Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

they often lock themselves up in a rigid box of heteronormative masculine behavior out of fear that being perceived as feminine will endanger them and take their power away.

“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

Pressures for women to position themselves as “normal” and “nice” are almost always a constraint, no matter who’s listening. “None of us is ever free of the need to keep up some sort of front,” Coates says.

A 2017 study of body-camera footage revealed that police officers were 61 percent more likely to use low-respect language, such as informal titles like “my man,” with black drivers than they were with white drivers. Interactions like this are not a sign of affection or something the recipient should be flattered by. Because really, they’re just a s

Young women use the linguistic features that they do, not as mindless affectations, but as power tools for establishing and strengthening relationships.

As Deborah Cameron once said, “Teaching young women to accommodate to the linguistic preferences, aka prejudices, of the men who run law firms and engineering companies is doing the patriarchy’s work for it.” It accepts the idea that “feminine” speech is the problem, rather than the sexist attitudes toward it. “The business of feminism is surely to

People don’t seem to care or even notice when men talk this way. Only when it comes from female mouths does it cause such an upset. This fact makes it clear that our culture’s aversion to vocal fry, uptalk, and like isn’t really about the speech qualities themselves.

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.

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