Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

by Amanda Montell

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

Why, when aiming to make a disparaging comment about a woman, do speakers often choose to use the word female? Cameron postulates that it might have something to do with the desire to point out that women are flawed by biological design. The implication is that female, a scientific term used to describe bodies throughout the animal kingdom, refers to one’s sex (one’s genitalia, chromosomes, gonads, and other reproductive body parts). Meanwhile, woman, a term only used to describe humans, refers to gender, a culturally invented and much more complex concept (which we’ll attempt to define in a bit). 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.

Instead, it’s just the opposite: people have the genders that they do because of the way they talk and the feedback they receive from that talk. Language brings gender to life.

She came up with a theory called gender performativity, which essentially says that gender isn’t something you are, it’s something you do.

“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.”

“When you objectify and dehumanize a class of people”—whether that’s women or a racial minority or both or anyone—“it becomes easier to mistreat them without guilt.”

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. Backstage talk that otherizes all things feminine is part of the mortar that keeps the walls of fratriarchy standing strong. And when you are part of an especially close group, like Donald and his bus bros, it makes it even harder to dissent, because you risk giving up that bond and the power that comes with it. So you end up like Billy Bush, laughing along.

The ways in which women and many other socially oppressed folks empower themselves with language are all rather connected. 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.

And gently advising women to stop using discourse markers and vocal fry so they can sound more “articulate”—no matter how well intentioned—is not helpful either. In 2016 I was offered a promo code to test out a new voice-recognition app designed to help young people practice talking without filler phrases like you know and like, so they could sound more “authoritative.” 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. One of our culture’s least helpful pieces of advice is that women need to change the way they speak to sound less “like women” (or that queer people need to sound straighter, or that people of color need to sound whiter).

According to Romaine, by comparing her to things like storms and seas, “woman is symbolic of the conflict between nature and civilization, tempting men with her beauty, attracting men with her charms, but dangerous and therefore in need of conquest.” Woman is a continent to colonize, a fortress to siege.

Jane Austen was all about singular they and used it precisely seventy-five times throughout her six novels.

Cameron says, “Hitler wasn’t any less fascist because he could write a coherent sentence.”

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.

But realistically, we have to stick up for ourselves along the way too. We have to speak out when wronged, believe one another, apply for positions of power, and hire each other. 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.”

This is especially good news for those who get a kick out of speaking in ways that not everyone finds so “appropriate,” which, in my opinion, is sometimes the single most feminist thing you can do with language.

As long as it remains strange for women to fill positions of authority, then we can expect their clothes, bodies, voices, and gender itself to be inevitably ogled. Until then, they will be forced to walk the tightrope of the double bind, careful not to slip and fall into either the box labeled “adorable eye candy” or the one marked “abrasive scold.”

However, asking, “Why is there no lesbian equivalent of the gay male voice?” isn’t the right question to begin with. That’s because this question treats the gay male experience as the standard to which the lesbian experience should be compared, instead of looking at the lesbian experience as its own separate thing.

The answer is simple: it’s not that lesbians don’t speak in a masculine way; it’s just that it’s not as abhorrent for women to talk like men as it is for men to talk like women. “Because who wants to be female?” our NYU linguist Louise O. Vasvári asked me facetiously over the phone. “A male who wants to be female is the ultimate downgrade.”

I’m grateful that we no longer live in a world where this version of the Bible needs to exist, that we’ve come far enough that queer people don’t have to use secret codes anymore to survive. But as a word geek, I find myself quite charmed that we have a record of it—proof that in the darkest times, language can offer people a creative and colorful safe haven.

“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.”

“I shall never write real poetry. Women never do, unless they’re invalids, or Lesbians, or something.”)