But back to all those wacky insults for women. Because it’s so fun to talk about, and such charming fodder for cocktail party conversation, I want to talk about the history of a few more of the many insults for or about women that used to mean something neutral or positive—a term of endearment, even—but at some point transitioned to mean something unflattering (and usually sexual).
Let’s start with the word hussy. Originally this term was nothing but a shorter, sweeter version of the Old English husewif, which meant female head of household and is an early cognate of the modern word housewife. Around the seventeenth century, the word came to describe a rude “rustic” woman; then, it became a general insult for women of any kind, and eventually it narrowed to mean a lewd, brazen woman or prostitute. The word tart went down a similar road. Once used to describe a small pie or pastry, the term soon became an innocent term of endearment for women, then specified to mean a sexually desirable woman, and by the late nineteenth century had descended to a female of immoral character or prostitute (which, of course, despite common rationale, are not the same thing).
Even the word slut used to mean something relatively innocent. The word is so contentious now you’d never guess it came from the comparatively wholesome Middle English term slutte, which merely meant an “untidy” woman. The word was even used for men sometimes (in 1386, Chaucer labeled one slovenly male character as “sluttish”). Soon enough, though, the word extended to mean an immoral, sexually loose woman or prostitute, and as of the late 1990s, this definition has been fortified by its heavy usage in pornography. There is a male equivalent of slut: manslut. However, I think we can all agree that this word is much sillier in connotation; plus, if slut with no modifier is a default female term, then manslut surely stands to imply that promiscuity is only contemptible when women do it.
Cruder still, we have bitch, which we already discussed a bit, but just to paint the full picture: linguists postulate that this word derived from the ancient Sanskrit word bhagas, meaning “genitals,” then later found its way (in various forms) into Latin, French, and Old English, eventually coming to refer to a creature with exposed genitals, aka an animal. After that, the word narrowed to female animal, and within a few centuries, we landed on female dog. The first shift in meaning from beast to human wasn’t recorded until around 1400 AD, when bitch surfaced in writing to describe a promiscuous woman or prostitute (which is still one of its primary meanings in British English). From there, the word evolved to describe a sort of weakling or servant (“Go fetch me my tea, bitch”); a stuck-up, mean, unpleasant woman; and finally a verb meaning “to complain.” (“There are so many English words to bitch about, aren’t there?”)
And yet, out of all these etymological allegories, my favorite has to be the story of cunt. What is largely considered the English language’s most offensive term for women didn’t actually start as an insult at all. Cunt’s roots are also up for debate, but most sources agree they can be traced back to the Proto-Indo-European word sound “cu,” which indicated femininity (this same “cu” is also related to the modern words cow and queen). The Latin term cuneus, meaning “wedge,” is also connected to cunt, as is the Old Dutch word kunte, which gives the word its dramatic final t. For centuries, cunt was used to refer to women’s external genitalia without any negative nuances whatsoever; but, like so many other terms referencing femaleness, it didn’t stay that way. What’s particularly interesting about cunt’s pejoration is that it is directly linked to human history itself. Ten thousand years ago, when Homo sapiens lived nomadic lifestyles, wandering from place to place, men and women all had multiple sexual partners and female sexuality was considered totally normal and great. It wasn’t until human beings stopped moving that women with sexual independence started gaining a bad rap, because once owning land became desirable, people wanted to be able to pass it down to their children, and in order for men to know who their children were, female monogamy became a must. To create a system of inheritance, societies became patriarchal, and any remaining notions of goddess-like sexual liberation went kaput. With the end of women’s sexual liberation came a general disgust for female sexuality, dooming words like cunt forever. (Or until the end of patriarchy, at least.)
Spiritually, reading all about these words’ pejoration is a bit of a bummer, but empirically, the patterns say something important about our culture’s gender standards at large: when English speakers want to insult a woman, they compare her to one of a few things: a food (tart), an animal (bitch), or a sex worker (slut). These are the very same themes Laurel A. Sutton noticed in her study at UC Berkeley in the ’90s. That we have used language to systematically reduce women to edible, nonhuman, and sexual entities for so many years is no coincidence. Instead, it makes a clear statement about the expectations, hopes, and fears of our society as a whole.
Since the very beginning of language, the names we use to refer to people have symbolized the history, status, and very worth of their referents. I’m not just talking about insults; this can also be applied to one’s legal name (which 70 percent of American women still believe they should change with marriage, either unaware or in denial of the fact that this signifies a transfer of ownership from their dads to their husbands). When we compare a woman to a farm animal or a fruity pastry, it isn’t random; it reflects what our language’s speakers believe (or want to believe) to be true.
