Wordslut Quotes

“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). 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.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“One of the sneakiest ways these biases show up is that in our language, in our culture, maleness is seen as the default”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“If you want to insult a woman, call her a prostitute. If you want to insult a man, call him a woman”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“We're also living in a time when we find respected media outlets and public figures circulating criticism of women's voices--like that they speak with too much vocal fry, overuse the words like and literally, and apologize in excess. They brand judgments like these as pseudofeminist advice aimed at helping women talk with 'more authority' so they can be 'taken more seriously.' What they don't seem to realize is that they're actually keeping women in a constant state of self-questioning--keeping them quiet--for no objectively logical reason other than that they don't sound like middle-aged white men.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“One of the burdens of being a woman is the imperative to be nice.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“*​As the legendary Betty White once said, “Why do people say ‘grow some balls?’ Balls are weak and sensitive. If you wanna be tough, grow a vagina. Those things can take a pounding.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“I think the golden rule for men should be: If you’re a man, don’t say anything to a woman on the street that you wouldn’t want a man saying to you in prison.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“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.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“Simply put, slurs go out of style at the same time the underlying belief in them does.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“Some compelling proof that women are indeed not born any more capable of empathy or connection than men comes from psychologist Niobe Way. In 2013 Way published a book called Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection, which explores the friendships of young straight men. 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, further perpetuating the notion that women are obligated by design to carry humanity’s emotional cargo.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“When you objectify and dehumanize a class of people”—whether that’s women or a racial minority or both or anyone—“it becomes easier to mistreat them without guilt.” Scholars have a clever word for this kind of social structure in which power is formed through a brotherhood that objectifies and dehumanizes those on the outside: they call it fratriarchy. Many think this is a more accurate way to describe our culture’s post-feudal system, which is ruled not by the fathers, but by peer networks of the brothers. Backstage talk that otherizes all things feminine is part of the mortar that keeps the walls of fratriarchy standing strong. And when you are part of an especially close group, like Donald and his bus bros, it makes it even harder to dissent, because you risk giving up that bond and the power that comes with it. So you end up like Billy Bush, laughing along.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“In my college sociolinguistics classes, I started learning about some of the subtle ways 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? If women were linguistically framed as the protagonists of any given sexual scenario, could that potentially mean that a woman’s orgasm as opposed to a dude’s would be seen as the proverbial climax—the ultimate goal? Questions like that blew my mind.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“Even the word slut used to mean something relatively innocent. The word is so contentious now you’d never guess it came from the comparatively wholesome Middle English term slutte, which merely meant an “untidy” woman. The word was even used for men sometimes (in 1386, Chaucer labeled one slovenly male character as “sluttish”).”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“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.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“If you want to insult a woman, call her a prostitute. If you want to insult a man, call him a woman.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“As American English speakers, we are perfectly at liberty to use whatever language we want; we just have to know that our words reveal our social and moral beliefs to some extent. So if one were to use the term comedienne instead of comic or the pronoun she to describe a Ferrari, they could be opening themselves up to criticism, not for flat-out sexism but definitely for expressing an indifference to gender equality. 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.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“According to the Corpus of Historical American English, which contains a massive four hundred million words from the 1810s to the 2000s, most people didn’t start using the word gender to describe human beings until the 1980s.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“Cameron found that when people use female as a noun, as opposed to woman, it’s often in explicitly negative contexts. For example: My poor Clemence was as helpless a female as you’d find in a long day’s march. “Stupid, crazy female” was all he said as he set about bandaging it. A call yesterday involved giving the chatty female at the other end one’s address. These examples all involve a speaker passing derogatory judgment on the subject. And though their statements would still be insulting if you swapped in the word woman, they would be, as Cameron says, “less unequivocally contemptuous.” The corpus data also showed that the noun form of female is almost never used in a positive context. You wouldn’t hear someone say, “My best friend is the kindest, most generous female I have ever met.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“The on-screen depiction of oral sex performed on women has consistently earned movies an NC-17 rating – Blue Valentine, Boys Don’t Cry, and Charlie Countryman are a few that come to mind. The same standard has certainly not been applied to on-screen blow jobs. I often think of 2013s Lovelace, a biopic about the star of the 1972 porn film Deep Throat. This was an entire movie dedicated to fellatio, and to extreme sexual violence, and even that was given a mild R. Sure, let the kids watch a porn star get repeatedly raped, but female desire? No, no, no.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“The way to get to that world starts not with teaching women how to protect themselves from harm but with teaching men, ideally from very early on, that the whole world does not belong to them. When men are itty bitty boys, we, as their parents and teachers, have to dismantle our culture's ideas of masculinity as we know them, at every turn.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“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.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“Getting people to understand that language itself is a means through which people can be harmed, elevated, or valued is really important,”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“While protesting a staff of nerdy, underpaid lexicographers is not the most effective way to enact social change, it is true that as a society, treating dictionary definitions as fixed, unbiased facts is a mistake. Word meanings and cultural beliefs go hand in hand, and they are both changing all the time.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“people’s pronouns just like you think of their names. You can’t tell a person’s name just by looking at them; if you want to know it, you have to ask, and to argue with their answer would be weird and rude.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“Silencing is always political," Robin Lakoff said in a 1992 paper. "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." When one's humanity is taken away, the obligation to treat them equally is also removed.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“the English language is not innately biased against women and nonbinary genders; but the bad news is that its speakers have collectively consented to wield it in a way that reinforces existing gender biases, often in ways they’re not even conscious of.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“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.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“At the time I am writing this, one of the definitions of vagina from TheFreeDictionary.com’s medical glossary reads, “An organ of copulation that receives the penis during sexual intercourse.” This is not a political view of the vagina, it’s a medical one. And yet, I would invite a doctor to try telling a lesbian that her vagina is “an organ that receives the penis.” See how well that goes. (258)”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“In the wrong hands, speech can be used as a weapon. But in the right ones, it can change the world.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

“People with high IQs, the most intelligent folks of the bunch, are more likely than anyone else to curse… swears are the only types of English words that you can use as an infix. An infix is a grammatical unit of meaning that you insert into the middle of a word, similar to a prefix, which comes at the beginning, or a suffix, which comes at the end. Contrary to what teachers and parents might proselytize, I am willing to bet that English speakers who can curse fluently have a more creative grasp of the language as a whole.”
― Amanda Montell, Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language