Wordslut

by Amanda Montell

  Some compelling proof that women are indeed not born any more capable of empathy or connection than men comes from psychologist Niobe Way. In 2013 Way published a book called Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection, which explores the friendships of young straight men. Way followed a group of boys from childhood through adolescence and found that when they were little, boys’ friendships with other boys were just as intimate and emotional as friendships between girls; it wasn’t until the norms of masculinity sank in that the boys ceased to confide in or express vulnerable feelings for one another. By the age of eighteen, society’s “no homo” creed had become so entrenched that they felt like the only people they could look to for emotional support were women, further perpetuating the notion that women are obligated by design to carry humanity’s emotional cargo.

  Natural or not, however, what we know for sure is that wherever women’s cooperative speech style comes from, a lot of them seem to be pretty good at it. True, many women don’t actively choose to acquire their empathy and collaboration skills, but we can’t fault them for making the best of it.

  Of course, women don’t handle each other with care all the time. One amusing illustration of women’s linguistic contrariness comes from a 1994 study in which language scholar Gabriella Modan discovered that among Jewish women in particular, the standard “cooperative” model of girl-on-girl conversation doesn’t apply. Instead, Jewish women tend to build linguistic solidarity through “opposition” (aka grumpily bickering like siblings). “Oppositional discussion itself creates intimacy because it signals that the relationship is strong enough to withstand serious differences of opinion,” Modan wrote. (“Tell me about it,” agreed my aunt Francie, one of the Jewish matriarchs of my family, after I summarized this paper for her a few Thanksgivings ago. “I have a couple friends I can barely stand talking to because we disagree on everything. Gotta love ’em.”)

  There are other ways in which women—Jewish and not—defy linguistic expectations when shielded from the watchful eye of patriarchy. In a 1996 study, Alysa Brown, a language scholar at the University of Texas, San Antonio, taped the natural speech of eight collegiate athletes on a women’s tennis team and found that when they were talking just among teammates, there was as much competitive verbal sparring, boasting, and one-upping as you’d typically see in groups of dudes. In one exchange, a woman was telling another teammate how well her last game went, dropping lines like “I was so awesome, I couldn’t miss. . . . I just laughed the whole time cause [the other player] sucked so bad.” These athletes also used more profanity and fewer cooperative questions. Meanwhile, they spoke in the same interjection-filled jam session manner that Coates found. All things considered, these women displayed a combination of both classically masculine and feminine speech styles.

  This idea that women often use both traditionally masculine and feminine conversational tactics is even more intriguing than it sounds, because it raises questions about what feminine speech even is in the first place. Was the source of these athletes’ linguistic diversity simply that collegiate sports are a competitive environment that inspires more vulgarity and one-upping? Or was it that out of everywhere in the world, these players felt most comfortable—like they could be their most unfiltered selves—in the company of their teammates, and their speech reflected that? And if that’s really the case, what might women’s speech sound like if everyone felt that at ease all the time?

  Researchers have stumbled upon a few faint glimmers of what women’s most unfiltered speech might sound like. Here’s one that makes me audibly laugh every time I flip open the transcript: In the 1990s sociologist Jenny Cook-Gumperz recorded a conversation among a trio of three-year-olds in a kindergarten class. The girls were playing “house,” casting themselves as the mothers and their dolls as their babies. Acting out domestic scenarios is something that most girls this age do (I know I did)—Cook-Gumperz says that’s because the mommy-baby structure allows young girls “to explore their gender roles as women.” This makes sense seeing as we live in a culture that has long taught us that being a good mother is part of being a good woman. Playing house is a way to investigate that.

  However, because no one is watching too carefully, and because the terribleness that is being a “bad mom” hasn’t been fully burned into their brains yet, little girls don’t always act like “perfect” mothers in these games. In fact, sometimes they experiment with playing the polar opposite. In Cook-Gumperz’s recordings, the three girls are giving their babies baths, when one of them mentions that the water is hot. “Let’s boil the babies!” her friend responds. “Yes, let’s boil them and boil them!” squeals a third.

