Wordslut

by Amanda Montell

  A word doesn’t have to lose its negative meanings completely to be considered reclaimed. The path to reclamation is almost never that smooth. That queer and dyke can still be used as gay slurs is not necessarily a sign that their reclamation has failed. Semantic change does not happen overnight; instead, it’s a more gradual process wherein one meaning slowly overlaps another, then eclipses it. As long as the positive varieties of a word steadily become more common, more mainstream, by the time the next generation starts learning the language, they will pick up those meanings first.

  Of course, while reclamation is slow-moving and mostly occurs through the daily grind of using old words in new contexts, there are a few organized efforts that can help speed things up. Activism is one of them. Look at what happened with the word suffragette: We no longer think of this term as an insult, but originally, it was invented as a demeaning version of the word suffragist (a Latin-derived term meaning a person of any gender who aims to extend voting rights). When suffragette was first coined, it was intended as a diminutive smear for women’s liberation activists in the early twentieth century: suffragettes were husbandless hags who dared to want the vote. The women’s lib movement was obviously far from perfect (it pretty much only benefited rich white ladies), but what was cool linguistically was that those women immediately stole the word suffragette, put it up on posters, shouted it through the streets, named their political magazine after it, and now most English speakers have entirely forgotten that it was ever meant as a slur.

  In more recent years, we’ve seen activists try to replicate this sort of success: consider Amber Rose’s Slut Walk, a yearly march against rape culture, or the annual Dyke March, a lesbian pride event. Certainly, lesbians have been using dyke to describe themselves since long before the first march was organized in the 1980s, but the image of fifteen thousand women marching through the streets with the letters D-Y-K-E proudly scrawled across their signs, sweatshirts, and bare breasts certainly helps the word along its way.

  In the age of the internet, memes—that is, viral web symbols—have also helped transfer the ownership of a word from the abusers to the oppressed. One of the most famous examples of reclamation-by-meme has to be nasty woman. Less than twenty-four hours after Donald Trump uttered the nasty woman heard around the world during a 2016 presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, it was made into a gif, a line of mugs (I own one), and a digital fund-raising campaign for Planned Parenthood. It only took about a day for the online mob to successfully snatch the phrase from the man who first said it. The internet can sometimes be cool that way.

  Now comes the fun part: knowing what we now know about how gendered insults evolved and what they accomplish, we have to figure out what to do next. How can we all proceed to make sure words like bitch, slut, and pussy don’t continue to work for evil instead of good? How can we approach our language usage in a way that’s fun and playful but also not perpetuating toxic gender stereotypes?

  Feminist media mogul Andi Zeisler, who cofounded and runs Bitch Media (a nonprofit organization that has a reclaimed slur in its very title), told me that the first step we can take to reduce the harm caused by gendered insults is simply to avoid using them abusively. That is, to use them only in positive contexts (“Wow, impressive, she’s a bad bitch!” as opposed to “Fuck her, that evil bitch”).

  Alternatively, we can give them up altogether—after all, not every insult is meant to be reclaimed.* Slut is one word that some feminists believe deserves to be terminated rather than taken back, simply because having a “special” word for female promiscuity is shady to begin with. Even Amber Rose, founder of the Slut Walk herself, wishes the word slut would disappear. In 2017 the model and activist told Playboy magazine, “My goal this year is to . . . get slut out of the dictionary. I’m going to find out where [Webster’s] headquarters are and tell my fans to come and protest with me, because the definition of a slut in the dictionary is a woman—a promiscuous woman.”

  Taking it upon ourselves to eradicate or redefine slut in everyday conversation will no doubt be more impactful than storming Webster’s HQ. (As Deborah Cameron once said, “It’s no good petitioning the King. . . . The struggle for meaning is a grassroots campaign.”) But I appreciate Rose’s intentions, and I’m wont to agree that in a culture that did not loathe women’s sexual sovereignty with such gusto, the whole idea of a slut, and thus the word itself, would not resonate and therefore cease to exist. This sort of linguistic disappearing act has happened before. It’s why terms like old maid and spinster* seem passé—because, as of the twenty-first century, so does the idea of criticizing a woman for being over the age of forty and unmarried. Simply put, slurs go out of style at the same time the underlying belief in them does.

  However, we all have our own relationships to different slurs, and mine to slut is a little different from Amber Rose’s. Personally, I haven’t used slut as a term of abuse or even thought of it that way for years. This is simply because I don’t think there is such a thing as a slut in a negative sense given that I don’t think there is such a thing as contemptible promiscuity in women. I still use the word slut—not a lot, but sparingly—and always in a positive, empowering, and sometimes ironic light, similar to the contexts Laurel Sutton observed with ho (e.g, “I had the sluttiest night ever, it was amazing”). Often my friends and I even use slut (and whore) in a nonsexual and gender-unspecific sense to describe one’s fanatical enthusiasm for something (e.g., “Zack is such a whore for McDonald’s fries” or “Amanda is the biggest wordslut I know”). Perhaps I stand by slut because it has that fun, plosive, single-syllable sound we all like so much. Perhaps it’s because I personally haven’t had too many traumatic experiences with the abusive usage of the word. Or perhaps it’s simply because if you analyze a slur enough, eventually its sting is removed, like when you repeat a word over and over again until it loses all meaning and starts to sound weird. I’d like to believe that we can get to a point where female sexuality is never reprehensible. That way, anyone can identify as a slut if they want, knowing that little offense, if any, will result.

