Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

by Amanda Montell

The link between language and culture is inextricable: language has always been, and continues to be, used to reflect and reinforce power structures and social norms.

That means questioning the words we speak every day, as well as the contexts in which we use them—because without realizing it, something as simple as an address term or curse word might be reinforcing a power structure that we ultimately don’t agree with.

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.

One of the most exciting concepts this new crop of research shows is that women possess a secret, badass arsenal of linguistic qualities that are profoundly misunderstood and deeply needed in the world right now.

gender stereotypes are hiding in English . . . like how the term penetration implies (and reinforces) the idea that sex is from the male perspective. Like sex is defined as something a man does to a woman. The opposite might be envelopment or enclosure. Can you imagine how different life would be if that’s how we referred to sex?

Thus, women’s experiences wind up getting squashed under their own generosity as listeners.

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.

Phonetically, slut, bitch, cunt, and dyke happen to possess the essential aural recipe shared universally by English speakers’ favorite, most used, and sometimes very first words.

Alternatively, we can give them up altogether—after all, not every insult is meant to be reclaimed.* Slut is one word that some feminists believe deserves to be terminated rather than taken back, simply because having a “special” word for female promiscuity is shady to begin with.

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

While men tend to view conversation as an arena for establishing hierarchies and expressing individual achievement, women’s goals are typically to support the other speakers and emphasize solidarity. Thus, women progressively build on what one another says.

“Locker-room banter” is just a manlier-sounding synonym for gossip; it’s the act of talking about someone who’s not in the room with the intention of establishing camaraderie and in-group norms,

People confuse women’s use of certain softening hedges like just, I mean, and I feel like as signs of uncertainty, but research shows that these words accomplish something different: instead, they’re used to help create trust and empathy in a conversation.

For instance, saying something along the lines of, “I mean, I just feel like you should maybe, well, try seeing a therapist” is a gentler, easier-to-hear way of saying, “You should see a therapist.” The latter statement, though direct, could come across as cold in the context of a heart-to-heart conversation. The hedged version is more tactful and open, inviting of the listener’s point of view, and leaves space for them to interject or share a different perspective (unlike “You should see a therapist,” which is closed off and doesn’t make room for anyone else’s input).

“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.”

There are also what linguists call minimal responses, which refers to those little phrases like yeah, right, and mm-hmm that one utters while someone else is speaking to demonstrate what Coates terms “active listenership.”

Instead, they work to affirm the speaker while signaling the listener’s recognition of how her story is progressing.

Tannen claims that from early childhood, women and men are socialized to live in two opposing cultures with two opposing sets of values, so they grow up to understand things differently. Not better or worse, just different. As a result, men’s goals when they talk are to communicate information, while women’s are to form connections.

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,

As a matter of fact, some studies have demonstrated that speech lacking in likes and you knows can sound too careful, robotic, or unfriendly. So next time someone accuses you of saying like too much, feel free to ask them, “Oh really? Which kind?”

In my own speech, I have noticed that I’ll use uptalk to soften a declarative sentence, especially when discussing a topic that’s a bit controversial, but I don’t think it’s necessarily to seem less bitchy. Instead, it feels like a way for me to state an opinion confidently while at the same time opening myself up for others’ responses. Which I don’t think is necessarily a bad thing?

Plus, not all hedges serve the same purpose. Take the case of you know: linguists have discovered that not only do men and women use this phrase in equal numbers, but that in many instances, women actually use it as a way to communicate active confidence.

“Unlike female speakers, male speakers on the whole avoid sensitive topics,” she says. By and large, men do not self-disclose or talk about personal matters as liberally. Thus, the need for this particular hedge does not apply.

But to me, the most compelling argument is that young women innovate because they see language as a tool to assert their power in a culture that doesn’t give them a lot of ways to do that.

The way any of these folks talk isn’t inherently more or less worthy of respect. It only sounds that way because it reflects an underlying assumption about who holds more power in our culture.

What’s considered “good grammar” today might have been totally unacceptable fifty years ago, or vice versa. 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.

We don’t assign gender to nouns in English—except, that is, when we use the pronoun she to refer to natural disasters, countries, and cars (all of which, by no coincidence, are dangerous things that men feel the need to vanquish and control; more on that in a bit).

(oh, to have the confidence of a nineteenth-century Prussian man).

There are two huge flaws in their logic: The first is that using a plural pronoun for a singular meaning is nothing new for English speakers. A few hundred years ago, the second-person you was exclusively a plural; thou was the singular version (e.g., “Thou shalt not kill,” “Thou shalt not lie”). Eventually, you extended to the singular meaning and pushed out thou entirely. Who’s to say the same thing couldn’t happen with they?

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. This is when you start hearing arguments about how it defies basic grammar rules and is just too confusing to bother with.

You can’t blame someone in this situation for defending themselves however they can—but you have to ask why claiming to have better grammar than your antagonist is so often the weapon of choice. Linguists posit that this has to do with notion that bigots are not only depraved, but also stupid, and that the two are connected.

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. In reality, of course, no one can force anyone to say anything in this country—political correctness does not endanger our freedom of expression at all. The only thing it actually threatens is the notion that we can separate our word choices from our politics—that how we choose to communicate doesn’t say something deeper about who we are.

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.

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.

Our standards of masculinity are extreme and undue: they require that men be powerful, exhaustingly heterosexual, and utterly unrelated to femininity at all costs.

“Men fail to exhibit empathy with women because masculinity precludes them from taking the position of the feminine other, and men’s moral stance vis-à-vis women is attenuated by this lack of empathy.”

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.

Many of our language’s most potent phrases—from pussy to motherfucker—paint a picture of women, men, and sex from a cisgender dude’s perspective. They portray the act of sex as inherently penetrative, the penis as violent and powerful, and the vagina as weak and passive.

“The more we allow men and women into one another’s spheres and allow them to exhibit behaviors normatively understood as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine,’ the more we will denaturalize and, in fact, redefine these understandings of gender.”

“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.”

When it comes to the language of sex, our dick-centrism is so deeply ingrained that most people’s interpretation of the word fuck inherently involves a penis, even though the term itself does not actually suggest one.