Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

by Amanda Montell

“Getting people to understand that language itself is a means through which people can be harmed, elevated, or valued is really important,” Zimman says.

What they don’t seem to realize is that they’re actually keeping women in a state of self-questioning—keeping them quiet—for no objectively logical reason other than that they don’t sound like middle-aged white men.

That means questioning the words we speak every day, as well as the contexts in which we use them—because without realizing it, something as simple as an address term or curse word might be reinforcing a power structure that we ultimately don’t agree with.

Fortunately, Cameron doesn’t think gendered prejudices are fundamentally built into the language’s DNA—its vowels, its consonants. Instead, it’s the way English is habitually used that “expresses (and so reproduces) some culturally ingrained sexist assumptions.” This means—good news—the English language is not innately biased against women and nonbinary genders; but the bad news is that its speakers have collectively consented to wield it in a way that reinforces existing gender biases, often in ways they’re not even conscious of.

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.

If you want to insult a woman, call her a prostitute. If you want to insult a man, call him a woman.

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.”

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.

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.

“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.

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.

“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.

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.

Simply put, slurs go out of style at the same time the underlying belief in them does.

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.

it is true that as a society, treating dictionary definitions as fixed, unbiased facts is a mistake.

Until the late fifteenth century, gender was only ever used to describe grammatical categories, like masculine and feminine nouns. Never people.

Language brings gender to life.

We still crave labels. Linguists say that this has everything to do with the power of words to legitimize experiences, as if an idea only becomes valid once it’s christened with a title. “It’s clearly empowering for people to discover that they’re not the only ones having an experience and that the experience can be named,” explains UCSB gender and language scholar Lal Zimman.

Jespersen decrees that the way women talk is curiously inferior—less masterful, less effective—to that of men. His conclusions include gems like, “Women more often than men break off without finishing their sentences, because they start talking without having thought out what they are going to say,” “The vocabulary of a woman as a rule is much less extensive than that of a man,” and “The highest linguistic genius and the lowest degree of linguistic imbecility are very rarely found among women. The great orators, the most famous literary artists, have been men.”

while men’s speech style can be categorized as “competitive,” women’s is “cooperative.”

“Language is not always about making an argument or conveying information in the cleanest, simplest way possible. It’s often about building relationships. It’s about making yourself understood and trying to understand someone else.”

“Women’s avoidance of information-seeking questions seems to be related to their role in constructing a speaker as ‘someone who knows the answer,’ an expert,” Coates explains. “In friendly conversation, women avoid the role of expert and therefore avoid forms which construct asymmetry.”

“Simultaneous speech does not threaten comprehension,” Coates explains, “but on the contrary permits a more multilayered development of topics.”

In fact, Coates has found that one of the most defining characteristics of men’s conversations, one that helps maintain its hierarchical structure, is that they tend to happen in alternating monologues, or stretches of talk where one speaker holds the floor for a lengthy period of time without any interruptions, not even in the form of minimal responses. This is a way for a speaker to “play the expert,” or display their individual knowledge of a subject. “Because most men most of the time choose a one-at-a-time model of turn-taking, overlap is interpreted as deviant, as an (illegitimate) attempt to grab the floor,” Coates explains. For this reason, men sometimes interpret women’s jam session–style overlaps as rude intrusions.

In her book, Tannen claims that from early childhood, women and men are socialized to live in two opposing cultures with two opposing sets of values, so they grow up to understand things differently. Not better or worse, just different. As a result, men’s goals when they talk are to communicate information, while women’s are to form connections.

Another, more complex theory suggests that women’s conversational style has developed as a coping strategy that reflects their position in our culture. This argument is inspired by Janet Holmes, who suggests that our society requires women to be the emotional laborers—shoulders to cry on, carriers of sympathetic burdens. So when women get together and talk to each other in a horizontal style, you’re basically looking at a bunch of people all navigating those expectations at the same time, doing a damn good job of it, and enjoying the reciprocation. I think it’s safe to say any woman who’s ever experienced the genuine empathy and solidarity of another woman knows it’s a pretty satisfying feeling.

In 2017 gender sociologist Lisa Huebner told Harper’s Bazaar that we should reject the notion that women are “always, naturally and biologically able to feel, express, and manage our emotions better than men”—and thus should be responsible for doing so.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This fact makes it clear that our culture’s aversion to vocal fry, uptalk, and like isn’t really about the speech qualities themselves. Instead, it’s about the fact that, in modern usage, women were the first to use them.

