Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

by Amanda Montell

What if I told you that this process of a totally neutral or even positive word devolving into some insult for women happens in the English language all the time?

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

Linguistics is, in fact, the scientific study of how language works in the real world. Under that umbrella falls sociolinguistics, where the studies of language and human sociology intersect.

Speaking of power, you may or may not have heard of a little thing called patriarchy: a societal structure in which men are the central figures. Human societies haven’t always been patriarchal—scholars believe man’s rule began somewhere around 4000 BCE. (Homo sapiens have been around for two hundred thousand years in all, for context.) When people talk about “smashing the patriarchy,” they’re talking about challenging this oppressive system, linguistically and otherwise. 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.

In the fifth century AD, a trio of Germanic tribes from Scandinavia called the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes show up at the British Isles unannounced.

These tribes speak a language called Englisc,

This lingo, along with the north Germanic languages spoken by Vikings (who came a few centuries later), pushes Britain’s Celtic languages to the outskirts of the country. The little bit of Celtic that’s left behind combines with these other guys’ languages to eventually become what we know as Old English

Old English is spoken in Britain until 1066 AD, when the Duke of Normandy (aka William the Conqueror, aka a terrifying little man with a long, gray beard and a fabulous bejeweled crown) invades England, murders a bunch of people, and brings along with him an early form of French.

For the few hundred years that follow, there is a sort of linguistic class divide in Britain, where the poor speak English and the rich speak French. But then the black death sweeps through and kills off about a third of the population. This makes the working class way more important to the country’s economy, and by the fourteenth century, English is the dominant language of Britain again. But at this point, the language, heavily influenced by French, has evolved into a new form called Middle English

The printing press is a big deal, and thanks to this snazzy new ability to mass manufacture newspapers and books, literacy increases; that, in turn, creates a need for a new standard language to print. So spelling and grammar are streamlined, and ultimately, the dialect of London, where most of the publishing business is headquartered, becomes the standard form of English. According to that standard, the first English dictionary is published in 1604 (it contains only 2,449 words; for perspective, Webster’s Third New International Unabridged Dictionary, addendum included, boasts a whopping 470,000).

Hinging on that idea is the pervasive assumption that many esteemed professions—surgeons,* scientists, lawyers, writers, actors (even nonhuman actors*)—are perceived male unless proven otherwise. These subtle preconceptions are reflected when we say things like female doctor or woman scientist, implying that such positions are inherently male, while models, nurses, and prostitutes are all default female. Something analogous happens with the trend of inserting the word man before what we consider “girl” words: manbun, manbag, guyliner.* These words are catchy, but in the end they accentuate the idea that objects often thought to be frivolous, like makeup and handbags, are for women, and if men are expected to participate (without being shoved into a locker, that is), they must be rebranded in a macho way.

Similarly, words like mompreneur, SHE-EO, and girlboss illuminate the notion that entrepreneur and CEO are not actually gender-neutral terms but are tacitly coded as male. They suggest that when a woman endeavors in business, we can’t help but to cutesy-fy her title. Mompreneur may read as a sparkling emblem of girl power, and it certainly makes for a good hashtag, but in practice, terms like that don’t quite work to undo implicit sexism in language—they reinforce it.

Gendered thinking is also encoded in our colossal vocabulary of sexualized terms for women (ho, tramp, skank; stay tuned for more in chapter ...

just think of the exceptionally gendered compliments we receive as young children. “Praise for little boys is more likely to include words like smart and clever,” Cameron says, “whi...

The dawn of this field of study coincided with the second-wave feminist movement, when there was a larger political need to understand the hidden sexism in English.

We’re going to talk about how speaking in a more gender-inclusive way is a very cool idea while being a grammar snob is not, and why the “gay voice” is a thing while the “lesbian voice” seemingly isn’t. We’ll discuss the history of the word cunt, what gossip really is, how language might sound if men were wiped from the face of the planet (not suggesting, just theorizing!), and what we can do with all of this information to effect real change.

“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!”*

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 wrote this book to help women (and other marginalized genders) feel as empowered by words as I did on the 6 train that day. To arm us all with the knowledge we need to reclaim a language that for so long has been used against us. Sick of being told how you should and shouldn’t use your voice?

