Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

by Amanda Montell

No matter your species, there are just so many ways for a gal to be a bitch.

“Getting people to understand that language itself is a means through which people can be harmed, elevated, or valued is really important,” Zimman says.

Which is relevant to us because in Western culture, patriarchy has overstayed its welcome.

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.

first we can consider the idea that, in a sense, man and person are oftentimes synonymous in English.

It 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.

Nasty and bossy criticize women for not behaving as sweet and docile as they ought to—for wanting too much power.