It's time to take bitch out of your vernacular

Transcript:

What qualifies a word as a slur? Before my research, I had assumed that once enough angry people on Twitter created a hashtag that word was now off limits. But it turns out that there are, like, rules that make a slur a slur.

Rutgers professor of Linguistics Elisabeth Camp states in her essay “The semantics of slurs” that gendered insults like slut, bitch, and sissy, are not slurs against women, but rather words that have been slurred because to qualify as a slur the slur must have a ‘Neutral correlate’…call in if you have any idea what that means. Really I’ve sat at my desk and tried to think of the neutral counterpart for some of the worst slurs I’ve heard and I’ve come up with zilch. Lauren Ashwell, the author of the article “Gendered Slurs” in the journal of Social Theory and Practice, argues that even though the neutral counterpart doesn’t exist that these gendered insults should still qualify as slurs, or at the least, the way to frame a word as a slur needs to be updated.

Gendered insults like bitch, slut, and sissy, are dehumanizing and objectifying. There has been a semi-recent phenomenon of men calling women “females” and pretending to not understand what they did wrong when women get upset. Yes, women are technically females, but a tree can be a female, just like a dog or fish could be, but only a human can be a woman, which is why it is upsetting and dehumanizing to be called a female.

Harmful gendered language goes beyond what is obvious. If I had a nickel for every time I was given a compliment that had “for a girl” tacked onto the end of it I would probably have no student debt. Other examples that may hit close to home are in work or team settings when a woman is labeled “bossy” or “naggy” while men are “assertive” or “leaders.” Even the tone we speak with is gender biased. Teenage girls have been criticized in the past for the “valley girl accent” and overuse of ‘like’. More recently women have been under fire for vocal fry. Previously the popular thing to micromanage women about is upspeak. Upspeak refers to the tone inflection you use at the end of your sentences. Maybe you’ve caught on but a sentence with upspeak ends with a higher pitch. UC Berkeley’s professor of linguistics Robin Lakoff was one of the first to bring gender differences into linguistics and she wrote about it in her 1975 titled “Language and Woman’s Place: Text and Commentaries (Studies in Language and Gender).” In her book, she claims that there are rules of politeness that govern women’s behavior, and “women train themselves—both voluntarily and involuntarily—to use rising intonation in certain contexts to protect themselves from accusations of “bossiness” and “bitchiness.”

No one could make this point better than the Queen of rap herself Nicki Minaj. Take it away Nicki: https://twitter.com/MTV/status/1101935206964056068?s=20&t=dx3TClIiST75agLl713zTQ

Peggy Klaus wrote an article for NYTimes discussing the way women navigate the workplace, “We need to become better chameleon communicators and to carefully read our audience, adjusting our style to the circumstances.”

It is my strong held belief that anyone who is sensitive enough to be irritated by the tone of someone’s voice is a loser and a weirdo. I’ve been annoyed by the sound of a particular person’s voice, but that is because they are annoying as a person, not because of the genitalia they have. If I said that hearing Spanish accents was grating to my ears would I not be a bigot? Why is women’s language not allotted the same respect?

Tiktok user Feminfitz points out that feminine language such as words like sissy, bitch, and pansy have been stripped of their original meaning and became bastardized over time. These words were warped by misogyny to become gendered insults. This TikTok user also argues that the same thing is happening to the word feminist (clip). Horrifying but true.

Luckily, removing these words from your vernacular is easy. There are infinite synonyms you can use to insult someone that are not gendered and more funny and creative. It’s a win-win.

I’d love to keep talking about the issues of gendered language but I have a swear jar to go fill. It’ll be tricky since white women are paid 83 cents to a man’s dollar. You can find the sources and additional reading material linked on my blog at fredstories.com/genderpop/. and if you liked what I had to say even with my grating vocal fry and upspeak, check out the other content on my blog where lucky for you it’s all written so you don’t have to listen to me drone on. I’ve written about many different topics like the Wage Gap, Roe v Wade, Misogyny in Rap, Conservative Women, and much much more. Thank you to my extra special guest Nicki Minaj as well as all the women who are way smarter than me that I cited! Thanks for listening and remember to stay bitchy!

Sources and other interesting material