Wordslut

by Amanda Montell

  I think this empathy issue is also part of what’s going on with interruption, nonresponse, mansplaining, calling women “hysterical,” and many of the other linguistic power moves we’ve identified so far. Because masculinity as we know it discourages men from forming solidarity with women, when a dude ignores or strong-arms a woman’s voice, he’s doing a good job by society’s standards. He’s playing his role well. The fact that the role causes damage is of relatively little importance.

  Feminist Dale Spender has said before that when the experiences of women or queer people go unnamed, people doubt their existence at all. Before we had labels like “sexism,” “sexual harassment,” and “homophobia”—terms that have only existed since the 1960s and ’70s—people saw the victims’ behavior as the problem. Women were hypersensitive and neurotic (or “asking for it”) and gay people were abominable. But even after we give these experiences names and recognition, we often still treat them as the victim’s responsibility to fix. We teach women that if you feel silenced at work, or in your relationship, or just walking from the train to your apartment, then it’s your job, and your job alone, to find a way to be heard. Do as Elizabeth Warren did in 2017 when Mitch McConnell silenced her on the Senate floor, and nevertheless persist. Speak out on social media, start your own organizations, take to the streets. Tell the sexual trespassers, “No.”

  I’d like to take a moment to offer a brief linguistic critique of what’s wrong with teaching women to say “no” and men to listen for “no” when we talk about sexual consent: analyses of real-life refusals show that there is a precise formula English speakers follow to decline things in a socially acceptable way, and it actually almost never includes the word no. Instead, it goes: hesitate + hedge + express regret + give a culturally acceptable reason. As in “Um, well, I’d love to, but I have to finish this assignment,” or “Oh, I’m sorry, but I should go home and feed my cat.” It is also our very job as listeners to make inferences about what other people mean when they speak, whether or not it is said in the clearest way. (Think of how strange it would be to reject a friend’s invitation out to coffee with a blunt “NO!”) Not to mention that in a sexual assault scenario, refusing something so brusquely might cause more tension or danger. The problem with teaching “no means no” is that it ultimately lets sexual offenders off the hook, because it removes their duty to use common sense as listeners, so that later they can say, “Well, she didn’t say ‘no.’ I can’t read people’s minds,” and we as a culture go, “That’s true, her fault.” Plus, as we’ve already learned, sexual trespassers actually don’t need an explicit no—they already get what they’re doing is wrong. They simply don’t care, because our culture teaches them that they don’t have to.

  Inspiring marginalized folks to self-advocate loudly and clearly is important, of course. It is indispensable. But in practice, it only solves the problem halfway. Because what it fails to address is that we live in a culture that doesn’t exactly make it easy for women and queer folks to stand up for themselves in the first place.

  Peg O’Connor, a gender and philosophy scholar at Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota, explains it like this: “We are not all Elizabeth Warren either in temperament or situation. Too many women would be fired from their jobs were they to speak out. In their personal relationships, women often fear the consequences of speaking out too.” The fear of being punished for speaking against the status quo is all-encompassing, and ultimately it works to control women’s actions from the inside out. It makes women silence themselves. “This is in no sense blaming the victim,” O’Connor explains, “but rather an acknowledgment of the way that dominated or oppressed people often ‘self-police’ or become ‘docile.’”

  What’s more is that thanks to centuries of steeping in messages that women are delicate, overly emotional, and unfit to hold power, many women have an internalized belief that it’s natural for them not to have a voice. It’s an unconscious feeling that speechlessness is just part of being a woman and that to be too loud or assertive would mean losing female identity, which is precious, because it’s a huge part of who they are.

  In a perfect world, people wouldn’t need to strategize what ghoulish faces or clever interview questions to have on hand for whenever a stranger in the street ambushes them with a review of how their butt looks in their jeans. In such a world, sex and flirting would be things that were equally desired and agreed upon, and preaching the necessity of “yes/no” consent transactions would no longer apply because it would already be a given that each sexual participant took the time and empathy to get on each other’s wavelength. The word hysterical would retire alongside old maid and spinster to the graveyard of forgotten offenses, and everyone, regardless of gender, would feel like they had access to the mic whenever they had something important to say.