  This blatantly homicidal and unmotherly exchange between kindergarteners is at once horrifying and hilarious. Eerily, I have a similar memory from my own childhood. One day at preschool, during recess, I remember acting as the mother in one of these domestic games and forcing the girl playing my baby to remain locked in a makeshift dungeon under the slide until I told her she could come out. “I am your master!” I proclaimed. (Did I miss my calling as a dominatrix?)

  It’s not just kids who talk like this. In 1999 Coates observed a conversation between three British women in their thirties, who’d been close friends for years. In the transcript, they are discussing another friend’s poorly behaved kids, specifically how they feel like they’re never allowed to say anything negative about them. (“It is undeniable,” says Coates, “that one of the burdens of being born female is the imperative to be nice.”*) In the privacy of their conversation, however, the women let down their guard, bonding over the unladylike truth that they actually find these children—in their words—“horrible” and “ghastly.”

  Linguists say these types of mutual confessions serve a larger purpose: to strengthen bonds among women. “Reciprocal admissions of ‘not-niceness’ . . . [and] taboo feelings . . . reinforce solidarity,” Coates explains, labeling these types of exchanges backstage talk. “In women’s backstage talk, we find women relaxing and letting down the conventional, ‘nice’ front they normally maintain frontstage. ‘Behaving badly’ like this backstage—that is, owning our less nice, our more impolite and unsociable feelings—is accepted and even welcomed between friends.”

  The intention of women’s backstage talk is not that different from Donald Trump’s lewd banter from the Access Hollywood tape—in the end, it is also a means of creating unanimity and closeness. Trump’s style of talk is certainly different in other important ways. For one, in locker-room banter, the solidarity doesn’t always require a genuine shared confession; sometimes it’s simply earned by the crassness of the language itself. For that reason, it might not even matter if the speaker believes what he’s saying or not. Trump may have never actually “grabbed” a woman “by the pussy” at all, but in his exchange with Billy Bush, the fact that he would say such a disturbing thing in the first place was the part that counted. I’m willing to bet that at least 50 percent of all the sexist remarks men make in the locker rooms of the world don’t reflect actions they’ve actually taken in real life. In an effort to bond, they descend to their baser selves.

  The big problem there is that whether the content of their statements is true or not, the fact that the sexual assault of women is exchanged in casual chitchat (even by otherwise “nice guys”) reinforces the idea that that sort of thing is acceptable. As Cameron puts it, “When you objectify and dehumanize a class of people”—whether that’s women or a racial minority or both or anyone—“it becomes easier to mistreat them without guilt.” Scholars have a clever word for this kind of social structure in which power is formed through a brotherhood that objectifies and dehumanizes those on the outside: they call it fratriarchy. Many think this is a more accurate way to describe our culture’s post-feudal system, which is ruled not by the fathers, but by peer networks of the brothers. Backstage talk that otherizes all things feminine is part of the mortar that keeps the walls of fratriarchy standing strong.
And when you are part of an especially close group, like Donald and his bus bros, it makes it even harder to dissent, because you risk giving up that bond and the power that comes with it. So you end up like Billy Bush, laughing along.

  Solidarity among women isn’t created this way. Because women are lower on society’s totem pole, and have less power to lose, their conversational bonding has everything to do with admitting to their rebellion against the gender status quo, not doing everything they can to live up to it. For that reason, when women build in-group connections through conversation, their statements have to be 100 percent truthful. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a secret worth sharing, and thus, it wouldn’t accomplish its goal.

  In the end, though, no matter how many studies we do or corpuses we compile, we can never truly know what women’s most unmitigated speech sounds like. Even when women feel their most relaxed, society’s expectations still loom overhead, and women often check themselves (and one another) for speaking in a way that’s too backstage. Coates recalls an example from one of her recordings, where a teenage girl divulges a fantasy about a boy in her class “putting hair gel on his pubic hair and combing it,” to which one of her friends exclaims, “Laura!” in a disapproving tone. Pressures for women to position themselves as “normal” and “nice” are almost always a constraint, no matter who’s listening. “None of us is ever free of the need to keep up some sort of front,” Coates says.

