual submissive, if we’re talking BDSM). Master can also indicate a person who has conquered a difficult skill, like karate or cooking. Tell me, is there a wildly entertaining television competition show called MistressChef? No, there is not. (I would definitely watch that, though.)
In some instances, the process of pejoration rebrands a feminine word as an insult not for women but for men. Take the words buddy and sissy: Today, we might use sissy to describe a weak or overly effeminate man, while buddy is a synonym for a close pal. We don’t think of these words as being related, but in the beginning, buddy and sissy were abbreviations of the words brother and sister. Over the years, the masculine term ameliorated as the feminine term went the other way, flushing down the semantic toilet until it
plunked onto its current meaning: a man who is weak and pathetic, just like a woman. Linguists have actually determined that the majority of insults for men sprout from references to femininity, either from allusions to women themselves or to stereotypically feminine men: wimp, candy-ass, motherfucker. (Even the word woman itself is often used as a term of ridicule. I can hear it now: “Dude, don’t be such a woman.”)
The word pussy is analogous to sissy, in that it’s a feminine word that was gradually reduced to an insult not for women but for men. Scholars aren’t 100 percent sure of pussy’s beginnings, but one theory is that it comes from an Old Norse word meaning “pouch” or “pocket.”* There’s also an Oxford English Dictionary entry from the sixteenth century that defines the term as a girl or woman who bears similar qualities to a cat, like affability and coyness. By the 1600s, the word had surfaced as a metaphor for both a cat and a vagina. It wasn’t used to describe men until the early twentieth century, when writers began associating it with tame, unaggressive males.
Few traditionally masculine terms have undergone pejoration like sissy, pussy, madam, or mistress. Dick is really the only prominent example—this word started as an innocent nickname for men named Richard; by Shakespeare’s time it was extended to mean a generalized everyman (like a “Joe Shmoe”); in the late nineteenth century it evolved to describe a penis (which we can likely attribute to British military slang—those dirty boys); and in the 1960s it grew to refer to a thoughtless or contemptible person. Dick, however, is an outlier. Lad, fellow, prince, squire, and butler are just a handful of other pejoration-worthy masculine words that have been spared.
Do feminine terms ever ameliorate? They do, but it’s often because women actively reclaim them (and we’ll talk more about how that happens toward the end of this chapter). But finding more instances like buddy, wherein a masculine term gains a more positive status over time, is an easier task. An Old English version of the word knight, for example, simply meant young boy or servant, before ameliorating to describe a gallant nobleman. The word stud graduated from a term for a male breeding animal to a slang phrase for a hot, manly dude. Even the word dude itself has elevated in status since the late nineteenth century, when it was used as an insult to describe an affected, foppish man. Today, dude is one of the most beloved words in the English language.
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