Look at our culture and our repertoire of insults for women side by side, and it’s no wonder that so many of them have sexual undertones. “Woman as sex object” is one of patriarchy’s oldest tropes, mostly due to that thousands-of-years-old attitude that a woman’s personal desire and sexual free will are inherently bad. Even a brief scan of our language’s slang for women will reveal that female desire is worthy of shame no matter what a woman chooses to do with it, which can only be one of two things per our culture’s rules: having a lot of sex, which earns her the reputation of a whore, or opting to withhold it, which gets her labeled a prude. In the late 1970s, a University of Nebraska scholar named Julia P. Stanley found linguistic proof of this pervasive whore-Madonna polarity after collecting and analyzing a catalog of popular sexual slang terms for women. She recorded 220 in total, and the metaphors underlying them were both entirely negative and also fell on either side of this ideological coin: the women who “put out” were categorized as sluts, and those who didn’t were damned as ice princesses. Meanwhile, most of the sexual metaphors Stanley collected for men (twenty-two in all, precisely one tenth of the set for women) had actively positive connotations. These terms, which included ass man, stud, and Don Juan, suggested an all-out approval of male promiscuity.
The animal and dessert metaphors often used to describe women ultimately work to reduce them to this same status of sexually reprehensible things. Likening people to animals certainly isn’t anything new or exclusive to women: for centuries, people of all genders have evoked beasts both wild and domestic to describe people’s habits and appearance. Women certainly compare people to animals, including other women. They have no problem calling each other bitches and cows.* They use animal metaphors for men too—they call them pigs when they’re being messy, for example, or sexually predatorial. But these are references to a person’s behavior, not judgments about how willing they are to “give it up” for someone else’s pleasure. By contrast, when dudes use animal metaphors for women, the symbolism often says one of a few things: that women are meant to be hunted (like a bird), subordinated and domesticated (like a kitten or a cow), or feared (like a cougar*).
But comparing women to dessert is my personal favorite pattern to analyze. Caitlin Hines, a San Francisco State University linguist, has devoted much of her research to determining the unwritten rules of how English speakers characterize other people as food. In 1999, Hines conducted an analysis revealing that women are systematically likened to sugary, fruity items like tarts and cupcakes, as opposed to more substantial “masculine” parts of the meal, like beefcakes. More pointedly
, the desserts women are associated with are always, as Hines describes, “firm on the outside, soft or juicy in the middle, and either able to be cut into more than one piece (cherry pie, pound cake) or conceptualized as one (snatched) serving of an implied batch (crumpet, cupcake, tart).” You never see women compared to ice-cream cones or chocolate mousse because speakers, whether they realize it or not, recognize the rules of the “piece of ass” metaphor and adhere to them. They understand and comply: women, like tarts, are sweet, single-serving items meant to be easily snapped up.*
Here’s the wrench in this whole analysis, though: men aren’t the only speakers who get these rules and stick to them—women do it too. Women label each other things like honey and cupcake* all the time. They call one another sluts, hos, and cunts too. But why? As Schulz says, “It is clearly not the women themselves who have coined . . . these epithets for each other.” (Women weren’t the first to describe men as pussies and sissies, either.) So why do we go along with it? Why do so many women unquestioningly agree to use these unpleasant, dude-invented metaphors to verbally dress each other down?
I’ll offer the simple answer first. In our culture, men run the show, women are taught to follow their leads, to please them, and thus we go out of our way to fit into the semantic categories set up for us: prude or whore, bitch or sweetheart, princess or dyke. But there’s a slightly more complex answer too, which says what’s really going on is that women happen to be better at a thing called listening. Cornell linguist Sally McConnell-Ginet once argued that women, on the whole, have become better at picking up on the thoughts, feelings, and perspectives of the people they’re talking to. Theoretically, that should be a good thing. But where it gets tricky is that this generally ends up giving men more space to project the particular metaphors that make sense to them all over our culture’s collective vocabulary, as if their perspectives are the only ones that count.
McConnell-Ginet explains it like this: “The more one talks and the less one listens, the more likely it is that one’s viewpoint will function as if it were community consensus even if it is not.” The idea here is that on some level, women are aware that dudes have come to understand their viewpoint as the only one that exists and wouldn’t pick up on the metaphors that represent women’s positions even if they tried. If they did, sissy might be the word we use for a good friend instead of buddy, and pussy might be what we call, I don’t know, a badass warrior queen.* But, as McConnell-Ginet says, “The more attention one pays to perspectives different from one’s own, the more likely one is to give tacit—indeed sometimes unwitting—support to these other views simply by being able to understand them.” Thus, women’s experiences wind up getting squashed under their own generosity as listeners.
These dude-invented perspectives about men and women slip into the subtext beneath so many insults, even ones that aren’t explicitly gendered. Think of terms like nasty, bossy, and nag: though there are no overt references to femaleness in these words, they have fallen into a class of insults reserved for women alone. In 2017 sociolinguist Eliza Scruton conducted a study in which she examined a corpus (that’s a large collection of language samples) containing more than fifty million words from the internet to determine exactly how gender-specific words like nasty, bossy, and nag really are. In short? Very. Her data revealed that these terms skew strongly female in usage, often appearing before the words wife and mother.
Chi Luu, a computational linguist and language columnist at JSTOR Daily, once made the point that the purpose of name-calling is to accuse a person of not behaving as they should in the eyes of the speaker. The end goal of the insult is to shape the recipient’s actions to fit the speaker’s desired image of a particular group. Nasty and bossy criticize women for not behaving as sweet and docile as they ought to—for wanting too much power. Equally, words like wimp and pansy point out a man’s failure to live up to the macho standard of what men are supposed to be. In a culture that places such importance on men being tough and aggressive, and women being dainty and deferential, having someone accuse you of doing your gender badly often feels like the worst insult of all, because it tells you that you’ve failed at a fundamental part of who you are.