  The way to get to that world starts not with teaching women how to protect themselves from harm but with teaching men, ideally from very early on, that the whole world does not belong to them. When men are itty-bitty boys, we as their parents and teachers have to dismantle our culture’s ideas of masculinity as we know them at every turn. It has to be okay—encouraged, really—for men to empathize and align with women and to stick up for them when they see other men try to take them down, linguistically and otherwise. “To put their principles above their fraternal loyalties,” as Deborah Cameron once put it. And it has to be not okay to treat anyone who isn’t a man like an intruder in their world.

  In 2015 Sheryl Sandberg told a story to the New York Times about a guy named Glen Mazzara, who ran a hit TV series called The Shield. Mazzara noticed that in pitch meetings, the show’s two women writers never spoke up. So he pulled them aside and encouraged them not to be so shy. It wasn’t a matter of “shy,” they promised. As Mazzara soon observed, nearly every time one of the women tried to pitch something, she was either interrupted, shot down, or her idea was stolen and taken credit for by one of the guys before she could finish. Mazzara was a busy fellow, and he could have ignored these women, or told them just to practice getting better at asserting themselves; but instead, he tried to help by switching up the power dynamics of the room so that they could be heard. He established a no-interruption rule in the writer’s room, so that no one was allowed to cut off anyone of any gender before they were done speaking. As it turned out, the new strategy worked, the women’s ideas became heard, and it made the whole team more productive and creative.

  Men in power should see it as their responsibility to extend a hand in this way, because in the end, they too might have something to gain from mixing up the voices in the room. Take a cue from one of the most powerful men in US history: at the end of a 2014 press conference, President Barack Obama called on eight reporters for questions—all women. The act made international headlines. “Had a politician given only men a chance to ask questions, it would not have been news; it would have been a regular day,” Sheryl Sandberg commented. “We wonder what would happen if we all held Obama-style meetings, offering women the floor whenever possible.”

  That’s not to say that while men sort this whole thing out, women should all go on a big Carnival Cruise and bide their time slurping piña coladas out of sippy cups shaped like vaginas until the matrilineal revolution takes hold. Don’t get me wrong, that sounds like a blast. But realistically, we have to stick up for ourselves along the way too. We have to speak out when wronged, believe one another, apply for positions of power, and hire each other. Robin Lakoff wrote in 1992: “As long as we are complicit in our own voicelessness, there is no incentive, neither fear nor shame, to make anyone else change.”

  The process of gaining a voice that people will listen to and respect isn’t simple, but that doesn’t mean it has to be a drag. Language is fun, after all, and—other than shouting “fire” in a movie theater—there are very few laws controlling what words we’re allowed to say. This is especially good news for those who get a kick out of speaking in ways that not everyone finds so “appro
priate,” which, in my opinion, is sometimes the single most feminist thing you can do with language.

  Get ready for some delicious inappropriateness: if the Motion Picture Association of America were to assign a rating to the following chapter (which I’m terribly glad they didn’t—good thing books don’t receive ratings like movies do, right?), you can be sure it would be a solid R for vulgarity.

  7

  Fuck It

  An Ode to Cursing While Female

  A whistling sailor, a crowing hen, and a swearing woman ought all three to go to hell together.

  —American proverb

  Dr. Richard Stephens and his research team have proven me right once and for all. They published a 2017 paper in the Personality and Individual Differences journal about the relationship between personality type and common everyday habits. Based on a survey of a thousand participants, Stephens’s study draws a variety of correlations between different human traits and behaviors, like an affinity for dirty jokes to extroversion and a tendency to sing in the shower to agreeability. But the best correlation of them all, to me at least, is this: people with high IQs, the most intelligent folks of the bunch, are more likely than anyone else to curse.

