Is the English Language Sexist?
Insights into the sneaky ways in which language reflects society.
A couple years ago, my friend randomly asked a really good question: What’s the equivalent of slut for straight men?
“That guy is such a slut!” sounds off.
“What a man-whore!” is a stab at women because adding “man” in front implies that the default is women.
To this day, I haven’t thought of a male equivalent…probably because there isn’t one. Derogatory terms stem from a place of shame and othering. And in mainstream society, men having lots of casual sexual partners is not usually shamed upon or othered.
In this way, words like slut give us insight into the sneaky ways in which language reflects society.
This connection between language and society is a key theme of one of my favorite research papers, Language and Woman’s Place by Robin Lakoff. The reason why I like it so much is that it was the first paper to make me realize how words, themselves, have stories of our history embedded in them.
Today we’re diving into some of Lakoff’s examples of how the English language reflects women’s place in 1970s society1.
A Semantics Primer
Semantic change is a fancy way of saying that word meanings change over time. Not all words, though, change in the same way. Some words undergo semantic amelioration, and become more positive over time. For example, the word nice meant ‘foolish’ in Middle English and today means ‘pleasant’. Other words undergo semantic pejoration and become more negative over time. An example of that would be that silly historically meant ‘happy’ and today means ‘foolish.’
Things get interesting when we have two words that mean equivalent things, but then undergo semantic change in different directions. For example, today, in English, cow and bull are equivalent, they refer to the same animal, just a cow is female and bull is male.
Imagine for a moment that hypothetically in 300 years, cow and bull still refer to the same animal, but instead of signifying sex, cow signifies that the animal is dead and bull signifies that the animal is healthy. And those terms and meanings are so natural to English-speakers 300 years from now that they have no idea that cow and bull used to refer to the sex of the animal. They would only find that out by looking up the etymology of the terms.
The whole scenario sounds absurd from today’s perspective, but that’s how drastically word’s meanings can change depending on the circumstances. And because the change of meaning reflects a change in circumstance, word etymologies, Robin Lakoff argues, give us insight into the society surrounding it.
I Am Your Master
The first example Lakoff gives is the word master.
What comes to your mind when you hear “I am your master”? For me, I think of intense, absolute power. I associate it with old-timey movies.
If we rewind the clock to those times, though, we would know that the master’s wife was given the honorable title of mistress.
Today, that word is anything but honorable. A mistress is the other woman in a man’s affair. This divergence of parallel meanings over time is an example of semantic change, and Lakoff writes that “by seeing where the parallelism breaks down, we can intuit something about the different roles played by men and women in this culture.”
In other words, if we see how the two words are used today, then we can gauge how society views men and women. She gives two examples:
a.) He is a master of the intricacies of academic politics.
*She is a mistress
b.) *Harry declined to be my master, and so he returned to his wife.
Rhonda declined to be my mistress, and so returned to her husband.
The point she is making is this: historically, these two words were interchangeable, parallel terms related to having power over someone. Today, they are not interchangeable, parallel terms, as seen in the examples. The male equivalent, today, is used to describe when someone has power/control over something (e.g. He mastered chess). The female equivalent, though, is only used when a woman is being controlled by a man.
These changes of meaning, she argues, are reflective of women’s inferior place in society.
The Spinster
Similarly, what comes to your mind when you think of these two words: bachelor and spinster? For me, a bachelor is an eligible man. Spinster is a derogatory word for a lonely woman who could never get married.
Big difference for two words that were historically parallel.
If we take a modern example, what better way to highlight this difference than the hit TV-show The Bachelor. When the producers aired the female-version, did they use the term that is the historical equivalent, spinster? Of course not (could you imagine…The Spinster). The word spinster is filled with such negative connotations that the producers created a new word: Bachelorette.
I’m a Professional
Lakoff gives another example of how parallel terms are used differently. This example, my professor wrote on the board, and had us say the first thought that came to our mind for each sentence. It could have been my naivete, but I like to think it’s that I was the youngest student in the class and that language has changed, but I read them both the same:
a.) He is a professional.
b.) She is a professional.
It took my a full two minutes to realize that she is a professional might mean that she’s a sex worker.
What This All Means
For the historically parallel words that Lakoff uses as examples, the male counterpart has either remained neutral, and the female form has become more and more negative. Though I’ve only pulled a few examples, as Amanda Montell writes, “nearly every word the English language offers to describe a woman has, at a point during its life span, been colored some shade of obscene.” The same is not true for words to describe men, which almost entirely have had a history of being neutral or positive words. And if we take Lakoff’s claim—that language reflects the beliefs of speakers—to be true, then these word histories give us a glimpse of how women have been viewed throughout history.
A Final Lesson from the Word Slut
Words that describe women do experience semantic amelioration, mainly when they’re reclaimed by women.
If we return to the word that started this newsletter–slut–we see that it’s never been better. Since the 1990s, the use of the lowercase word has skyrocketed, and if you look at the examples of how it’s used, they’re mostly positive uses that celebrate female sexuality.
And if I could summarize what Lakoff’s paper taught me in one sentence it’s that words have histories that are enveloped in the sociopolitical moments through which they pass…
…just like the word slut shows us.
Works Cited
Lakoff, R. (1973). Language and woman's place. Language in society, 2(1), 45-79.
Montell, A. (2019). Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language. HarperCollins.
I’m writing this based on Lakoff’s work. She assumes a gender binary and uses the word “women” very broadly. The piece is from her perspective as a White straight middle class woman.