Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

by Amanda Montell

A 2017 study analyzing Supreme Court oral argument transcripts from 1990, 2002, and 2015 determined that as more female justices were added to the bench, interruptions of women did not improve but escalated.

“Even though Supreme Court justices are some of the most powerful individuals in the country [with interruption], gender is approximately 30 times more powerful than seniority,”

research shows that when sexual harassers are asked to switch places with their targets, they are able to grasp quite quickly that what they’ve done is wrong. 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.

there is a precise formula English speakers follow to decline things in a socially acceptable way, and it actually almost never includes the word no. Instead, it goes: hesitate + hedge + express regret + give a culturally acceptable reason.

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,”

people with high IQs, the most intelligent folks of the bunch, are more likely than anyone else to curse.

In a big way, women’s avoidance of sexist swear words is another symbol of unity and mutual support among women.

In pursuit of a more feminist swear vocabulary, we have a few options, the least exciting of which is probably just to limit one’s cursing to the scatology category. The shits, pisses, assholes, and other bodily function metaphors are all perfectly gender neutral.

Biases against the voices of powerful women are, again, actually related not to the quality of the voice itself but instead to our impressions of gender and authority at large.

Eventually, the more normal it is for women to lead and for men to follow—the more balanced the scales become—then there will be no such thing as a woman sounding “shrill” or “abrasive,” because we will no longer automatically associate women with subservience.

Any social group’s language is a direct product of its history. Because gay men and lesbians do not have parallel histories, their language necessarily couldn’t be the same.

A discourse of sex as pleasure, separating pleasure from procreation, and acknowledging women as active desiring and sexually assertive subjects, not necessarily centered around the erect penis, will challenge and confront established power structures. What is needed is a new mythology, one which speaks about mutual exploration, communication, discovery, and pleasuring one another, where penetration is not an end unto itself, but one of the many possibilities for erotic enjoyment.

The delightfully comprehensive phrase vaginal-cliteral-vulval complex (or VCVC) is another women-invented term I’ve heard to describe said genitalia.

As Deborah Cameron comments, “I was always skeptical about the idea of a language ‘expressing women’s perceptions.’ Which perceptions would those be, and which women would they belong to? There is no set of perceptions which all women share.”

making a language feminist does not start with making the vowels, consonants, or even vocabulary feminist. It starts with transforming the ideologies of its speakers.

“The more we move in a direction of respecting nonnormative identities and a language that goes along with that, the more dramatic the pushback is going to be,” Zimman said.