Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

by Amanda Montell

but the reality is that grammar and morality don’t actually have anything to do with one another, and attacking a bigot’s poor grammar does not itself prove you are a better person.

However, the moral significance of what someone says is about the content, not the grammar. As Cameron says, “Hitler wasn’t any less fascist because he could write a coherent sentence.”

When highly educated folks engage in grammar policing, they’re basically just doing what misogynists do when they dismiss what a woman is saying because she uses uptalk or vocal fry; it’s another example of judging someone’s speech based on preconceptions of who they are.

“Language pedantry is snobbery and snobbery is prejudice,” Cameron says. “And that, IMHO, is nothing to be proud of.”

Whenever language changes, as when anything in life changes, folks can’t help but feel a little fussy. That’s because language change is frequently a sign of bigger social changes, which makes people anxious.

The type of language change that’s gotten perhaps the worst reputation is the push toward political correctness. The conservative media has played a big role in painting this concept as a negative, in propagating the idea that in this day and age “you can’t say anything anymore.” The fear is that being forced to use gender-inclusive language, like singular they, Mx. instead of Mrs. and Mr., and friends instead of “boys and girls,” poses a threat to free speech.

What rubs people the wrong way about political correctness is not that they can’t use certain words anymore, it’s that political neutrality is no longer an option.

In the meantime, we can either do our best to get on board or not—but whatever we choose, we can trust that language will move along its merry way regardless.

So many languages offer a phrase to describe the act of a person (usually a man) shouting sexual comments in the street at someone they don’t know (usually a woman or feminine-presenting person), because in almost every country, you are sure to find it.

That guy didn’t want to marry me or even make me feel good about myself, but he did want me to hear him and to understand that he had control over me, at least for those few seconds. Because the act of catcalling isn’t really about sex—it’s about power.

Since the beginning of patriarchy, language has been a primary means through which men have asserted their dominance in order to make sure women and other oppressed genders have no control over what happens to them.

Equally disempowering are the practices of labeling women overemotional, hormonal, crazy, or hysterical* as a way to discredit their experiences, or addressing female colleagues as sweetheart or young lady in a professional setting as a form of (often subconscious) subordination.

Consistently interrupting women as they’re speaking is a similar ploy for control.

And then there’s the act of dismissing a woman’s testimony when she comes forward with any of these offenses.

It’s hard to forget that until relatively recently, women were not even considered people in a legal or political sense (American women weren’t able to own property until the late 1800s or vote until half a century later, and that was just white ladies).

“To be voiceless is to have no ‘say’ in what gets done, what happens to one, to have no representation. . . . To be deprived of speech is to be deprived of humanity itself—in one’s own eyes and in the eyes of others.”

“Interruptions are attempts at dominance . . . so the more powerful a woman becomes, the less often she should be interrupted,” the researchers wrote. Instead, they found that in 1990, when Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was the only woman on the bench, 35.7 percent of overall interruptions were aimed at her (which, out of nine justices, was already a high percentage); twelve years later, after Ruth Bader Ginsburg was added, 45.3 percent were directed at the two female justices; and in 2015, with three women on the bench (Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan), 65.9 percent of all court interruptions on the court were aimed at female justices.

(Not to mention, in 2015, the most common type of interruption of any individual justice was by male advocates speaking over Justice Sotomayor—this dynamic accounted for 8 percent of all of the court’s interruptions. Sotomayor is also the only female Supreme Court justice of color.)

The underlying problem with all of these forms of sexual trespassing is that they rely on the assumption that a man has an automatic right to a woman’s body. It’s a display of social control, signaling to women that they are intruders in a world owned by men, and thus have no right to privacy.

In other words, a woman could be a CEO of a company, have an IQ of 180, or be a prosecutor making her case in a courtroom, but the second the male defense attorney calls her “honey,”* all of that is taken away.

There is one unified reason why many men feel as though they have an inherent right to comment on women’s bodies, ignore them in meetings, or dismiss them with the excuse that they’re on their periods and acting hysterical: it’s because of a lack of empathy.

It’s not that their intentions have been misunderstood—these dudes realize the harm they’ve caused. It’s simply that they aren’t motivated to care. They lack empathy.

This empathy deficit toward all things feminine surely hurts men too, as the masculinity standards that cause it do not allow men to display any emotional, physical, or linguistic characteristics that could possibly be construed as womanlike. So they often lock themselves up in a rigid box of heteronormative masculine behavior out of fear that being perceived as feminine will endanger them and take their power away.

Because masculinity as we know it discourages men from forming solidarity with women, when a dude ignores or strong-arms a woman’s voice, he’s doing a good job by society’s standards. He’s playing his role well. The fact that the role causes damage is of relatively little importance.

Women were hypersensitive and neurotic (or “asking for it”) and gay people were abominable.

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.”

Inspiring marginalized folks to self-advocate loudly and clearly is important, of course. It is indispensable. But in practice, it only solves the problem halfway. Because what it fails to address is that we live in a culture that doesn’t exactly make it easy for women and queer folks to stand up for themselves in the first place.

What’s more is that thanks to centuries of steeping in messages that women are delicate, overly emotional, and unfit to hold power, many women have an internalized belief that it’s natural for them not to have a voice. It’s an unconscious feeling that speechlessness is just part of being a woman and that to be too loud or assertive would mean losing female identity, which is precious, because it’s a huge part of who they are.

When adults wield these words to describe female politicians, they’re implying how crazy and wrong it is when women assert their authority outside the home, just as terms like pussywhipped and henpecked imply how crazy and wrong it is when men allow them to do so.

A 2016 Slate piece called “Trump’s Tower of Babble” cited an analysis concluding that our forty-fifth president’s “loosely woven sentences and cramped, simplistic vocabulary” placed his speech below a sixth-grade reading level (more than four reading levels behind his opponents’ talking styles). A different study found that 78 percent of Trump’s vocabulary was made up of monosyllabic words, and that his most frequently used lexical items included (in the following order) I, Trump, very, China, and money.

Studies also show that by and large, companies led by women over-perform.

“Homosexual acts” (mostly meaning sodomy) were illegal in the majority of English-speaking countries through most of the twentieth century. In Scotland, for example, the ban on anal sex between men was not officially lifted until 2013.

The ballroom collective House of Xtravaganza once summed up their position on the matter in a succinct Instagram post: “You can’t be homophobic/transphobic and use terms such as ‘yaaass’ or ‘giving me life’ or ‘werk’ or ‘throwing shade’ or ‘reading’ or ‘spilling tea.’ These phrases are direct products of drag and ball culture. You don’t get to dehumanize black and Latinx queer/trans people and then appropriate our shit.”

By Spender’s account, the grammar and vocabulary of your native tongue inherently shape your perception of reality—if there isn’t a word to describe a certain concept in your language, then you can’t conceive of that thing at all.