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.

there are also plenty of folks—usually ones of some social privilege—who want to stop language from evolving at all costs. These are the grumps you may find dismissing gender-neutral language as ungrammatical, refusing to learn the difference between sex and gender, or lamenting the inability to throw around the word slut willy-nilly without being called sexist, like they could in the good old days.

Cameron doesn’t think gendered prejudices are fundamentally built into the language’s DNA—its vowels, its consonants. Instead, it’s the way English is habitually used that “expresses (and so reproduces) some culturally ingrained sexist assumptions.” This means—good news—the English language is not innately biased against women and nonbinary genders; but the bad news is that its speakers have collectively consented to wield it in a way that reinforces existing gender biases, often in ways they’re not even conscious of.

though it wasn’t academically in vogue anymore, like Kimberlé Crenshaw, who came up with the concept of intersectionality* in 1989.)

“Y’all?” she gasped, taking a palm to her sternum. “You can’t go around saying the word y’all, Amanda. It’s terrible English! People will think you’re stupid . . . or worse, Southern!”

“Actually,” I offered, sliding back across the seat, “I like to see y’all as an efficient and socially conscious way to handle the English language’s lack of a second-person plural pronoun.” The mother raised an eyebrow. I continued, “I could have used the word you to address the two girls, but I wanted to make sure your daughter knew I was including her in the conversation. I could also have said you guys, which has become surprisingly customary in casual conversation, but to my knowledge, neither of these children identifies as male, and I try to avoid using masculine terms to address people who aren’t men, as it ultimately works to promote the sort of linguistic sexism many have been fighting for years. I mean, if neither of these girls is a guy, then surely together they aren’t guys, you know?”

If you want to insult a woman, call her a prostitute. If you want to insult a man, call him a woman.

A similar survey of gendered insults conducted at UCLA the year before found that approximately 90 percent of all recorded slang words for women were negative, compared to only 46 percent of recorded words for men.

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.

Compare, for example, sir and madam: Three hundred years ago, both were used as formal terms of address. But with time, madam evolved to mean a conceited or precocious girl, then a kept mistress or prostitute, and, finally, a woman who manages a brothel. All of that excitement while the meaning of sir just stuck where it was.

in the beginning, buddy and sissy were abbreviations of the words brother and sister. Over the years, the masculine term ameliorated as the feminine term went the other way, flushing down the semantic toilet until it plunked onto its current meaning: a man who is weak and pathetic, just like a woman.

Even the word slut used to mean something relatively innocent. The 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.

70 percent of American women still believe they should change with marriage, either unaware or in denial of the fact that this signifies a transfer of ownership from their dads to their husbands).

having someone accuse you of doing your gender badly often feels like the worst insult of all, because it tells you that you’ve failed at a fundamental part of who you are.

Probably the most successful example in recent history, queer used to be exclusively a homophobic insult but has undergone a pretty impressive reappropriation by academics and the LGBTQ+ community. Queer is still considered problematic by some, but in the grand scheme of things, the word has evolved into a sort of self-affirming umbrella term for nonnormative gender and sexual identities. Today it can be found in contexts as lighthearted as the title of the TV series Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and as formal as one of the gender options listed on a job application, next to male and female.

Ho and bitch in these contexts are used not as slurs but as signals of solidarity and liberation.

Through resistance comes redefinition.”

“If you’re sitting in a group of black women, there’s going to be a lot of cross talk—a lot of mm-hmm and girl, you’re right,” she said. “Black women’s speech is so much about consensus and community building.”

Coates has found that when men ask each other questions (which they do just as frequently as women, though they’re never accused of insecurity for it), it’s typically to request information and seek answers, but 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.

The delicate horizontality of all-women discourse requires that no single participant position themselves as the dominant authority on the topic at hand, and the questions they use align with those requirements. “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.”

Of course, women don’t handle each other with care all the time. One amusing illustration of women’s linguistic contrariness comes from a 1994 study in which language scholar Gabriella Modan discovered that among Jewish women in particular, the standard “cooperative” model of girl-on-girl conversation doesn’t apply.

Instead, Jewish women tend to build linguistic solidarity through “opposition” (aka grumpily bickering like siblings). “Oppositional discussion itself creates intimacy because it signals that the relationship is strong enough to withstand serious differences of opinion,” Modan wrote. (“Tell me about it,” agreed my aunt Francie, one of the Jewish matriarchs of my family, after I summarized this paper for her a few Thanksgivings ago. “I have a couple friends I can barely stand talking to because we disagree on everything. Gotta love ’em.”)