Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussion of sexism, sexual content, and sexual harassment. 

In Wordslut, Montell shows how semantic change creates gendered language, especially in regards to gendered insults specific to men or women. In exploring this topic she shows how women are disadvantaged in this verbal arena in many ways, most importantly because there are many more insulting terms to describe women than men.

Montell’s careful description of the process of pejoration shows how misogynistic trends in English-speaking societies caused originally neutral words to change semantically until they became insults and even swear words. For instance, the word “hussy” was originally a neutral term for a housewife (the Old English “husewif”); however, over the course of a couple centuries it became the insult that it remains today: “[E]ventually it narrowed to mean a lewd, brazen woman or prostitute” (28). This pejoration occurred much more frequently for words associated with women, resulting in the English language’s rich lexicon of insults for women compared to its much fewer gender-specific insults for men.

Adding to her point, Montell reveals how many historical terms for men retained their neutral or polite meanings while the female equivalents gradually became terms of insult or abuse.