Book Review/Heather Seggel

If Feminists Don’t Take Over the English Language, Who Will?

“What if I told you that without even realizing it, language is impacting all of our lives in an astonishing, filthy, and fascinating way?” Author Amanda Montell does not check or curb her enthusiasm where sociolinguistics is concerned. In “WORDSLUT: A Feminist Guide to Taking Over the English Language” (HarperCollins), she shows us how words may seem innocuous, but shape our perceptions daily, especially where sex and gender are concerned. It’s a serious topic, but she writes with enough humor and ebullience to make the medicine go down easily.

Montell, a journalist and reporter who studied linguistics at NYU, writes about how language reflects and influences systems of power. In a patriarchal society that power flows to men, and in America it flows overwhelmingly to white men. This can be as innocuous as the diminutive form of words marking them as feminine, as any actress or bachelorette can tell you, or a bit more sinister. It’s creepy to see how often men’s descriptive words for sex are violent—all that smashing, pounding, nailing and hammering can feel more than a bit threatening to anyone on the receiving end.

There’s an interesting argument at play culturally now, as we slowly begin to accept non-binary and gender non-conforming folks and learn their pronouns (and there’s great advice on how to do that painlessly here). The idea has been floated that separation on the basis of gender may become a thing of the past. Do the Oscars need categories for Actor and Actress, considering they inherently exclude non-binary performers? Sadly they probably do, at least until there’s a way to ensure that merging things does not let all the spoils flow solely to cisgender men. It’s complicated. People who say they’re “post-gender” are a bit like those who claim not to see color; the sentiment may be well-intended, but it’s misguided at best and potentially harmful as long as inequality based on gender still exists.

If Montell cracks wise at the expense of “dudes” regularly here, don’t let that chase you away if you are one. She doesn’t shy away from complex ideas and rejects simple charges of “sexism,” going so far as to break down the Access Hollywood tape of Billy Bush and Donald Trump to point out that Trump opens with a story of how he failed to connect with a married woman (“I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn’t get there.”) before going on to tout his pussy-grabbing skills. Regardless of what he said afterwards, this portion really was a form of “locker room talk,” a kind of offering Trump made to bond with Bush. Elsewhere, she notes that women bond similarly through swearing; it’s considered a way to build trust and intimacy for them, whereas men swear because they feel it’s socially expected of them.

One trivial anecdote hit close to home for me: Montell relates how answering “well” instead of “good” in response to “How are you?” is a marker of someone from a lower class trying to fluff themself up a bit. Guilty as charged, and now looking to break the habit, though it has proven difficult. Lighter anecdotes like this twine between serious topics, including a thoughtful analysis of how we talk about sexual consent, and why “no means no” is true, but never the whole story. Declining anything politely is a fraught situation, and we traditionally do it as gently as possible; there is, in fact, a formula we follow that looks like a complicated dance step, and nowhere amid the polite dodges do you find the word “no.” The onus is on the person listening to understand and respect the exchange.

There’s a pointed B.S. alert leveled at male journalists (and other media professionals) who critique female colleagues for “vocal fry” or uptalk, couching the advice in feminist rhetoric about wanting women to sound more authoritative instead of simply listening to them. Yet Montell has sympathy for the people who feel threatened by the rapid changes language is continually undergoing. She’s just not giving them a pass to keep making the same retrograde mistakes. This is an opportunity to evolve-to know better and then do better, with a tool we wield every single day.

Heather Seggel is a writer living in Northern California. Email heatherlseggel@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, August 1, 2019

Populist.com