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May 1 - June 2, 2025
nonresponse renders the victim’s speaking status nonexistent to begin with. 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.
Because men have gotten so used to speaking for everyone, thanks to millennia of doing so, when women begin to creep into their territory, they feel as though they have to do something to reassert the authority they’ve been taught for so long is rightfully theirs. In a way, catcalling, interruption, disregarding a woman by telling her she’s crazy, and other forms of silencing are in response to this gradual challenging of the power scales. It’s all a way of rendering what women think and say irrelevant, a justification for keeping them from the authority they’ve begun to reclaim.
according to a 2008 analysis, is that the majority of men’s compliments to women have nothing at all to do with appearance but instead with softening face-threatening acts such as requests or criticism. And they almost always occur between people who know each other, e.g., “Kate, you know you’re my favorite, but can you please try to show up on time tomorrow?”).
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.”
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.
calling attention to a woman’s sexuality can function “to exclude recognition of her competence, rationality, trustworthiness, and even humanity.” In other words, a woman could be a CEO of a company, have an IQ of 180, or be a prosecutor making her case in a courtroom, but the second the male defense attorney calls her “honey,”* all of that is taken away.
being seen as sexual has different consequences for women and men.”)
“Men fail to exhibit empathy with women because masculinity precludes them from taking the position of the feminine other, and men’s moral stance vis-à-vis women is attenuated by this lack of empathy.”
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.
I’d like to take a moment to offer a brief linguistic critique of what’s wrong with teaching women to say “no” and men to listen for “no” when we talk about sexual consent: analyses of real-life refusals show that there is a precise formula English speakers follow to decline things in a socially acceptable way, and it actually almost never includes the word no. Instead, it goes: hesitate + hedge + express regret + give a culturally acceptable reason. As in “Um, well, I’d love to, but I have to finish this assignment,” or “Oh, I’m sorry, but I should go home and feed my cat.” It is also our
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The fear of being punished for speaking against the status quo is all-encompassing, and ultimately it works to control women’s actions from the inside out. It makes women silence themselves.
What’s more is that thanks to centuries of steeping in messages that women are delicate, overly emotional, and unfit to hold power, many women have an internalized belief that it’s natural for them not to have a voice. 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.
When men are itty-bitty boys, we as their parents and teachers have to dismantle our culture’s ideas of masculinity as we know them at every turn. It has to be okay—encouraged, really—for men to empathize and align with women and to stick up for them when they see other men try to take them down, linguistically and otherwise. “To put their principles above their fraternal loyalties,” as Deborah Cameron once put it. And it has to be not okay to treat anyone who isn’t a man like an intruder in their world.
Robin Lakoff wrote in 1992: “As long as we are complicit in our own voicelessness, there is no incentive, neither fear nor shame, to make anyone else change.”
By having Hotspur beseech Lady Percy not to swear like a lowly comfit-maker’s wife, but instead like an aristocratic “lady,” Shakespeare demonstrated an awareness that people connect swearing not only to gender, but also to social class.
A 1997 study of gender and cursing revealed that listeners associated sailor-mouthed women not only with lower socioeconomic status but also with lower moral standing. The implication was that a woman partial to dropping the f-bomb would be more likely to, say, litter or cheat on her spouse than one who wasn’t. (This result was not found in participants’ judgments of men who cursed.)
because women have for so long been socialized to speak more politely, they are more likely to say things like “good grief” and “oh, shucks,” while men say “goddamnit” and “holy shit.” 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.
women don’t want to betray the tribe by using words like cunt so liberally, and they seem disappointed in other women who do.
women rarely curse for no reason. The shits and motherfucks aren’t there just because they’re “expected” or to use obscenity for obscenity’s sake. They’re there to make someone laugh, to put on a brave face, to feel close to someone, to be an individual.
Many of our language’s most potent phrases—from pussy to motherfucker—paint a picture of women, men, and sex from a cisgender dude’s perspective. They portray the act of sex as inherently penetrative, the penis as violent and powerful, and the vagina as weak and passive.