  This correlation feels personal. Like most American children, I grew up with the narrative, promoted by high school teachers and friends’ hard-ass dads, that a high incidence of cursing meant you were angry, crass, unladylike, and had a limited vocabulary. I certainly wanted people to think of me as smart and elegant, but I was also suspicious of this claim. Admittedly, I have one of the foulest mouths of anyone I know. When I was nine, a girl at recess dared me to say shit to a lunch lady—I did; I didn’t get in trouble—and I’ve been hooked on four-letter words ever since. To me, Stephens’s findings were excellent news. I even shared them on Facebook, secretly hoping that my twelfth-grade English teacher would click.

  The majority of English curse words fall into three main semantic categories, which reflect the particular anxieties and fascinations of our culture. These categories include sex (fuck, dick, cunt), scatology (shit, crap, asshole), and religion (goddamnit, holy shit, Christ on a cracker).* I was made well aware throughout my youthhood that hearing such things come out of a little girl’s mouth was inappropriate, impolite, and—most frustratingly—adorable. Still, nothing in the world could squash my zest for profanity. As a kid, I remember eavesdropping on my parents’ rated R movies or catching an adult at the grocery store drop a jar of pickles—“Shit!”—and quietly practicing these words to myself. The opening bursts and closing thwacks bookending terms like bitch, fuck, and dick felt like a party in the mouth (the word fuck alone makes use of the lips, the tongue, and the teeth). It was linguistic calisthenics. And it was “grown-up language”—off-limits for kids. Nothing could have made it more appealing.

  Years later, in college, I learned about the concept of phonosymbolism, which says that certain speech sounds can hold meaning in and of themselves. Think of the inherent harshness conveyed by a word like chop or slap, the ooey-gooeyness of slither, and the coziness in velvet. Swears had this snap, crackle, pop that absolutely tickled me—not to mention their grammatical versatility. Fuck, for example, is not only fun to say all on its own, it’s also one of the most malleable words in the English language, able to slot naturally into almost any grammatical category to communicate the desired sentiment. You can use it as a noun (“You crazy fuck!”), a verb (“This traffic is totally fucking me”), an adverb (“I fucking nailed that!”), an adjective (“This situation is totally fucked up”), or an interjection (“Fuuuuuuuck”). If you’re as habitual a fuck user as I am, you might even use it as a discourse marker or filler word, like um or well. As in, “Fuck, so, you want to get some pizza later?”

  Contrary to what teachers and parents might proselytize, I’m willing to bet that English speakers who can curse fluently have a more creative grasp of the language as a whole. Here’s one of my favorite cursing facts from Phonology 101: swears are the only types of English words that you can use as an infix. An infix is a grammatical unit of meaning that you insert in the middle of a word, similar to a prefix, which comes at the beginning (like the “un” in “unusual”), or a suffix, which comes at the end (like the “ful” in “grateful”). There are plenty of foreign languages that use infixes all over the place, but in English, we only have two: fucking and damn. An example: “I’ll guaran-damn-tee you that you’re gonna love Cali-fucking-fornia.”

  Cursing is a word nerd’s dream, and yet . . . so controversial. To me, our culture’s horror surrounding taboo language—the alarmist bleeping on network TV, the image of mothers washing their kids’ mouths out with soap—has generally seemed a little . . . puritanical. Blown out of proportion. After all, there is a big difference between a swear word and an insult. There is overlap, but as we learned in chapter 1, just as you can insult someone without cursing (nasty, wimp, pansy), you can curse without insulting.

  Linguistic studies show that in modern practice, it’s actually quite rare for swearing to intend hostility or offense; instead, cursing is an incredibly complex, colorful language category that can serve nearly infinite emotional purposes—humor, shock, sadness, solidarity—some of which might be considered actively polite, depending on the context. Oftentimes, curse words are used to foster social harmony, like if you were to tell someone, “That is a fucking brilliant idea,” or “These cupcakes are the shit.” Linguists say the only impolite sorts of cursing come when you purposefully threaten someone (“Don’t fucking talk to me like that,” “Back off, bitch”), express strong emotions in public, or have misunderstood the social rules of a certain situation. As a whole, though, the majority of everyday cursing instances in the twenty-first century are not considered inappropriate. As a pair of researchers named Timothy Jay and Kristin Janschewitz wrote in 2008, “Through thousands of incidents of recorded swearing, we have never witnessed any form of physical aggression as a consequence of [it].”