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

In total, 166 of the collected terms were either for or about women specifically. Sutton isolated these terms, looked for patterns, and was able to divide them into four semantic categories based on the following themes: sexual promiscuity, fatness, evilness, and level of hotness. Highlights from the database included words such as slut, whore, and skankly hobag (used to describe sexually loose women); bitch and biscuit (for women with an attitude); hootchie and pink taco (to represent a woman by describing just her genitals); and heifer and hellpig (to describe a woman based on her ugliness or unfuckability).

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. That means there were simply more insults for females in people’s everyday lexicon than there were for males. The survey also found a range of “positive” terms for women, but most of them were still sex-themed, like the insults, often comparing women to food: peach, treat, filet.

It’s a classic case of the virgin/whore dichotomy—according to our inventory of English slang, women are always either one of two types of sexual objects: an innocent hard-to-get peach or a grotesque, too-easy skank.

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.

Let’s start with the word hussy. Originally this term was nothing but a shorter, sweeter version of the Old English husewif, which meant female head of household and is an early cognate of the modern word housewife. Around the seventeenth century, the word came to describe a rude “rustic” woman; then, it became a general insult for women of any kind, and eventually it narrowed to mean a lewd, brazen woman or prostitute. The word tart went down a similar road.

For centuries, cunt was used to refer to women’s external genitalia without any negative nuances whatsoever; but, like so many other terms referencing femaleness, it didn’t stay that way.

Since the very beginning of language, the names we use to refer to people have symbolized the history, status, and very worth of their referents. I’m not just talking about insults; this can also be applied to one’s legal name (which 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).

Even a brief scan of our language’s slang for women will reveal that female desire is worthy of shame no matter what a woman chooses to do with it, which can only be one of two things per our culture’s rules: having a lot of sex, which earns her the reputation of a whore, or opting to withhold it, which gets her labeled a prude.

the women who “put out” were categorized as sluts, and those who didn’t were damned as ice princesses. Meanwhile, most of the sexual metaphors Stanley collected for men (twenty-two in all, precisely one tenth of the set for women) had actively positive connotations. These terms, which included ass man, stud, and Don Juan, suggested an all-out approval of male promiscuity.

I’ll offer the simple answer first. In our culture, men run the show, women are taught to follow their leads, to please them, and thus we go out of our way to fit into the semantic categories set up for us: prude or whore, bitch or sweetheart, princess or dyke.

Chi Luu, a computational linguist and language columnist at JSTOR Daily, once made the point that the purpose of name-calling is to accuse a person of not behaving as they should in the eyes of the speaker.

Nasty and bossy criticize women for not behaving as sweet and docile as they ought to—for wanting too much power. Equally, words like wimp and pansy point out a man’s failure to live up to the macho standard of what men are supposed to be.

Gendered insults are damaging because they work to propagate harmful myths about men and women, which is not great for equality.

Look at what happened with the word suffragette: We no longer think of this term as an insult, but originally, it was invented as a demeaning version of the word suffragist (a Latin-derived term meaning a person of any gender who aims to extend voting rights). When suffragette was first coined, it was intended as a diminutive smear for women’s liberation activists in the early twentieth century: suffragettes were husbandless hags who dared to want the vote. The women’s lib movement was obviously far from perfect (it pretty much only benefited rich white ladies), but what was cool linguistically was that those women immediately stole the word suffragette, put it up on posters, shouted it through the streets, named their political magazine after it, and now most English speakers have entirely forgotten that it was ever meant as a slur.

Simply put, slurs go out of style at the same time the underlying belief in them does.

“shit-filled, two-faced sneak” or a “goddamn villainous crook,” instead of a bitch or a dick—insults which happen to be more creative, scathing, and (importantly) relevant.

Jamaican word bumbaclot, meaning “ass wipe,” or the endearing (though hard to pronounce) Russian term perhot’ podzalupnaya, meaning “pee hole dandruff.”

And if enough people rebel, then everyone wins, because a society that’s more equal is also one that’s more relaxed, more compassionate, and less offended overall.

Brill attended the University of Manitoba, though she was not allowed to study engineering due to the fact that she possessed a vulva. (Unclear whether or not the admissions office personally confirmed her vulva, but because of the little f on her birth certificate, they evidently wagered a guess and stamped “Nope, no engineering for you, dear” on her transcript.) She wasn’t deterred. Brill majored in chemistry and mathematics instead, and years later, she developed a rocket engine so efficient and reliable that it became standard throughout the industry. If you’ve ever watched the local news, looked up the weather, or used a GPS, you have Dr. Brill to thank.