Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

by Amanda Montell

Over the decades linguists have learned that pretty much every corner of language is touched by gender, from the most microscopic units of sound to the broadest categories of conversation.

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.

Sensing the grounds of linguistic change quaking beneath them, these humans take phenomena like vocal fry and gender-free pronouns as a spine-chilling omen that their dominance in the world is at stake.

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.

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.

In English, our negative terms for women, which usually carry sexual connotations, necessarily mirror the status of women in Western society at large—that being the status of treats and filets, at best, and hobags and hellpigs, at worst. 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.

As Schulz writes, “Again and again in the history of the language, one finds that a perfectly innocent term designating a girl or a woman may begin with totally neutral or even positive connotations, but that gradually it acquires negative implications, at first perhaps only slightly disparaging, but after a period of time becoming abusive and ending as a sexual slur.”

Even the word dude itself has elevated in status since the late nineteenth century, when it was used as an insult to describe an affected, foppish man.

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.

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

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.

“Woman as sex object” is one of patriarchy’s oldest tropes, mostly due to that thousands-of-years-old attitude that a woman’s personal desire and sexual free will are inherently bad. 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.

Here’s the wrench in this whole analysis, though: men aren’t the only speakers who get these rules and stick to them—women do it too.

Why do so many women unquestioningly agree to use these unpleasant, dude-invented metaphors to verbally dress each other down?

These dude-invented perspectives about men and women slip into the subtext beneath so many insults, even ones that aren’t explicitly gendered. Think of terms like nasty, bossy, and nag: though there are no overt references to femaleness in these words, they have fallen into a class of insults reserved for women alone.

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. The end goal of the insult is to shape the recipient’s actions to fit the speaker’s desired image of a particular group. Nasty and bossy criticize women for not behaving as sweet and docile as they ought to—for wanting too much power.

In a culture that places such importance on men being tough and aggressive, and women being dainty and deferential, 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.

culture’s most oppressed communities. Take the word queer, for instance. 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.

A word doesn’t have to lose its negative meanings completely to be considered reclaimed.

That queer and dyke can still be used as gay slurs is not necessarily a sign that their reclamation has failed.

But words can’t be positive all the time. In practice, insults are a linguistic need that will probably never go away (we’re a critical bunch, us humans).

The other positive thing we can do, says Zeisler, is to be mindful of the sexist terms we use around kids. Childhood and adolescence, after all, are when so many of these gendered stereotypes are solidified.

To say “woman scientist,” “woman president,” or “woman doctor” implies that a woman filling these roles is “in some way unnatural,” Lakoff once told the New York Times.

There will always be people who continue to call a businessperson a businessman and will only switch to the gender-inclusive term when the subject is female—a sign that adjusting one’s language in the right direction doesn’t necessarily cause one’s unconscious thinking to follow.

The corpus data also showed that the noun form of female is almost never used in a positive context.

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.

“Girl talk,” suggests that when women converse with one another it’s inherently featherbrained and precious.

Another tactic women use to establish conversational connections is a certain form of question-asking that is also misinterpreted as a sign of insecurity.

Now, whether or not women are born more empathetic is hard to tell. But experts doubt it.

Way followed a group of boys from childhood through adolescence and found that when they were little, boys’ friendships with other boys were just as intimate and emotional as friendships between girls; it wasn’t until the norms of masculinity sank in that the boys ceased to confide in or express vulnerable feelings for one another. By the age of eighteen, society’s “no homo” creed had become so entrenched that they felt like the only people they could look to for emotional support were women, further perpetuating the notion that women are obligated by design to carry humanity’s emotional cargo.

As Cameron puts it, “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.”

“None of us is ever free of the need to keep up some sort of front,” Coates says.

Where Lakoff went wrong, however, was suggesting that women acclimate to men’s speech style if they want any hope of equality.

As Fought says, “If women do something like uptalk or vocal fry, it’s immediately interpreted as insecure, emotional, or even stupid.”

To sum things up, over the first two decades of the twenty-first century, women began speaking with increasingly lower-pitched voices, attempting to convey more dominance and expressing more boredom—all things that middle-aged men have historically not been in favor of women doing.

Lakoff once theorized that one reason why women might use a question-esque intonation when communicating authority is because they’ve trained themselves to, either on purpose or subconsciously, so they don’t come off as “bossy” or “bitchy.”

Whenever we get the urge to criticize women or anyone else (even our own selves) for a certain dialect feature, we can remember to think like a linguist, reminding ourselves that systematic speech patterns are almost never mindless or stupid. Believing that they are only reinforces a screwed-up linguistic standard.

Fretting over the amount of creak in your voice or number of times you apologize are the linguistic equivalents of worrying if your forehead is shiny or if you’re spilling out of your Spanx.

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).

holds more power in our culture. As Deborah Cameron once said, “Teaching young women to accommodate to the linguistic preferences, aka prejudices, of the men who run law firms and engineering companies is doing the patriarchy’s work for it.”

“When the subject is language, you can take pride in being a snob,” Deborah Cameron once said. “You can even display your exquisite sensitivity by comparing yourself to a genocidal fascist (‘I’m a bit of a grammar Nazi: I can’t bear it when people use language incorrectly’).”

Recall the word ain’t, which was once associated with high-class Brits—Winston Churchill was a fan—and has simply devolved since the early twentieth century to become one of the most stigmatized grammatical forms in English history.

Queer speakers of Hebrew, for example, often use a mixture of masculine and feminine forms, or invent entirely new ones, to express their queer identities in ways that English speakers don’t have the opportunity to.

English speakers have been using they as a singular pronoun to refer to someone whose gender is unknown to them ever since the days of Middle English

These days, the only problem anyone seems to have with singular they is when they’re specifically being asked to use it because someone doesn’t identify as either he or she.

For anyone else who would like to step up their pronoun game but is still a little confused, Lal Zimman has an amazing tip: think of people’s pronouns just like you think of their names. You can’t tell a person’s name just by looking at them; if you want to know it, you have to ask, and to argue with their answer would be weird and rude.

(Just as it would be unreasonable to say, “What? Your name is Chrysanthemum? No, that’s too much for me, I think I’ll call you Bob,” it would be equally bananas to use a pronoun that someone explicitly told you wasn’t theirs.)

“This is one of those things where people start with a conclusion and work backward to find an argument,” Lal Zimman says, before telling me a story about how his partner, who uses they/them pronouns, is always butting heads with their mother, who can’t be convinced to get on board.

A friend of mine, who is first-generation American, once told me that when she was growing up, her Japanese father made her put a dollar in a jar every time she used a slang word. “He thought it made me sound low class,” she said. “He was an immigrant.” For folks like my friend’s dad, speaking “proper” English is the way to the big house with the white picket fence. It’s the idea that if you want to be a CEO, you have to sound like one, and not caring about grammar means not caring about your future itself.