  Historically, however, attitudes toward cursing—particularly when women do it—have not always been so positive. Since swearing is largely thought to be intrinsically aggressive, women who do it may be perceived as breaking the traditional rules of femininity, which require them to be sweet, deferential, and constantly attuned to the feelings of others. Naturally, defying this expectation can invite criticism. I, for one, have been told several times that I “curse like a man,” and I can never tell whether this is a compliment or not.

  The idea that swearing is inherently masculine has a long history. While one can presume that language taboos have always existed, vulgarity wasn’t fully born until the Middle Ages, when courtly traditions created gentility and thus a new value for “clean” speech. The same standards for refinement that strengthened linguistic taboos also put women on a proverbial pedestal, meaning that their use of potty words, and men’s use of potty words in their presence, became a major no-no.

  Even Shakespeare poked fun at the cultural cliché that women’s mouths and ears were too delicate for cursing. In Henry IV, the character Hotspur teases his wife, Lady Percy, for her low-class use of oaths: “Come, Kate, I’ll have your song too,” he says. “Not mine, in good sooth,” she replies, to which Hotspur says, “Not yours, in good sooth! Heart! You swear like a comfit-maker’s wife! . . . Swear me, Kate, like a lady as thou art, a good mouth-filling oath.”

  By having Hotspur beseech Lady Percy not to swear like a lowly comfit-maker’s wife, but instead like an aristocratic “lady,” Shakespeare demonstrated an awareness that people connect swearing not only to gender, but also to social class. The popular opinion was that poorer folks cursed more often than and in a different manner from the wealthy. Centuries later, English speakers still hold this presumption. A 1997 study of gender and cursing revealed that listeners associated sailor-mouthed women not only with lower socioeconomic status but also with lower moral standing. The implication was that a woman partial to dropping the f-bomb would be more likely to, say, litter
or cheat on her spouse than one who wasn’t. (This result was not found in participants’ judgments of men who cursed.)

  Even a few linguists have believed there to be inherent “women’s” and “men’s” styles of vulgarity (and that those who disobeyed these rules were violating their very nature). Our old buddy Otto Jespersen wrote in 1922 that women have an “instinctive shrinking from coarse and gross expressions and [a] preference for refined and (in certain spheres) veiled and indirect expressions.” Robin Lakoff gave a similar take in Language and Woman’s Place, where she noted that, because women have for so long been socialized to speak more politely, they are more likely to say things like “good grief” and “oh, shucks,” while men say “goddamnit” and “holy shit.” To Lakoff, women’s watered-down curses were less powerful, less communicative, and thus more ladylike—and they reflected their position in society as weaklings and whiners. “Women don’t use off-color or indelicate expressions,” she stated.

  These misconceptions about women and vulgarity might seem fairly inconsequential, but they can have serious real-life repercussions. A 1991 study of sexual harassment in an underground coal mine determined that one of the biggest obstacles to women miners’ professional advancement was that their male colleagues ousted them from social interaction on the basis that they were too sensitive to swear. Paradoxically, the study also found that if these women started swearing, it didn’t earn them the same social status as their male colleagues; instead, it actually heightened their femininity by way of juxtaposition. In other words, by adopting this one “masculine” trait (vulgarity), their visibility as women increased in comparison, like Charlie’s Angels with their long hair, skintight outfits, and nine-millimeter pistols. Ever met a guy who thought a feminine-presenting woman who could shoot a gun or smoke a cigar was hot? Same idea: the study found that male coal miners actually interpreted the female miners’ swearing as an invitation, and women who cursed were sexually harassed significantly more than women who didn’t. Those who opted out of swearing entirely didn’t have it much better, though; they were excluded from conversation, participation, and ultimately power. As one female miner told the researchers, “Filthy language is like an invisible line between men and women.” The women miners ultimately found themselves between a rock and a hard place—to swear or not to swear. Either way, they couldn’t win.