Words to the Wise (Women)

By JoAnne Young

If you want to insult a woman, call her a prostitute. If you want to insult a man, call him a woman. 

 

Gendered insults, it’s the way linguist Amanda Montell gets our attention in Chapter 1 of her book: Wordslut: a feminist guide to taking back the english language.

 

It’s true, isn’t it? If a woman does something someone doesn’t like, the go-to insult is  frequently related to prostitution or her sexuality. The throwdown for men is that they [fill in the blank] “like a girl.” 

 

Language is the next frontier that needs to be conquered in equalizing genders, Montell says. 

It can tell us about the nature and extent of the inequality of women, linguist Robin Lakoff wrote 50 years ago. Women experience discrimination in the way they are taught to use language and the way language treats them, she said. It’s used to keep them in line from the time they are young girls, taking away their right to express themselves strongly and denying them access to power. 

 

Author Percival Evertt said it this way: In language, and in ownership of language, resides great power. 

 

Power. Control of our own lives. Our own bodies. We are still struggling from centuries of limited power and limited control. There are people now – politicians, lawmakers, judges, influencers, swaths of the influenced – who would drag us back into the dark ages, who would decide how we should behave, spend our time, walk, talk, dress, and wear our hair. 

 

Sticks and stones may break your bones but, as many scholars will tell you, words actually can hurt you. The link between language and culture is forever entangled, Montell says, and continues to reflect and reinforce power structures and social norms. The time has come, she says, to challenge how and why we use language the way we do. That means questioning the words we speak every day. And the words used, even when someone thinks they are being supportive. 

 

This happened just last week at a hearing at the Nebraska Legislature in which Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh spoke to the Executive Board on her resolution to censure Sen. Steve Halloran because of his inserting her name into his reading during debate of a segment of a book in which a young woman was being sexually assaulted.  

After her testimony, Board Chairman Ray Aguilar said, “I just want to thank you for your courage and your composure today under some very difficult circumstances. I’m proud of you.” 

 

Thank you for your composure? I’m proud of you? Would he have said that to any man in the midst of a hearing? 

 

Let me say to Sen. Cavanaugh what I would rather have heard him say to her: 

I just want to thank you for your powerful words.

I just want to thank you for your strength in standing up for people subjected to sexual assault.

I just want to thank you for your persistence in believing elected officials should be held to a higher standard of dignity and integrity. 

 

The Legislature’s Executive Board, which did not forward Cavanaugh’s censure resolution to the full Legislature for a vote, is made up of 10 members and only one of them is female: Sen. Julie Slama. 

 

Buzzing around the internet, I came across a site listing 29 words only used to describe women. These will sound familiar to a lot of you. Abrasive, bossy, bitchy, bubbly, ditsy, frigid, frumpy, high maintenance, pushy, breathless, hysterical, shrill ... that’s fewer than half of them. 

 

Women are often criticized for “being emotional.” Emotions, by the way, serve important purposes and are normal responses that all humans have. They are not a form of hysteria, a word first coined by Hippocrates, the founder of Western medicine. It’s from the word hystera, Greek for uterus, because he believed women’s wombs induced “a lack of control and extravagant feelings.” 

 

I think about Anna Cox, a woman who lived in Pawnee City at the turn of the 20^th Century. She was 33, with six children, ages 4 months to 11 years old. Her husband divorced her, saying her behavior had been erratic for about nine months. He took custody of their children and dropped her off at the Nebraska Hospital for the Insane, now known as the Lincoln Regional Center. 

 

They diagnosed her with subacute mania, even though upon her arrival she spoke rationally, was controlled, quiet and even cheerful. Over the next few years, separated from her children, family and friends, her medical records showed she was known as an excellent worker, even if sometimes “a bit incoherent” and at times had outbursts. 

 

She remained at the asylum 43 years, from 1904 to her death in 1947 at age 75. In those times, other women found themselves in the same predicament, with no rights, brought to asylums for hysteria and other acts of defying domestic control, which were commonly diagnosed as abnormal and therefore a mental disorder. 

 

Christine Blasey Ford (you remember that many of us were glued to her words in 2018 as we watched her testimony about the former president’s Supreme Court appointee Brett Kavanaugh) has turned the phrase "I believe you" on its head. 

 

Those words, said Blasey Ford on the podcast We Can Do Hard Things, are only said to a woman reporting an assault or rape or harassment. “I don’t think we say it for anything else other than sexual assaults, or maybe domestic violence.”

 

We don’t say it to a man who has reported being a victim of a crime. 

 

The underlying question when someone says “I believe you” is whether the woman is believable, whether women in general are trustworthy, Glennon Doyle said. 

 

 I will leave you with this, a word from author Ben Montgomery: Cloistering. He was talking to writers, but I would give this same word to women. 

 

Find a sect, a fortress, a coven of those who are like-minded with whom to dwell in the dark times, he said. Find your people and take care of them. Stick with them. Genuinely love them. Learn from them. Write them letters. Swap stories on barstools. Nurture and sharpen one another. Do not be exclusive. Others will come in search of what you have found. Invite them in. Cheer them on. 

 

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