Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

by Amanda Montell

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

I don’t think there is such a thing as a slut in a negative sense given that I don’t think there is such a thing as contemptible promiscuity in women.

I’d like to believe that we can get to a point where female sexuality is never reprehensible. That way, anyone can identify as a slut if they want, knowing that little offense, if any, will result.

if someone of any gender does something conniving, we can call them a “shit-filled, two-faced sneak” or a “goddamn villainous crook,” instead of a bitch or a dick—insults

it’s a rebellion against the rules. By refusing to use words like slut and pussy as terms of abuse, you’re rejecting the imbalanced standards that have been set for women’s sexuality and men’s machismo. It’s a form of protest against the condemnation of women’s sexual independence and men’s refusal to act like chauvinist bruisers. 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. If we’re able to make like queers and dykes and own our insults, then the word offense itself will become obsolete.

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.)

If you’ve ever watched the local news, looked up the weather, or used a GPS, you have Dr. Brill to thank.

“Every time we say ‘woman president,’ we reinforce the view that only a man can be commander in chief [and] symbolize the US (which is metonymically Uncle Sam and not Aunt Samantha, after all), and make it harder to conceive of, and hence vote for, a woman in that role.”

If gender isn’t something that comes fully formed at birth, where exactly do each of our genders come from then? This might not seem like a language question, but some philosophers theorize that gender is actually constructed through language itself.

Judith Butler. She came up with a theory called gender performativity, which essentially says that gender isn’t something you are, it’s something you do.

while men’s speech style can be categorized as “competitive,” women’s is “cooperative.”

may have heard the banality that women talk about “people,” whereas men talk about “ideas.”

inserting too many justs or you knows in order to come off as sweet and self-doubting won’t help women’s overall station in society; instead, it will reinforce the stereotype that women are naturally docile and insecure.

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. As Coates explains, hedges like these “are used to respect the face needs of all participants, to negotiate sensitive topics, and to encourage the participation of others.”

“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.”

“Reciprocal admissions of ‘not-niceness’ . . . [and] taboo feelings . . . reinforce solidarity,”

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.

In the 1920s male linguists came up with a name for this process of giving an object a human pronoun; they called it “upgrading,” as if by calling these things “she,” they are elevated to human status. They couldn’t quite see that it simultaneously downgrades women to the status of toys and property.

“As long as we are complicit in our own voicelessness, there is no incentive, neither fear nor shame, to make anyone else change.”

lesbians are women first, gay women second, whereas gay men go the other way around.

In an episode of the podcast Reply All, hosted by two straight white dudes in their thirties (which I happen to like very much despite these shortcomings),

“Lesbians have been socially and historically invisible in our society and isolated from one another as a consequence.” For this reason, they didn’t have the chance to build a “cohesive community in which a lesbian aesthetic could have developed,”

wouldn’t it be better to live in a world where a man sounding like a woman is not only no longer a symbol of gayness or invitation for harassment, but isn’t even an idea that crosses people’s minds? Wouldn’t it be better to live in a world where a woman sounding “angry” or “assertive” didn’t necessarily make her a lesbian (and vice versa)?

“The penis is often going to be some kind of weapon, the vagina some kind of narrow passage, intercourse some way of saying ‘man hits woman.’”

I think part of what people loved about va-jay-jay was that, unlike so many other slang words for the vagina, this one was female-invented and felt like it belonged to women.

Maybe the idea of naming your own body on your terms will catch on. And maybe when that happens, a rebalancing of the sexual power scales will finally follow.

English dictionaries and grammar were made up by men, women need to invent a whole new language that puts their view of the world at the center.

There is a verb doroledim, describing the act of a woman overeating to cope with a lack of ability to care for herself properly while at the same time feeling extreme guilt about overindulging in something as gluttonous as food.

“With regard to feminist language change, I think there will be—as there already is—a backlash to this progress,” he told me, reasoning that the conservative right and its “far-right stepbrother” will remain steadfast in their fight to prevent the mainstreaming of feminist values in the English language. Szetela thinks Donald Trump’s presidency in particular has had a regressive effect that will take some years to reverse. “While in certain spheres, language that was once okay is being ousted as problematic, the most powerful person in the world is modeling sexism on a routine basis . . . [with] no consequences,” he wrote to me in December 2017. “Thus, the message to young men coming of age in the era of Trump is that this is a socially acceptable way of relating to, interacting with, and speaking about women.”

sometimes the backlash is louder than the progress.

move through life with the confident knowledge that every persecuted element of our speech—the hedges, the upspeak, the lisps, the vocal fry—is there for a logical, powerful, and provable reason.

you know is not just a mindless filler, but rather a discourse marker with a purpose. I told him about how women actually use it to display confidence a lot of time, and how hedges generally work as essential tools for creating trust and empathy in controversial conversations but are often misinterpreted because of cultural myths about women, self-assuredness, and authority.

“I have to be optimistic, to make it through,” he says with a laugh. “You have to believe that it’s possible.”

he made the point that because our relationship to loaded words depends on our relationship to the oppression associated with them, not every reappropriated slur gets to belong to every group.

“The experience of being a hip-hop fan and not being able to use the word ni**er . . . will give you just a little peek into the world of what it means to be black. Because to be black is to walk through the world and watch people doing things that you cannot do.”

A more accepted way to refer to a person’s physiology outside of their gender is not to say “biologically female” or “biologically male,” but instead to say AFAB or AMAB, which stand for “assigned female at birth” and “assigned male at birth.”