Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

What there is plenty of data to support, however, is the fact that gossip is a serviceable and goal-driven practice. Our linguist Deborah Cameron has explained that when you analyze it closely, gossip serves three main purposes: 1) to circulate personal information in order to keep members of a social group in the know; 2) to bond with one another

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.

So the words we use don’t only reflect who we are, they actively create who we are.

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

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

Almost nothing about our identities can be defined on such rigid terms—gender included. If you’re a woman, you’re a person who self-identifies as a woman, no matter what your body, mannerisms, or style of dress look like.

“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.”

It’s possible that people still confuse the bodily sense of masculinity and femininity (now understood as sex) and the cultural or identity part of it (gender) because these words have been used interchangeably for half a millennium. No one ever posed a semantic distinction between sex and gender until the 1960s, when folks began to realize that ou

people have the genders that they do because of the way they talk and the feedback they receive from that talk. Language brings gender to life.