  I admit, even if women are able to let down their guards completely in the company of other women, I don’t know quite how to feel about the notion that women sometimes reserve certain versions of themselves, of their gender performance, for certain contexts. On the one hand, I think the idea is rather beautiful—that those who’ve shared a similar experience of the world can get together and use these subtle linguistic cues to connect and feel understood. But at the same time, does that mean we’re hiding something outside of those environments?

  I’m not the only one with conflicting opinions about this. Coates is ambivalent too. “It remains to be seen whether the overt expression of alternative and subversive femininities backstage only serves to perpetuate the hetero-patriarchal order, by providing an outlet for the frustrations of frontstage performance,” she wrote in 1999. “Or is it possible that such backstage rehearsals may eventually lead to new frontstage performances?”

  While writing for a beauty magazine a few years ago, I learned about a makeup artist in her forties who never went to bed without a full face of makeup on. Her husband never saw her without lipstick, eyeshadow, mascara, the works. She didn’t want him to see her as anything less than her most polished self. She exhaustively put forth a frontstage performance from the neck up, even at four in the morning.

  If letting yourself boast about your victories, tell off-color stories, and express disapproval of children are the equivalents of showing your un-made-up face, I’m curious to know what would happen if women all agreed to retire their mascara wands, if for no other reason than to let the overconfident Otto Jespersens and John L. Lockes of the world know that we’re capable of being just as great and just as crude as men. If not greater and cruder.

  Male linguists certainly aren’t the only ones cocksure of their beliefs about women’s speech. False and disparaging conclusions are drawn about how women use language, especially young women, by all different kinds of people every day. Have you ever had someone tell you that you should stop using the word like because it makes you sound stupid? Or that you shouldn’t apologize so much? If you’re a woman under the age of thirty-five, odds are you have. Perhaps you’ve even passed one of these judgments yourself. I wouldn’t blame you if you did—we English speakers have been trained to turn our noses up at any type of speech that doesn’t sound like that of a male thirty-four-year-old TV host named Billy, or, as we’ll learn in a second, a sixty-four-year-old NPR reporter named Bob.

  Today’s sharpest linguists, however, have data suggesting that “teenage girl speak,” one of the most loathed and mocked language styles, is actually what standard English is going to sound like in the near future. In a lot of ways, it’s already happening. And that’s making a lot of middle-age men very, very cranky.

  4

  Women Didn’t Ruin the English Language—They, Like, Invented It

  It’s 2013, and Bob Garfield is in a state of exasperation. “Vulgar,” he spits into his microphone. “Repulsive.” I’m listening to an episode of the NPR host’s language-themed podcast, Lexicon Valley. Though I cannot see fifty-eight-year-old Garfield with my own eyes, from the disdain in his voice, I can picture him, scornfully stroking his frosty-white facial hair and crossing one corduroy-clad arm over the other. The topic of discussion is a linguistic phenomenon that Garfield says is so endlessly “annoying” that he wishes he could “wave a magic wand over a significant portion of the American public and make it come to an end.” It is an oddity that occurs “exclusively” among young women, he tells cohost Mike Vuolo with conviction. “I don’t have any data [proving this],” he says. “I simply know I’m right.”*

  Any guesses as to what this odious feminine speech quality could be? It’s vocal fry, also known by linguists as creaky voice. You may have heard of this phenomenon or even do it yourself: vocal fry is a raspy, low-pitched noise that we often hear as people trail off at the ends of their sentences. The sound is produced when a speaker compresses their vocal cords, reducing the airflow and frequency of vibrations through the larynx, causing the voice to sound sort of, well, creaky. Like a rusty door, or the grate of a Mexican guiro. (Commentators like to reference the voices of Valley girls and Kim Kardashian when describing vocal fry—in fact, it is a part of a legitimate dialect colloquially termed “Valley girl speak”—though people of all genders and geographical locations do it too, which I’ll get into later.)

  Garfield says that in recent years, he’s noticed a vocal fry epidemic in the speech of women in their teens and twenties—nothing but a “mindless affectation”—and he is certain that it’s irreparably ruining the English language. To demonstrate the sound, Garfield beckons his eleven-year-old daughter to the microphone. “Ida, be obnoxious,” he instructs.