One could certainly get away with saying “suck my dick” for humor or emphasis without it seeming sexual, but the same could not be said for “eat my pussy”—evidence that there is a semantic imbalance between curse words from a normatively male perspective and curse words from a normatively female one.
Fricke points out that for women, power derived from sexuality can be a double-edged sword. You can’t explain to a fourteen-year-old boy that Madonna’s sexual expression is a feminist thing (at least not in the moment); to him, it will just seem sexy.
women who wish to hold power are expected to strike a precarious balance of appearing pleasant and polite, like the sweet-tempered caregivers they’re used to women being, as well as tough and authoritative, like capable leaders, all the while doing their best to convince everyone that they’re neither a bitch (Hillary Clinton) nor a sexual object (Scarlett Johansson).
On the other end of the double bind, when a woman in charge makes no attempt to conduct herself in a “masculine” fashion, or perhaps even highlights her femininity, she will be perceived as fragile and out of her depth. But, because she is hanging on to most of her normatively ladylike traits, she will also seem less scary. As her perceived toughness dips, her likability spikes.
Researchers have determined that one of the reasons we tend to connect men’s voices with authority is that we connect low pitch with authority.
“Saying that a woman’s voice is ‘shrill’ is also a code for ‘she’s not in control.’”
Eventually, the more normal it is for women to lead and for men to follow—the more balanced the scales become—then there will be no such thing as a woman sounding “shrill” or “abrasive,” because we will no longer automatically associate women with subservience.
“The more we allow men and women into one another’s spheres and allow them to exhibit behaviors normatively understood as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine,’ the more we will denaturalize and, in fact, redefine these understandings of gender.”
effeminate, learned style of speech became a symbol of the gay community and something that its members could learn and teach each other.
Just like a man wearing a skirt makes a bolder social statement than a woman wearing pants, a man speaking like a woman makes a bolder statement than a woman speaking like a man.
the word gay to mean “happy.” By asking someone in public, “Do you know any gay places around here?” gay men could identify who was a part of their community and who could be trusted.
Sonja Lanehart has made the point that straight white (or even gay white) people using words like yas and werk to seem hip is sort of like white pop singers wearing dreadlocks, gold chains, and low-hanging jeans; it’s an act of lifting the “cool” parts of an oppressed culture while conveniently leaving behind the things that make actually being a part of that culture, which invented the cool stuff in the first place, very hard.
society made it trickier for lesbians to find each other in the first place.
Think of all the gay icons that speak “like gay men” to create a certain persona, but aren’t gay men themselves (Miss Piggy, Mae West). Or people like Oprah and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who are regarded by some as queer icons for women, but aren’t actually lesbians.
“The penis is often going to be some kind of weapon, the vagina some kind of narrow passage, intercourse some way of saying ‘man hits woman.’” The fact that these troubling metaphors have stuck around for so long is no accident.
“The research that people have done on heteronormative gender naming really shows that our worst cultural values are reflected in the ways we talk about genitals. Like penises are always weapons that exist for penetrating, sex is always violence, and women and vaginas are passive and absence, just a place to put a penis.”
Meanwhile, the man is expected to take the active role. He’s expected to be the initiator, the expert, and the girl is expected to go along with whatever he decides to do. In the latter story, both Amy and Helen wonder about Ken’s feelings, but never once in Ian’s account does he mention how the girl might have felt. Her humanity is so irrelevant, in fact, that he refers to her as a “thing.”
They don’t say, “Hey! I can tell you’re not into me, and—good news—I’m not into you either, so how about we just don’t put ourselves through this, okay?” Instead, they follow the (unfortunate) unspoken rules of these sorts of interactions, which say the woman must “accept her status as object.” Her fate is determined by what the guy chooses to do. And according to our cultural standards of heterosexual masculinity and male sex drive, he is expected to want the sex and to pursue it, whether either of them actually wants it or not.