For women, language is often a complex way of coping with, or all-out resisting, oppression.

“You can wonder why it is that the language of a powerless group gets taken up later by the majority—but perhaps it has always been the powerless who use language as a form of power. Think of disenfranchised Jews in Europe, who gave origin to ‘the Jewish joke’ and, in fact, to much of humor altogether.”

People tend to think of prescriptive grammar—that’s the grammar your English teacher made you learn—as this almighty, unchanging force that has been there forever, like gravity or the sun. We forget that grammar rules are a human invention, and they’re constantly evolving. What’s considered “good grammar” today might have been totally unacceptable fifty years ago, or vice versa. Recall the word ain’t, which was once associated with high-class Brits—Winston Churchill was a fan—and has simply devolved since the early twentieth century to become one of the most stigmatized grammatical forms in English history.

a nation’s government is labeled as having “founding fathers,” while the land itself (“Mother Nature,” “virgin territory”) is perceived as a feminine entity. In grammar as in allegory as in life, women are considered reckless places outside the civilized male world—wild things meant to be tamed into the weak, delicate flowers we’ve traditionally wanted women to be.

There are two huge flaws in their logic: The first is that using a plural pronoun for a singular meaning is nothing new for English speakers. A few hundred years ago, the second-person you was exclusively a plural; thou was the singular version (e.g., “Thou shalt not kill,” “Thou shalt not lie”). Eventually, you extended to the singular meaning and pushed out thou entirely. Who’s to say the same thing couldn’t happen with they?

The other key defect in the argument against singular they is that most people already use it so naturally that they don’t even realize they’re doing it. (I’ve used singular they once in this chapter so far—100 points to anyone who finds it.) English speakers have been using they as a singular pronoun to refer to someone whose gender is unknown to them ever since the days of Middle English (“Someone left their goblet in the gatehouse”). If we’re talking grammar rules, singular they was considered perfectly acceptable as a generic third-singular pronoun all the way up until the late eighteenth century. That’s when grammarians decided that people should start using generic he instead. Their reasoning? That’s what they used to do in Latin.

These days, the only problem anyone seems to have with singular they is when they’re specifically being asked to use it because someone doesn’t identify as either he or she.

To some people that does seem mind-boggling. But for those who outright refuse to learn new pronouns, grammar does not work as a defense, because language scholars know that isn’t really the problem. If you don’t approve of nonbinary identity or feel the need to affirm it, then it’s possible to find a reason to avoid using gender-neutral language no matter what.

See, during Europe’s feudal period—the time of lords, ladies, and peasants—if you were born poor, you’d stay poor forever.

can—but you have to ask why claiming to have better grammar than your antagonist is so often the weapon of choice. Linguists posit that this has to do with notion that bigots are not only depraved, but also stupid, and that the two are connected. “It allows their critics to feel intellectually and culturally as well as morally superior,” Cameron explains. That is a satisfying feeling, to be sure, but the reality is that grammar and morality don’t actually have anything to do with one another, and attacking a bigot’s poor grammar does not itself prove you are a better person.

As Cameron says, “Hitler wasn’t any less fascist because he could write a coherent sentence.”

Linguists know that nonstandard forms of a language are not objectively “bad.” The grammatical forms themselves, like saying “he be”* instead of “he is,” are not inherently worse or better than what we learned in English class. They’re simply stigmatized based on how we feel about the type of person using them.

That’s because language change is frequently a sign of bigger social changes, which makes people anxious. It’s why people above the age of forty have always loathed teen slang, no matter the era: it represents a new generation rising up and taking over. One of my mom’s friends, a guy in his late fifties, recently told me he “hates” so many of today’s popular slang words (shade, lit, G.O.A.T.) because “they do nothing to improve the English language.” What’s funny is that I can almost promise, forty years ago, his parents were saying the exact same thing about cool, bummer, and freaking out, all phrases that have now taken a seat at the table of acceptable English terminology but started out as annoying teen slang.

What rubs people the wrong way about political correctness is not that they can’t use certain words anymore, it’s that political neutrality is no longer an option.

The underlying problem with all of these forms of sexual trespassing is that they rely on the assumption that a man has an automatic right to a woman’s body. It’s a display of social control, signaling to women that they are intruders in a world owned by men, and thus have no right to privacy.

There is one unified reason why many men feel as though they have an inherent right to comment on women’s bodies, ignore them in meetings, or dismiss them with the excuse that they’re on their periods and acting hysterical: it’s because of a lack of empathy.