Gendered insults are damaging because they work to propagate harmful myths about men and women, which is not great for equality. So we should just give them up altogether, right? As it turns out, not exactly. As much as I hate being called a bitch in the middle of a fight, that doesn’t explain why I, and many other women, actively delight in so many of the gendered terms I’ve listed in this chapter. Personally, I proudly identify as nasty, a bitch, and a slut, which are also names that my friends and I would happily call each other with affection. And I’m only partially ashamed to admit that I also find words like tart and hussy just plain fun to say.
On the surface, these predilections might seem like treachery to feminism, but I think most linguists would pardon me. That’s because many of these slurs for women are lovable by design, simply because of how they sound. Phonetically, slut, bitch, cunt, and dyke happen to possess the essential aural recipe shared universally by English speakers’ favorite, most used, and sometimes very first words. Like mama, dada, and their derivatives, our most prevailing English slang, including the terms boob, tit, dude, and fuck, tend to be short and plosive. Stop consonants like b, p, d, and t are humans’ favorites from birth (if you’ve ever been around a babbling baby, you know this), and we continue to love them over the course of our lives. The more fun a word is to say, the likelier it is to persist; and, since terms like slut and bitch have all the acoustic trappings of a fun word, it makes sense that they’d have such staying power. It’s not as if women are just brainwashed by men to want to call each other these names—their phonetic delight is empirically proven.
But even more important than how they sound, what also makes our female-directed insults so irresistible is that many of them aren’t seen as completely negative anymore. This has everything to do with reclamation—with people actively redefining what these words mean from the ground up. Some of the most triumphant instances of reappropriated slurs come from our culture’s most oppressed communities. Take the word queer, for instance. Probably the most successful example in recent history, queer used to be exclusively a homophobic insult but has undergone a pretty impressive reappropriation by academics and the LGBTQ+ community. Queer is still considered problematic by some, but in the grand scheme of things, the word has evolved into a sort of self-affirming umbrella term for nonnormative gender and sexual identities. Today it can be found in contexts as lighthearted as the title of the TV series Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and as formal as one of the gender options listed on a job application, next to male and female.
There are also words like bitch, ho, dyke, and cunt, which are definitely still used abusively, but have also evolved as terms of endearment among women who use them inside their own groups (which is usually how a word’s reclamation begins—it’s when the rule of “I can call myself this word, but you can’t” becomes more relaxed over time). Remember Laurel A. Sutton’s 1992 slang study? Sutton also found that many of her young female participants called their friends bitch and ho, not as insults, but as humorous terms of affection. My experience is the same: I know I personally say things like “hey hos” and “love you, bitch” all the time.
How did this reclamation happen? In large part, we have circles of African-American women to thank for transforming bitch and ho. African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is a rich source of slang for America’s youth in general—AAVE is responsible for treasured slang terms as new as squad, fleek, and woke, and as old as bling-bling, the use of bad to mean good, and the phrase 24-7. (Sonja Lanehart, a University of Texas linguist, once told me that the first time she heard a white news anchor use the phrase 24-7 on TV, she nearly spat out her drink.) The particular way some women use AAVE has been paramount in the reappropriation of gendered insults. Many speakers of AAVE are virtuosos of a form of wordplay ca
lled signifyin’, the verbal art of insult in which a speaker humorously puts down the listener. Over the years, this ingenious technique has caught on beyond Black communities.
There’s also a specific connection between the positive redefinition of bitch and women in hip-hop. Since the late 1990s, Black female recording artists have used the phrase bad bitch to refer to a confident, desirable woman, as opposed to a mean or hostile one.* (Kudos to Trina’s 1999 song “Da Baddest Bitch” and Rihanna’s “Bad Bitch.”) Hip-hop is also responsible for the word heaux, a Frencher-looking and thus chicer and more pleasant alternative spelling of hos that my female friends and I began using in 2017. The first place I saw heaux was in the title of a song that came out that year, “These Heaux,” by teen rapper Danielle Bregoli (who is white, incidentally, though the idea of cleverly respelling words is another thing we can attribute to AAVE, which is no doubt where Bregoli learned to do this). Heaux may be nothing but a cheeky orthographic play, but it gives the word enough of a female-driven makeover that it makes it feel ever so subtly more empowering and reclaimed.
Ho and bitch in these contexts are used not as slurs but as signals of solidarity and liberation. Certainly there are women who aren’t comfortable with these words no matter what, but for the women who are, describing themselves as bitches and hos can be a way to reject old standards of femininity. Sutton analyzes it like this: “Perhaps when we call each other ‘ho,’ we acknowledge that we are women who have sex and earn our own money too; and when we call each other ‘bitch,’ we acknowledge the realities of this man-made world and affirm our ability to survive in it. Through resistance comes redefinition.”
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