Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

by Amanda Montell

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.

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

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.

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. While men tend to view conversation as an arena for establishing hierarchies and expressing individual achievement, women’s goals are typically to support the other speakers and emphasize solidarity. Thus, women progressively build on what one another says.

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.

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.

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.

In recent history, acts of verbal dominance have gotten worse, not better. A 2017 study analyzing Supreme Court oral argument transcripts from 1990, 2002, and 2015 determined that as more female justices were added to the bench, interruptions of women did not improve but escalated. Using the logic that more female justices would normalize female power, you might expect the opposite result. “Interruptions are attempts at dominance . . . so the more powerful a woman becomes, the less often she should be interrupted,” the researchers wrote. Instead, they found that in 1990, when Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was the only woman on the bench, 35.7 percent of overall interruptions were aimed at her (which, out of nine justices, was already a high percentage); twelve years later, after Ruth Bader Ginsburg was added, 45.3 percent were directed at the two female justices; and in 2015, with three women on the bench (Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan), 65.9 percent of all court interruptions on the court were aimed at female justices.

To persuade one of the men she confronted that women do not in fact enjoy unwelcome sexual commentary from strangers, she quoted a poll stating that 67 percent of women think that an interaction with a catcaller is going to become violent. Eighty-five percent feel angry after being catcalled, 78 percent feel annoyed, 80 percent feel nervous, and 72 percent feel disgusted.

If asked to illustrate the concept of bonding via flattery to an alien race unfamiliar with human social interaction, I think we can all agree that “Smile!” and “Let me tap that ass” would not be considered good examples.

In 2017 comedian Peter White put the lunacy of the compliment argument into perspective with this pithy statement: “I think the golden rule for men should be: If you’re a man, don’t say anything to a woman on the street that you wouldn’t want a man saying to you in prison.”

Because research shows that when sexual harassers are asked to switch places with their targets, they are able to grasp quite quickly that what they’ve done is wrong. It’s not that their intentions have been misunderstood—these dudes realize the harm they’ve caused. It’s simply that they aren’t motivated to care. They lack empathy. And this, underneath it all, has to do with a problem of how our culture teaches men to be men.

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.