  In the years following this podcast, vocal fry becomes increasingly mauled and mocked by the media—a public emblem of young women’s overall inability to communicate as elegantly as older, wiser men. In 2014 the Atlantic publishes a report that women who talk with vocal fry are less likely to be hired. In 2015 a male Vice reporter publishes a story called “My Girlfriend Went to a Speech Therapist to Cure Her Vocal Fry.” The same year, journalist Naomi Wolf pens an article for the Guardian titled, “Young women, give up the vocal fry and reclaim your strong female voice.” She writes, “‘Vocal fry’ is that guttural growl at the back of the throat, as a Valley girl might sound if she had been shouting herself hoarse at a rave all night.”

  I myself remember being berated for using vocal fry in high school by a male theater teacher who told me that if I continued contaminating my lines with creak, I would never make it to Broadway. (Could this be the reason I was not cast as one of the original stars of Hamilton?)

  Of course vocal fry isn’t the only thing wrong with young female voices. Around the same time of Bob Garfield’s episode, the internet has a collective freak-out over contemporary “lady language,” and journalists everywhere start cranking out think pieces analyzing other characteristics commonly noticed and reviled in women’s speech. Saying like after every other word is a well-known example. So is apologizing too much; using hyperbolic internet slang (“OMG, I AM LITERALLY DYING”); and speaking with uptalk, where you end a declarative sentence with the upward intonation of a question.

  Suddenly, making poorly informed, pseudofeminist claims about how women talk becomes the trendy thing for brands and magazines to do. In 2014 hair care company Pantene releases an advertisement encouraging women to stop saying “sorry” all the time. (Because now not only does your hair need a makeover, so does your speech!) A year la
ter, publications like Time and Business Insider begin claiming that uptalk makes women sound timid and self-conscious. YOUNG LADY, IF YOU EVER WANT A JOB OR A HUSBAND YOU MUST STOP TALKING THIS WAY, the internet screams.

  At the height of this media frenzy, I was a twentysomething female, the very target of these articles and commercials, and I had three concerns: 1) whether or not speech qualities like vocal fry and uptalk are really exclusive to young women; 2) the purpose they serve, if so; and 3) why everybody hates them so much.

  Those hair product copywriters and magazine reporters thought they were original, but when it comes to telling young women how they should and shouldn’t speak, UC Berkeley’s Robin Lakoff had them beat by about four decades. Lakoff’s most famous contribution in that 1975 book of hers, Language and Woman’s Place, was a list of observed characteristics of “women’s speech.” This was basically Otto Jespersen’s “The Woman” chapter with a quasi-feminist twist. Lakoff’s inventory of lady language included: a tendency to over-apologize, “empty” adjectives (“This chocolate mousse is heavenly”), ultrapolite language (“Would you mind if . . .”), strong emphasis (“I LOVE that show”), indirect requests (“I think the package is still downstairs,” instead of, “Can you go get the package?”), hypercorrection of grammar (“between you and I,” as opposed to “between you and me”), hedging (“kind of,” “you know”), tag questions (“That movie was good, wasn’t it?”), and an avoidance of cursing (“Goodness gracious” instead of “Holy shit”).

  Lakoff’s argument was that women systematically use these linguistic features more than men because they have been socialized to do so as a part of the cultural expectation that women present themselves as deferential and unassertive. What was good about Lakoff’s commentary was that it brought an unprecedented amount of attention to the relationship between language and social power, and she was on the right track in helping to illuminate ways in which speech can perpetuate existing gender stereotypes. Never before had a linguist formally argued that the types of intonation or questions one uses could send messages about the speaker’s gender, thus granting or impeding their access to respect and authority. Where Lakoff went wrong, however, was suggesting that women acclimate to men’s speech style if they want any hope of equality. According to Lakoff, weakness is a trait we’ve come to strongly (albeit unfairly) associate with being female, not just verbally but in general; so, if women would like to be perceived otherwise, it would behoove them to dissociate themselves from what we’ve been conditioned to see as feminine behavior. That means making an effort to avoid speaking with any of the characteristics listed earlier, which Lakoff claimed made women sound insecure, just like all those commercials and articles forty years later.