  But words can’t be positive all the time. In practice, insults are a linguistic need that will probably never go away (we’re a critical bunch, us humans). So, when you do find yourself in need of an insult, to navigate the gender and sexism problem, here’s another idea: instead of calling a woman a cunt, or a man a motherfucker, we could try to think of something gender neutral to say, choosing to focus on a person’s behavior while verbally slighting them rather than their gender, which is more specific and effective anyway. For example, if someone of any gender does something conniving, we can call them a “shit-filled, two-faced sneak” or a “goddamn villainous crook,” instead of a bitch or a dick—insults which happen to be more creative, scathing, and (importantly) relevant. If you want to get even more colorful about it, there are a few gender-neutral insults from foreign languages I quite enjoy. Perhaps try the Jamaican word bumbaclot, meaning “ass wipe,” or the endearing (though hard to pronounce) Russian term perhot’ podzalupnaya, meaning “pee hole dandruff.”

  The other positive thing we can do, says Zeisler, is to be mindful of the sexist terms we use around kids. Childhood and adolescence, after all, are when so many of these gendered stereotypes are solidified. “Take an active role in helping younger people break down what it is that they’re really trying to say when they call someone a bitch or a slut or a pussy,” Zeisler suggests, referencing an incident from 2008 when a college student called Hillary Clinton a bitch in front of her. “I asked him why he used that word in particular,” Zeisler recalls. It turned out that this student didn’t actually have strong, independently formed opinions about Hillary Clinton or what she should be called but instead had learned to refer to her as a bitch early in life because he grew up hearing his parents do it. Like the toddler who repeats “shit” over and over after hearing her mom let it slip out in the car, we absorb a hefty fraction of our unthinking gendered insult usage fro
m our parents. In both positive and negative directions, future generations’ offensive language habits are to some degree within our control. “There’s so much in language that just becomes default,” says Zeisler, “and so getting there early and challenging it is really crucial.”

  This isn’t a matter of putting a moratorium on any given word out of political correctness or fear of offending. In fact, it’s the opposite; it’s a rebellion against the rules. By refusing to use words like slut and pussy as terms of abuse, you’re rejecting the imbalanced standards that have been set for women’s sexuality and men’s machismo. It’s a form of protest against the condemnation of women’s sexual independence and men’s refusal to act like chauvinist bruisers. And if enough people rebel, then everyone wins, because a society that’s more equal is also one that’s more relaxed, more compassionate, and less offended overall. If we’re able to make like queers and dykes and own our insults, then the word offense itself will become obsolete.

  Heightening our awareness of gendered insults gives us a better chance of becoming more conscious, more inclusive, and thus more accurate when we describe people’s appearances and behaviors. That awareness, in turn, makes one think about how gender sneaks into other areas of our everyday speech. If we’re going to analyze what the word slut really means, where it comes from, and why we say it, the next natural step is to ask the same questions about the rest of the gendered words we habitually use without thinking, like woman, man, female, male, guy, girl, she, he, etc. Why do gender and sex, as opposed to any other identifying qualities, play such a fundamental role in how we talk about people? Why is singling out a person’s gender through language so important to us?

  I figured there had to be a story there. And, oh my word, there was . . .

  2

  Wait . . . What Does the Word Woman Mean Anyway?

  Plus Other Questions of Sex, Gender, and the Language Behind Them

  There was once a gifted rocket scientist named Yvonne Brill. Born in Winnipeg, Canada, Brill spent her prodigious three-decade career dreaming up dazzling new ways for NASA to send starships and satellites into the great beyond. Brill attended the University of Manitoba, though she was not allowed to study engineering due to the fact that she possessed a vulva. (Unclear whether or not the admissions office personally confirmed her vulva, but because of the little f on her birth certificate, they evidently wagered a guess and stamped “Nope, no engineering for you, dear” on her transcript.) She wasn’t deterred. Brill majored in chemistry and mathematics instead, and years later, she developed a rocket engine so efficient and reliable that it became standard throughout the industry. If you’ve ever watched the local news, looked up the weather, or used a GPS, you have Dr. Brill to thank.

  When Brill died in 2013 at the age of eighty-eight, the world of aerospace engineering mourned her deeply, and a couple days later, the New York Times ran an obituary that started a little something like this:

  She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. “The world’s best mom,” her son Matthew said.

  But Yvonne Brill, who died on Wednesday at 88 in Princeton, N.J., was also a brilliant rocket scientist . . .

  And everyone was really, really confused.

