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May 1 - June 2, 2025
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.
my college sociolinguistics classes, I started learning about some of the subtle ways gender stereotypes are hiding in English . . . 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
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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.
word is so contentious now you’d never guess it came from the comparatively wholesome Middle English term slutte, which merely meant an “untidy” woman.
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.
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.
when dudes use animal metaphors for women, the symbolism often says one of a few things: that women are meant to be hunted (like a bird), subordinated and domesticated (like a kitten or a cow), or feared (like a cougar*).
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 one talks and the less one listens, the more likely it is that one’s viewpoint will function as if it were community consensus even if it is not.”
the purpose of name-calling is to accuse a person of not behaving as they should in the eyes of the speaker.
Certainly there are women who aren’t comfortable with these words no matter what, but for the women who are, describing themselves as bitches and hos can be a way to reject old standards of femininity.
“Perhaps when we call each other ‘ho,’ we acknowledge that we are women who have sex and earn our own money too; and when we call each other ‘bitch,’ we acknowledge the realities of this man-made world and affirm our ability to survive in it. Through resistance comes redefinition.”
As long as the positive varieties of a word steadily become more common, more mainstream, by the time the next generation starts learning the language, they will pick up those meanings first.
Simply put, slurs go out of style at the same time the underlying belief in them does.
when people use female as a noun, as opposed to woman, it’s often in explicitly negative contexts.
By choosing to label someone a “stupid, crazy female,” it suggests that the subject’s intellectual flaws are connected to her vulva, XX chromosomes, uterus, etc., as if the very sex classification of her body is responsible for these negative traits.
Merriam-Webster’s top man entry simply reads “an individual human”—a glaring reflection of that pervasive default maleness concept.)
“That actually bypasses the traditional idea that women see themselves as women because they liked to play with dolls when they were little and that men see themselves as men because they liked to play sports,” says Zimman. These props don’t have to be what defines our gender anymore. “Instead,” he says, “it’s just this very individualized, emotional, visceral feeling of who do I think I am.”
Men are so lucky they just get to be called sir no matter their age or marital status.
while men’s speech style can be categorized as “competitive,” women’s is “cooperative.”
gossip serves three main purposes: 1) to circulate personal information in order to keep members of a social group in the know; 2) to bond with one another by establishing the gossipers as an in-group; and 3) to affirm the group’s commitment to certain values or norms.
“Locker-room banter” is just a manlier-sounding synonym for gossip;
Believing a hesitant style of speech will earn them acceptance, women, says Lakoff, will adopt deferential phrases like just and you know to dilute the conviction of their statements (e.g., “I just feel like maybe we should push the deadline to Friday, you know?”).
inserting too many justs or you knows in order to come off as sweet and self-doubting won’t help women’s overall station in society; instead, it will reinforce the stereotype that women are naturally docile and insecure.
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. As Coates explains, hedges like these “are used to respect the face needs of all participants, to negotiate sensitive topics, and to encourage the participation of others.”
Sally knows exactly what she wants to get across. But because the topic at hand is so sensitive, she needs the wells and I means so she doesn’t come off as brusque and unfeeling.
“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.”
All the mm-hmms and yeahs represent Lyn’s investment in the discourse and her support of its content. She’s an active participant, not simply a wall for Tina to talk at.
with women, questions serve a different function. Women’s intentions are to welcome each participant onto the conversational floor and keep the overall flow moving.
“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.”
It is undeniable,” says Coates, “that one of the burdens of being born female is the imperative to be nice.”*)
Scholars have a clever word for this kind of social structure in which power is formed through a brotherhood that objectifies and dehumanizes those on the outside: they call it fratriarchy. Many think this is a more accurate way to describe our culture’s post-feudal system, which is ruled not by the fathers, but by peer networks of the brothers.
On the one hand, I think the idea is rather beautiful—that those who’ve shared a similar experience of the world can get together and use these subtle linguistic cues to connect and feel understood. But at the same time, does that mean we’re hiding something outside of those environments?
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.
People don’t seem to care or even notice when men talk this way. Only when it comes from female mouths does it cause such an upset. 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 decades, linguists have agreed that young, urban females tend to be our linguistic innovators. 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.
(Fun fact: linguists have also determined that the least innovative language users are nonmobile, older, rural males, which they’ve majestically given the acronym “NORMs.”)
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.
There exists a long history of marginalized groups innovating linguistically to build themselves up. And they’re clearly very good at it, because the rest of the world invariably ends up talking just like them, whether they know whom to credit for all their cool new slang terms, word pronunciations, and intonations or not.
“Had NORMs been the ones to pioneer vocal fry, uptalk, and like, we’d be praising them as enriching expansions of the language. We’d be reading The, Like, New Yorker,”
But dressing up this advice as empowering is as shady as telling a woman that wearing a longer hemline will make her worthier of success. It’s a way of punishing women for their own oppression.
“Teaching young women to accommodate to the linguistic preferences, aka prejudices, of the men who run law firms and engineering companies is doing the patriarchy’s work for it.” It accepts the idea that “feminine” speech is the problem, rather than the sexist attitudes toward it.
Ultimately, language can serve as a rather blatant means of otherizing all things feminine.
In the 1920s male linguists came up with a name for this process of giving an object a human pronoun; they called it “upgrading,” as if by calling these things “she,” they are elevated to human status. They couldn’t quite see that it simultaneously downgrades women to the status of toys and property.
practice, what these metaphors of women as nature, territories, and technologies do is place feminine gender in that same distant category of “other.”
“Language pedantry is snobbery and snobbery is prejudice,” Cameron says. “And that, IMHO, is nothing to be proud of.”
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.
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.
