Trumped-Up, Trumped-Down Linguistics: Why We Need Nasty Women to Succeed

For years, women have faced discrimination in the very fabric of language — but now, for the first time in history, herstory is just starting to creep in…

(Disclaimer: this article was written in 2017)

In the final presidential debate of 2016’s US election, Donald Trump, obviously sensing loss on the horizon and desperate to interrupt like the up-standing man he is, uttered one single phrase — a phrase that would come to define an entire movement, not just against his subsequent administration, but against discrimination all over the Western world: ‘Such a nasty woman.’

Nice try, Donald. Really nice try.

As you can tell from the above photo of the mug given to me as a Christmas present that year, his intentions didn’t really come to fruition. While some people may have believed him — mostly his staunch supporters from the very beginning — rather a few didn’t. In fact, Hillary Clinton’s campaign seized upon it as a mantra — as did the wider feminist movement in the US, and, eventually, here in the UK.

“I am a nasty woman because I pay my own rent.”

“I am a nasty woman because I am pro-choice and always will be — keep your laws away from my body.”

“I am a nasty woman because when it comes to electing our next President, I consider a history of flagrant racial discrimination and sexual assault deal breakers.”

“I am a nasty woman because I demand respect.”

Now, that last one sticks with me — because respect is exactly what Trump lacked in those words he said. He reduced Hillary Clinton to her sex — to her position as a woman, which, in his mind (and in many others’, in our patriarchal societies), infinitely lower than a man’s. He used an adjective that people ‘should’ cower away from in its very meaning, in the wish not to be branded the opposite of a stereotypical, quiet, meek and humble woman who can’t say a bad word to anybody — ‘nasty’. And it didn’t work. Hillary’s supporters — and, aside from her supporters, even Bernie Sanders’ supporters, who were infinitely more influential in the millennial sphere — took back those words in an act of semantic reclamation and branded a movement with them.

Pretty cool, right?

And it isn’t just this that’s been going on. As well as semantic reclamation, we have new prefixation of words, which have begun to plug the lexical (word) gap in gender-affiliated words — e.g. the recent addition of ‘mansplaining’ to the Oxford English Dictionary (definition, ‘a man explaining something to someone, typically to a woman, in a manner regarded as condescending or patronising’). Even our Prime Minister, Theresa May, was said to have called out Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the opposition, on ‘mansplaining’ in Parliament. With these words slipping into common usage, it is clear that at least some of the gender bias inherent in our language is changing.

The problem is simple — for all those reclaiming derogatory words through slut-walks, through feminist movements, through simple removal of power, there are thousands more not doing anything. Thousands more who remain complicit in a patriarchy that uses its language to undermine and keep women in a secondary position in society.

In 1977, the sociolinguist Julia Stanley collated insults for both genders and found that, while there were only 20 insults to describe a promiscuous man, there were 220 to describe a promiscuous woman. Not only this stunning discrepancy, but the fact that women’s insults tended to have worse connotations and men’s had relatively positive connotations or one’s of femininity (e.g. ‘gay’ — oh, my fragile masculinity!). At a very basis, this shows that the English language isn’t fair — women are pushed into their old role as subordinate to men through language, and, for no apparent reason other than sheer bias, any notion of femininity is ‘bad’.

Janet Holmes followed this up in 1986 with another piece of research on gendered terms — i.e. terms associated with a specific gender — and found that they discriminate against women in the very high number of derogatory terms used to describe them. Animal and food imagery are two very common areas of this — e.g. “stud,” with positive connotations, for a man, vs. “bitch,” with negative connotations, for a woman.

Overall, both linguists found that the English language in its very nature is discriminatory, and another linguist, Tannen, backed this up in 1992 by arguing that men are made the social norm through terms that explicitly refer to their gender, such as ‘mankind’. As a species, we are defined linguistically by the male percentage of the species, and one that only takes up half of our population. A half of a whole isn’t representative.

These problems are still prevalent today, in a supposedly modern and adapting society where discrimination to those in power is often a thing of the past. And it is the emergence of Hillary Clinton’s ‘Nasty Women’, the now annual marches on International Women’s Day, and so many other powerful women around the world that are making us aware of this.

We are half of the population. Do not dismiss us as property.