  Yvonne Brill spent decades launching missions to the moon and to Mars. In 2011 President Obama awarded her the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. But damn, that stroganoff. And lest we forget those eight years she took off to nurture her offspring (which didn’t actually happen; she just went part-time). In the eyes of the Times, however, those trappings of traditional femininity not only defined Brill more than her contributions to the cosmos, they were—as the “but” at the start of their second paragraph implies—in direct contradiction.

  The Times didn’t get away with their sexist aspersion of Brill’s life. They hastily struck the stroganoff reference after a veritable shitstorm of criticism echoed throughout the press, lamenting the obit’s emphasis on Brill’s stereotypical embodiment of womanness (the food, the babies) rather than her intergalactic reputation. As book critic Edward Champion tweeted that week, the paper’s death notice of Mahatma Gandhi likely would not have read, “[He] made a great frittata, ironed some shirts, and took eight years off to catch up on Hardy Boys books.”

  I came across the problematic opening of Brill’s obit in college and it instantly piqued my interest, because it posed the challenging question: At the end of the day (or at the end of a life, as it were), what does the word woman truly represent? That is, when English speakers label someone a woman, what image do we intend to put in a listener’s mind? Is a woman defined by certain gender roles (a devoted wife and nurturing cook)? Is womanness classified by presentation (long hair, makeup, dresses)? Is it the body that potentially allows childbearing, the vulva that excluded Brill from U of M’s engineering program? Or is that instead what we mean when we say female? Also, why are some people offended by explicitly gendering an accomplished professional who happens to be a woman, like Yvonne Brill—calling her “a woman scientist,” as opposed to just “a scientist”—while others aren’t? Perhaps woman is becoming one of those words that means something different to everyone. But if that is indeed the case, how do we figure out how to use it?

  Some people argue that if we want gender equality, then we should avoid using the word woman in public whenever possible. From their perspective, it’s sexist to call out a woman’s gender in contexts where the same wouldn’t be done for a man. You may have heard one or two high-achieving women tell an interviewer, “I don’t want to be known as a woman such-and-such, I just want to be known as that thing, no qualifiers.” In 1996 television director Gloria Muzio said: “It’s always been important to me and crucial to be thought of as a good director, not as a good woman director, but unfortunately, I’ve been singled out at times as a woman.”

  Perhaps the biggest critic of adding women’s genders to their accomplishments is UC Berkeley scholar Robin Lakoff. Often considered the founding parent of the study of gender and language, Lakoff wrote an explosively influential book in 1975 called Language and Woman’s Place, which sparked great debate about the role language plays in creating gender stereotypes. To say “woman scientist,” “woman president,” or “woman doctor” implies that a woman filling these roles is “in some way unnatural,” Lakoff once told the New York Times. What these gendered qualifiers do is suggest that it is an exception for women to have well-regarded professions, and that messaging can creep into our real-life decision-making. Lakoff continued: “Every time we say ‘woman president,’ we reinforce the view that only a man can be commander in chief [and] symbolize the US (which is metonymically Uncle Sam and not Aunt Samantha, after all), and make it harder to conceive of, and hence vote for, a woman in that role.”

  Not everyone agrees that calling attention to a woman’s gender is bad, even in contexts where you wouldn’t do so for a man. The way some folks see it, because it’s still harder for women to succeed in science, medicine, and politics, highlighting their gender helps make women in these fields more visible. It’s seen as an inspiration.

  Others argue that whether you call someone like Dr. Brill an engineer or a woman engineer, it won’t make much of a difference in how people conceive of engineers in general. Linguistic studies show that many gender-neutral job titles (cardiologist, construction worker) are still usually interpreted as men’s jobs, no matter what words you use to describe them. (Equally, titles like housekeeper and babysitter are interpreted as women’s jobs, even though the words themselves don’t make any reference to gender.) Furthermore, when new words that are meant to be gender-inclusive are introduced to the lexicon (chairperson instead of chairman, businessperson versus businessman, firefighter versus fireman), they often wind up becoming another feminine term—an outlier in a world where man is still the default. There will always be people who continue to call a businessperson a businessman and will only
switch to the gender-inclusive term when the subject is female—a sign that adjusting one’s language in the right direction doesn’t necessarily cause one’s unconscious thinking to follow.

  Another important branch of the “to gender or not to gender” debate is whether to call someone a woman or a female. The dispute has stirred up real controversy. In 2015, after Hillary Clinton announced the start of her presidential campaign, political pundits went berserk over whether she should (if elected) go by the term “woman president” or “female president.”

  This semantic bickering was justifiable, even if most of those reporters didn’t understand exactly why: in practical usage, woman and female are not, in fact, interchangeable. Our Oxford linguist Deborah Cameron found proof of this in the British National Corpus (a comprehensive database containing over one hundred million written and spoken English words collected from a wide variety of sources. The corpus is meant to serve as a representative sample of late-twentieth-century British English). After scanning the database, Cameron found that when people use female as a noun, as opposed to woman, it’s often in explicitly negative contexts. For example:

  My poor Clemence was as helpless a female as you’d find in a long day’s march.

  “Stupid, crazy female” was all he said as he set about bandaging it.

  A call yesterday involved giving the chatty female at the other end one’s address.