Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

by Amanda Montell

No matter your species, there are just so many ways for a gal to be a bitch.

But every part of our speech—our words, our intonation, our sentence structures—is sending invisible signals telling other people who we are.

We’re living in an era when many of us often feel overwhelmed and silenced by the English language.

The link between language and culture is inextricable:

man and person are oftentimes synonymous in English.

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.

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.

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.

With the end of women’s sexual liberation came a general disgust for female sexuality,

You never see women compared to ice-cream cones or chocolate mousse because speakers, whether they realize it or not, recognize the rules of the “piece of ass” metaphor and adhere to them.

“The more one talks and the less one listens, the more likely it is that one’s viewpoint will function as if it were community consensus even if it is not.”

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.

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.

The more fun a word is to say, the likelier it is to persist; and, since terms like slut and bitch have all the acoustic

trappings of a fun word, it makes sense that they’d have such staying power. It’s

There’s also a specific connection between the positive redefinition of bitch and women in hip-hop. Since

Through resistance comes redefinition.”

If we’re going to analyze what the word slut really means, where it comes from, and why we say it, the next natural step is to ask the same questions about the rest of the gendered words we habitually use without thinking, like woman, man, female, male, guy, girl, she, he, etc. Why do gender and sex, as opposed to any other identifying qualities, play such a fundamental role in how we talk about people? Why is singling out a person’s gender through language so important to us?

And all the while, some people still use the word gender when what they really want to talk about is sex—like when pregnant parents reveal the “gender” of their unborn babies. (My theory is that some English speakers continue to do this simply because prudish Westerners are too afraid to say the word sex out loud.)

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

Talked about this in my PIP

We still crave labels.

Can forcing someone to say “hi, folks” instead of “hi, guys,” or to call Yvonne Brill an “engineer” instead of a “woman engineer” really change their perspective of gender at large?

As a result, men’s goals when they talk are to communicate information, while women’s are to form connections.

This story jives with Louise O. Vasvári’s theory that young women in poorer communities, as well as young immigrant women, are more likely to need language for social mobility. Why?

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).

Ultimately, language can serve as a rather blatant means of otherizing all things feminine.

A: As a straight male how would u feel about yr child having a homosexual school teacher?! Who their around for 8hrs of the day? B: If a gay teacher teaches my child the difference between they’re, their and there, I’m good.

Discerning listeners can tell that addressing someone’s grammar is often just a way of avoiding the message itself.

that political neutrality is no longer an option.

Because the act of catcalling isn’t really about sex—it’s about power.

us and let someone else have a turn. What we also need is to empower those who have been convinced that they don’t deserve access to the microphone to seize it firsthand.

On Gordon-Smith’s episode of This

Gonna look that up

“The power of sexuality is asymmetrical, in part, because being seen as sexual has different consequences for women and men.”)

Fuck, for example, is not only fun to say all on its own, it’s also one of the most malleable words in the English language, able to slot naturally into almost any grammatical category to communicate the desired sentiment.

For twice the number of women as men, sexism itself, as opposed to the motivation not to seem sexist, was reason enough to avoid certain swears.

Characters like Lydecker and DeWitt contributed to the stereotype that to be educated and refined was to be gay, and to be gay was to be evil.

think of Captain Hook and Jafar with their flamboyant hats and aristocratic airs, not to mention Ursula the Sea Witch, who was openly inspired by the iconic drag queen Divine.

Most of us speak more than one dialect of English,

Consciously or unconsciously, we all adjust our codes depending on the context of the conversation. This is an incredibly useful tool, because it helps us better connect to the people we’re talking to.

Our culture wants it to be that simple—to

That’s because this question treats the gay male experience as the standard to which the lesbian experience should be compared, instead of looking at the lesbian experience as its own separate thing.

Ooo

Some of the most persecuted queer communities in English-speaking history are in fact responsible for much of mainstream culture’s best slang. You might be familiar with terms like throwing shade (meaning, “to insult”), werk (an expression of praise), and slay (to do something very well), which are just a handful of the beloved twenty-first-century slang words that originated in black and Latinx* ballroom culture.

So much amazing pop culture originated in the ballroom scene, including the vogue style of dance (no, it didn’t come from Madonna), plus treasured slang terms like werk, read, face beat, hunty, extra, gagging

serving realness, tea, kiki,

After all, any slang that’s widely used in real life is inevitably going to end up on the internet.

if they are going to continue making use of the products of marginalized groups, then at the very least, they can recognize and support these communities in exchange.

“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.’

Still, several Polari words can be found in modern British (and sometimes American) slang,