wordslut: a feminist guide to taking back the english language by Amanda Montell analyzed language and the gendered terms within it, with an emphasis on insults, cursing and sexual terms. The first chapter dealt with gendered insults which included both those she hated as well as the ones she loved, including slut, for example. Montell discussed the reasons she likes slut and the circumstances wherein she uses it. The title of her work is self-referential, and used in a favorable context. She even provided the example of her friends using it as an intensifier: “Amanda is the biggest wordslut I know”.
She also looked at speech patterns and phrases that are often misrepresented as being overused by women such as vocal fry and the insertion of filler words such as you know and like. While men might use these terms just as frequently as women, listeners are often oblivious to these perceived verbal offences when men utter them and criticize women when they do.
The author is too young to remember that Valleyspeak originated in southern California in the late seventies and became a media phenomenon in the early eighties. She is at least a decade off when she wrote that the quotative sense of like [1] became “masterminded by young Southern California females in the 1990s.”
I take issue with Montell’s assertion that the term guy exclusively applies to males. She writes about an episode when addressing two girls:
“I could also have said you guys, which has become surprisingly customary in casual conversation, but to my knowledge, neither of these children identifies as male, and I try to avoid using masculine terms to address people who aren’t men, as it ultimately works to promote the sort of linguistic sexism many have been fighting for years. I mean, if neither of these girls is a guy, then surely together they aren’t guys, you know?”
While listening to girls and women talk among themselves, I have indeed heard them use the word guys. I recall sitting in a park while a girls’ soccer team was practising. Their coach, a woman, called out for everyone to come in from the field. She yelled “Guys! Come back!” What struck me was the first word she uttered. In order to get all the players’ attention, she yelled out one simple monosyllabic word: Guys. The players were all young, so she could have called out Girls, or the polysyllabic Everyone, or just used an interjection such as Hey. But she chose to address the team, and referred to them as Guys. I have also heard it among a group of women as they discuss their plans: “So what do you guys all want to do this evening?” So while Montell believes that this word is masculine and to use it when addressing women is linguistic sexism, I believe that the term as heard applied by women towards women invalidates that point. Women have taken a term which no doubt started out with a singularly male context and appropriated it to include themselves. This is how language evolves. As Montell herself states about her own favourite word, slut, it started out as applying to both men and women (where Shakespeare uses it in a masculine context) yet now it refers only, or mainly, to women.
I nodded throughout the chapter on gendered insults, which starts off with this truism:
“If you want to insult a woman, call her a prostitute. If you want to insult a man, call him a woman.”
However, I have heard women use women-based insults against men and even other women, although the latter maybe for comedic effect. She elaborates:
“Linguists have actually determined that the majority of insults for men sprout from references to femininity, either from allusions to women themselves or to stereotypically feminine men: wimp, candy-ass, motherfucker. (Even the word woman itself is often used as a term of ridicule. I can hear it now: ‘Dude, don’t be such a woman.’)”
The slang terms for genitalia are biased too, as it is a worse insult to call someone a cunt than a dick or a prick. However I disagree with her assessment of desexualized curse terms:
“One could certainly get away with saying ‘suck my dick’ for humor or emphasis without it seeming sexual, but the same could not be said for ‘eat my pussy’–evidence that there is a semantic imbalance between curse words from a normatively male perspective and curse words from a normatively female one.”
This depends entirely on the sex of the person saying it. The male curse is definitely not deprived of sexual content, and I can’t think of examples where a man might not be confronted with an accusation of harassment for using it. Perhaps if Montell herself said it, then it would seem funny. I can picture her saying it to her women friends in an example of ironic discontentment. But if I were to say it to anyone, anywhere? You think I’d have people laugh at my attempt at humour? Or nod with me in agreement of emphasis? Not a chance. I would be branded a misogynist pig, even deemed a threat to public safety.
I took greatest issue with the chapters on Montell’s assessment of gender when applied to humans. I will be upfront and state that I find the current “awareness” of gender diversity to be a form of mass hysteria. In other words, this whole business of “nonbinary” orientation is our generation’s current fad, and will disappear when the next social faux-crisis rears its ugly head. How I roll my eyes every time I see institutions such as Air Canada with its dropdown menu giving not two but four choices for passenger gender [2]. To me, one’s sex is determined by the sexual organs between one’s legs. You are male if you have a penis and testes. You are female if you have a vagina. End of. So Montell’s snarky note, annoyingly passed off as “cute” in a way to thumb her nose at critics, totally flies in the face of my way of thinking:
“ICYMI: A more accepted way to refer to a person’s physiology outside of their gender is not to say ‘biologically female’ or ‘biologically male,’ but instead to say AFAB or AMAB, which stand for ‘assigned female at birth’ and ‘assigned male at birth.’ The idea is that the sex of a person is not necessarily a ‘biological fact’ but is instead determined by a doctor’s brief evaluation of a baby’s genitalia without taking into consideration any of their other sex characteristics (and certainly not their gender identity–not that a newborn baby has one yet). Also, while we’re talking abbreviations, ICYMI stands for ‘in case you missed it.’ ICYMI.”
Calling AFAB or AMAB a “more accepted way” is strictly her own opinion. I suppose Montell and I are a generation apart and among younger people, perhaps AFAB and AMAB are the terms of the future, as is the definition of woman itself. How do you feel about this statement:
“Another useful thing we can do to make our language more inclusive, especially when gender is pertinent to the conversation, is to be much more specific with our word choices. Say we’re talking about reproductive health. Instead of saying something like ‘women need access to cervical cancer screenings,’ we can get more specific and say, ‘people with cervixes need access to cervical cancer screenings.'”
This is nonsense. Montell cannot see the trees for the forest here. Language likes to be short and concise. When one speaks, oral discourse does not have the time or patience for extended prepositional phrases. That is why English is so compact when in comparison to French, for example, which often requires multiple prepositional phrases to express what English can manage in one short sentence. Thus speakers will never even consider to use “people with cervixes” when 99% of those who do have cervixes are women. Montell never even considers the tautology in her own recommendation, for the prepositional phrase with cervixes is redundant anyway. Why not simply say “People need access to cervical cancer screenings”? Come to think of it, you could substitute people for women and reduce the redundancy.
The book gets a bit preachy, which is a turnoff, and quite ironic from someone whose title for chapter five is called how to embarrass the shit out of people who try to correct your grammar. (All chapter titles are in lowercase.) She provides exercises on how to use pronouns which read as if they were lifted from a Canadian university style manual or an Ontario municipal government homepage. Didactic and verbose instructions on how to use pronouns do not appeal to anyone. I will stick with the sex-neutral third-person singular he, Amanda.
Montell does raise some important points about sexism in the media, and I enjoyed the chapter on how women talk to each other “when dudes aren’t around”. You’d think they’d avoid sexist language when in the company of other women, but…not so much. Although she was 27 when she wrote the book, she comes off as smug and juvenile with her “we should all say it this way” scenarios to counter sexism in language.
[1] Quotative like as in “I was like, ‘I want to see Superwoman.'” I lived my teenage years throughout the early eighties and we made fun of Valspeak and the quotative like back then.
[2] For the record, Montell goes into the distinct differences between the terms sex and gender and how often, especially now, the two are conflated. I come from the field of language so I tend to be pedantic in my application of these terms, differentiating between language and people. Montell raises a valid point that western society is so hung up on the word sex that people prefer to use the term gender instead, when they rightfully should be using the shorter term, which still has a taboo sense when uttered aloud. People should just get over it already, especially parents-to-be. “Gender-reveal” parties are huge now, yet they are wrongfully named.