Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

by Amanda Montell

We’re also living in a time when we find respected media outlets and public figures circulating criticisms of women’s voices—like that they speak with too much vocal fry, overuse the words like and literally, and apologize in excess.

they’re like talking about people like me, like i’m sorry, i really am

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.

Keep paging through definitions for woman and you’ll find secondary entries reading “a female servant or domestic help” and “a wife, mistress, or girlfriend.” These labels have nothing at all to do with body parts—they describe culturally invented roles and relationships, and they certainly don’t apply to every woman.

This vocabulary is ever-evolving. For some speakers it may feel hard to keep up, but it’s important to understand that these labels aren’t surfacing just because it’s suddenly trendy to have an identity that will perplex and/or piss off all our great-aunts and -uncles at Thanksgiving.* Sociolinguists agree the creation of these different categories is connected to a deeper human desire to typologize species—to identify groups of living things, sort them, and try to figure out what their relationship is to one another. 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. “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.

everyone is empowered by categorization, and it is possible that one day nonnormative genders and sexualities will become so accepted that this spectrum of labels won’t seem necessary. But in the meantime, labels offer validation to many folks who previously felt isolated and unheard.

Analyze a few hundred transcripts of dude-on-dude chatter and you’ll usually find a dominant speaker who holds the floor, and a subordinate waiting for his turn. It’s a vertical structure. But with women, the conversation is frequently much more horizontal and malleable; everyone is an equal player.

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.

Women’s intentions are to welcome each participant onto the conversational floor and keep the overall flow moving. The delicate horizontality of all-women discourse requires that no single participant position themselves as the dominant authority on the topic at hand, and the questions they use align with those requirements.

His argument is that women’s affinities for talking about people behind their backs and babbling over one another in conversation are a product of our ancestors’ confinement to domestic spaces—the kitchen, the crafts table—where women were ingrained to develop feelings of closeness through intimate admissions about themselves and other people.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Equally disempowering are the practices of labeling women overemotional, hormonal, crazy, or hysterical* as a way to discredit their experiences, or addressing female colleagues as sweetheart or young lady in a professional setting as a form of (often subconscious) subordination.

As if to say, the idea of a woman making a worthwhile contribution is so meaningless that as far as the listener is concerned, her statement might as well just have been a loud gust of wind and therefore does not merit a response.

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).*

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.

According to this study, women don’t want to betray the tribe by using words like cunt so liberally, and they seem disappointed in other women who do. As one twenty-six-year-old participant named Kelly said, “Women may be seen as ‘letting the side down’ if they engage in the use of certain terms.” It would be a sign that they hadn’t really thought about what the word meant. Women don’t expect men to know better or try to understand the potential harm of what they’re saying, but they do expect this of other women.

Cameron says, “Saying that a woman’s voice is ‘shrill’ is also a code for ‘she’s not in control.’”

Probably the clearest illustration of the two sides of the linguistic double bind presented itself in 2008, when Hillary Clinton campaigned for president at the same time as Governor Sarah Palin, John McCain’s running mate. The juxtaposition of these two women was so extreme it was as if a gender studies professor had dreamed it up specifically for argument’s sake. As 1984’s winner of Miss Wasilla and Miss Congeniality, beauty queen Palin was a tailor-made foil to Clinton, whose very laughter, according to several male commentators, made “her sound like the Wicked Witch of the West.” The “Clinton cackle” was a phrase commonly used every time she so much as cracked a smile.

Deborah Cameron suggests that our resistance to women in positions of authority, and the reason the double bind itself exists, is in part related to the messy clash of feelings we have about our own mothers. “Our main historical model for female authority is the maternal variety,” she explains, “and it’s a form of power most people are at least somewhat ambivalent about, because we’ve all experienced the powerlessness of the child and the rebellion against maternal power which is part of growing

As we’ve already learned, adding women to workplace environments doesn’t automatically earn them more respect; sometimes, it can even have the opposite effect by intimidating their male colleagues, impelling them to behave even more dominantly. However, when women make up the active majority of higher-up positions (or all of them), that story changes. Take it from University of Texas professor Ethan Burris, who studied a credit union staff made up of 74 percent women supervisors. “Sure enough,” Sandberg reports, “when women spoke up there, they were more likely to be heard than men.” Studies also show that by and large, companies led by women over-perform. “Start-ups led by women are more likely to succeed,” Sandberg says, “innovative firms with more women in top management are more profitable; and companies with more gender diversity have more revenue, customers, market share, and profits.”

Consciously or unconsciously, we all adjust our codes depending on the context of the conversation. This is an incredibly useful tool, because it helps us better connect to the people we’re talking to.

Our culture wants it to be that simple—to believe so badly that all gay men sound like women—because that makes it easier to size them up and potentially ridicule them. Thus, the stereotype prevails. “Why do you think gay men sometimes reject other gay men for sounding gay?” David Thorpe asks gay media pundit Dan Savage. “Misogyny,” Savage responds. “They want to prove to the culture that they’re not not men—that they’re good because they’re not women. . . . And then they punish gay men who they perceive as being feminine in any way.”

Any social group’s language is a direct product of its history. Because gay men and lesbians do not have parallel histories, their language necessarily couldn’t be the same.

woman would have to take her gender inversion much further than a man for anyone to notice.

“Lesbians have been socially and historically invisible in our society and isolated from one another as a consequence.” For this reason, they didn’t have the chance to build a “cohesive community in which a lesbian aesthetic could have developed,”

There is a verb doroledim, describing the act of a woman overeating to cope with a lack of ability to care for herself properly while at the same time feeling extreme guilt about overindulging in something as gluttonous as food.

There are inherent problems with the idea of a singular “women’s language.” As Deborah Cameron comments, “I was always skeptical about the idea of a language ‘expressing women’s perceptions.’ Which perceptions would those be, and which women would they belong to? There is no set of perceptions which all women share.” As nice as it is to believe in a collective sisterhood, women’s experiences make up a complex spectrum, and “sisterhood” doesn’t mean just one thing.

Even Adam Szetela, a feminist scholar at Boston’s Berklee College of Music (an idyllic liberal enclave chock-a-block with eighteen-year-old acoustic guitar prodigies), thinks we’re in for a rough ride. “With regard to feminist language change, I think there will be—as there already is—a backlash to this progress,” he told me, reasoning that the conservative right and its “far-right stepbrother” will remain steadfast in their fight to prevent the mainstreaming of feminist values in the English language. Szetela thinks Donald Trump’s presidency in particular has had a regressive effect that will take some years to reverse. “While in certain spheres, language that was once okay is being ousted as problematic, the most powerful person in the world is modeling sexism on a routine basis . . . [with] no consequences,” he wrote to me in December 2017. “Thus, the message to young men coming of age in the era of Trump is that this is a socially acceptable way of relating to, interacting with, and speaking about women.”

The way this was writtwn during his first term and things have only continued to go downhill evident in many things but one being language (insert upside down face emoji)

Basically when a man explains something to a woman and gets chastised for it. Seriously, you can’t make this shit up if you tried. When women explain things to men in a condescending attitude. Feminist [sic] talking down to men just because they are men. If I had to wager a guess, I’d predict these definitions were written by men who felt strongly and instantly attacked by women’s newfound ability to express what it felt like to be mansplained to, and who preferred to villainize women over listening to them. To me, their entries are proof that women (or any oppressed group) can come up with new words to express what were once unnamed experiences, but sometimes the backlash is louder than the progress.