Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

by Amanda Montell

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. With the end of women’s sexual liberation came a general disgust for female sexuality, dooming words like cunt forever.

McConnell-Ginet explains it like this: “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.”

African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is a rich source of slang for America’s youth in general—AAVE

women who are, describing themselves as bitches and hos can be a way to reject old standards of femininity. Sutton analyzes it like this: “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.”

Over the decades, Coates and her peers have carefully examined the speech styles of many different all-women and all-men groups—these are called genderlects. They’ve looked at various ages, races, cultures, sexualities, and socioeconomic classes, and while there is undoubtedly variation based on these factors, not to mention the context of the conversations (speech usually varies from the brunch table to the boardroom), one observation has remained rather constant: while men’s speech style can be categorized as “competitive,” women’s is “cooperative.”

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.