Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

by Amanda Montell

In the wrong hands, speech can be used as a weapon. But in the right ones, it can change the world.

language is the next frontier of modern gender equality. We just have to help the world see it.

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

language ultimately reflects the beliefs and power structures of its culture.)

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.

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).

Word meanings and cultural beliefs go hand in hand, and they are both changing all the time.

It’s a form of taxonomy: we create these labels to help make sense of the world around us and ourselves.

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.

However, what we do know is that even if changing our own language won’t necessarily change our thinking, the language we hear from other people can.

What there is plenty of data to support, however, is the fact that gossip is a serviceable and goal-driven practice.

People confuse women’s use of certain softening hedges like just, I mean, and I feel like as signs of uncertainty, but research shows that these words accomplish something different: instead, they’re used to help create trust and empathy in a conversation.

“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.”

Young women use the linguistic features that they do, not as mindless affectations, but as power tools for establishing and strengthening relationships.

As a matter of fact, some studies have demonstrated that speech lacking in likes and you knows can sound too careful, robotic, or unfriendly.

In other words, judgments about linguistic prestige depend a whole lot on how we feel about the speaker.

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.

As South Korea is to beauty products and Silicon Valley is to apps, women in their teens, twenties, and thirties create—and/or incubate—future language trends.

But to me, the most compelling argument is that young women innovate because they see language as a tool to assert their power in a culture that doesn’t give them a lot of ways to do that.

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

I’ve heard the satirical argument that women were given purses to hold and high heels to wear to physically slow them down. While I don’t take this sentiment literally, I think you can compare it to the critique of women’s voices, which are there to steal the focus away from the content of their statements, while distracting women with the anxiety of how their speech sounds to other people.

Many people I know (or see on Reddit)—people who never think or care about “proper grammar” in their everyday lives—suddenly get very unsettled at the idea of someone changing a word just because they want to.

!!!!!!!

As American English speakers, we are perfectly at liberty to use whatever language we want; we just have to know that our words reveal our social and moral beliefs to some extent.

So many languages offer a phrase to describe the act of a person (usually a man) shouting sexual comments in the street at someone they don’t know (usually a woman or feminine-presenting person), because in almost every country, you are sure to find it.

That guy didn’t want to marry me or even make me feel good about myself, but he did want me to hear him and to understand that he had control over me, at least for those few seconds. Because the act of catcalling isn’t really about sex—it’s about power.

To be deprived of speech is to be deprived of humanity itself—in

“The power of sexuality is asymmetrical, in part, because being seen as sexual has different consequences for women and men.”)

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.

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.”

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.

proof that in the darkest times, language can offer people a creative and colorful safe haven.

Not to mention, making a language feminist does not start with making the vowels, consonants, or even vocabulary feminist. It starts with transforming the ideologies of its speakers.