Wordslut - Amanda Montell
I’m an English teacher, a lover of language, and a feminist to boot - so it’s really no surprise that I loved every page of Wordslut by Amanda Montell.
A humorous and enlightening read, Wordslut helps the reader to better understand and use the English language from a feminist perspective.
As you might have expected, the work includes some fascinating lessons on the etymology of gender-based insults, but the work is so much more than this. Amanda Montell is a linguist as well as an author, and the book explored ideas based on linguistics that I’d not known or properly considered previously.
A core idea of Wordslut that Montell continuously returns to is that the way we speak, and the words we use, reflect our society and culture. Montell’s assertion is that our dominant ways of speaking uphold patriarchal structures, and she provides many examples to support this claim.
Montell references research that highlights how most insults for men sprout from references to femininity, and how people are more likely to listen to, and respect, voices of a lower pitch.
Montell states that our worst values are reflected in the ways we discuss sex and genitalia. The author explores how many of the colloquial terms for female genitalia are crass and offensive, and how even the slang terms for sex (like ‘boned’ or ‘screwed’) centre men and the act of penetration from the cis male perspective. We’re all so used to this being the norm - reversing this idea to centre a cis woman’s perspective simply “doesn’t happen”, states the author. Who ever heard of anyone saying something like, “we enveloped all night” in reference to sex? I certainly haven’t. Montell encourages the reader to consider the biases inherent in our language, and even to have some fun with our language while challenging the status quo.
Wordslut, overall, is about wielding language as a weapon to dismantle the patriarchy - something we can all get on board with. If you want to learn more about how the language we use and the way in which we use it can help or hinder our feminist efforts, look no further than Wordslut.
Featured image via Goodreads.
