Do we need to talk about tits?

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This summer a publisher sent me a free copy of a book which someone evidently thought would be right up my street. Written by the sociologist Sarah Thornton (who according to her bio “was once hailed as Britain’s hippest academic”), its title is Tits Up, and the blurb summarizing its content starts like this:  

BOOBS

KNOCKERS

JUGS

BOSOMS

MELONS

FUNBAGS

HOOTERS

In the English language there are over 700 expressions for female mammary glands—the vast majority of which are used by men.

Books, like lunches, are never really free: even if you’re not being asked for an endorsement there’s usually an expectation that you’ll do something to promote them—write a review, put them on a reading list, ask your library to order a copy. Fair enough, IMO, but I do quite often wonder how I, of all people, have ended up on someone’s list. Who would look at my profile and think, “ah yes, she’s the perfect person to promote this book by a Jehovah’s witness on how linguistic research proves the literal truth of the Bible”?

But in this case there was no great mystery. Tits Up is billed as a feminist book, and the jacket copy I’ve just quoted references an idea with a long history in feminist writing about language: that lexical elaboration, having lots of different words for the same thing, is a sign of that thing’s cultural importance, and that analysing the words can offer valuable insights into the worldview members of the culture inherit. The classic example, which has nothing to do with feminism (and has also been subject to some vigorous debunking), is “Eskimos [sic] have a lot of words for snow”.  But since the 1970s feminists have applied the same idea to areas of vocabulary which tell us something about relations between men and women.

In 1977, for instance, the radical feminist linguist who would later be known as Julia Penelope (though in those days she still used her original surname, Stanley) analysed a large number of English words denoting prostitutes, and argued that prostitutes under patriarchy were treated as “paradigmatic women”.  Other feminists examined the copious terminology available for talking about female genitals, pointing out that these terms tend to fall into one of three categories: clinical/Latinate (vagina, vulva, pudenda) obscene/pornographic (cunt, pussy, snatch) or vague and euphemistic (foofoo, ladyparts, undercarriage). They are numerous yet monotonous, sending largely the same message—that women’s genitals are shameful in a way that men’s are not.    

I’ve contributed to this literature myself. More than thirty years ago I became briefly (in)famous as the author of an academic article about the terms used by some US college students to name the penis—though what interested me was not so much how many terms there were (I collected scores of them) as how heavily they relied on a smaller set of metaphorical comparisons (e.g., with authority figures, tools, weapons and food items). Despite the obscurity of the publication where it appeared (an American dialectology journal), this article attracted some media attention. A columnist on my then-local paper (the Glasgow Herald) denounced me for wasting taxpayers’ money on junk research; other journalists (to the justified amusement of people who knew me) took to citing me as a “penis expert” and asking me to comment on penis-related news stories. My reputation in this field still follows me around: only a couple of years ago I was contacted by someone who said he was editing an Encyclopedia of the Penis and invited me to contribute a couple of entries (in case you’re wondering, I said no).

This history may explain why I was on Sarah Thornton’s publisher’s radar—though Tits Up isn’t really a book about language. Rather it investigates the way breasts are thought about and treated in five different social settings where they’re a major preoccupation: a strip club, a human milk bank, a clinic offering reconstructive surgery, a fashion company that designs bras and a community of goddess worshippers. There’s some discussion of some of the terms people in those settings use to talk about breasts, but no attempt to systematically analyse the “more than 700 expressions” referenced on the cover.

Thornton does, however, make a more general argument about language: she suggests that the project of “liberating breasts from centuries of patriarchal prejudice” would be advanced by women “reclaiming” terms like boobs, knockers, jugs and tits. She asserts that those terms are used “mainly by men”, and acknowledges that their use is often objectifying and derogatory, but she still argues that women should take them back: “without reclaiming this sexualized slang”, she says, “we have little hope of repossessing the body part” (p.20).   

Proposals to reclaim sexist and misogynist terms have been made with some regularity since the 1970s, but in general they’ve had limited success. For instance, it’s been suggested repeatedly that cunt could be rehabilitated as just a neutral term for the female genitals, to send the message that there’s nothing shameful or obscene about them; but that proposal has been impossible for most people to square with cunt’s long and continuing history as an expression of extreme contempt for women (a meaning it also carries when used, as it often is in real-world use, to insult a man). It’s a slur rather than just a body-part label, and slurs have a kind of performative power, producing effects such as shame and humiliation, which cannot just be removed by fiat.

Other misogynist slurs have fared little better. Attempts to reclaim slut have gained some traction in “sex-positive” feminist circles, but they’ve always been controversial, and plenty of feminists have opposed the whole idea. In a world without sexism, they ask, and more specifically without the sexual double standard which feminists have criticized for as long as feminism has existed, why would we need a word, even a positive word, for a promiscuous woman?

Bitch, on the other hand (which is now the subject of a full-length book by a linguist), has been partially reclaimed, in that it does now have positive as well as negative uses which are not confined to a small political subculture. It’s possible to address or refer to your girlfriends as bitches, or to joke about your “resting bitch face”, and be heard as celebrating the lack of agreeableness and subservience implied by the b-word. However, that move arguably only works because bitch continues to be used prolifically in the traditional, unironic (and unambiguously misogynistic) way.

How do breast terms fit into this picture? They haven’t, AFAIK, featured prominently in past discussions. I can’t remember ever reading an analysis that did for breast terms what various people have done for genital terms; nor, before Tits Up, do I recall encountering proposals to reclaim words like jugs and knockers. That can’t be because breasts and breast-talk are not real-world issues. As any woman or girl can tell you, having your breasts stared at, commented on and/or touched without your consent are all extremely common experiences: basic, everyday sexual harassment (verbal, physical or both) very often focuses on breasts (“get your tits out” is the trademark cry of the “lad”), and they are also a favoured subject for sexist jokes, memes, cartoons and innuendo-laden sitcom or film dialogue.

But maybe that’s what’s behind their relative neglect—the perception that, compared to cunt and its ilk, terms like tits are pretty low-level insults: they’re vulgar, to be sure, but more comical than hateful. Though tit, like cunt, can be used metonymically, as an appellation for a person (either male or female), its meaning, which is akin to “idiot”, doesn’t really rise to the level of a slur. And you can’t insult anyone by calling them a knocker or a jug.

When I look at the list of breast terms on the cover of Thornton’s book, the adjective that comes most insistently to mind is puerile, meaning simultaneously childish and male. They remind me of my brother, aged about six, running round the back garden yelling “belly bum pee shit”. And the impression of puerility is only reinforced if you consider the metaphors behind the words. Tits (aka “teats”) and jugs figure women’s breasts as containers of liquid nourishment (which of course they are, for human infants); melons are also a food, something to put in your mouth; funbags, knockers and hooters conjure up a picture of protuberances to be squeezed, pulled or pushed on. To me there’s nothing powerful or subversive about this lexicon: it smacks more of a (literally) infantile fixation. Which makes it difficult to see why women would want to reclaim it.  

It’s true, of course, that at least some of the words I’ve mentioned are used by women as well as men. While I was writing this post I set myself the task of recording every instance I encountered, either in the real world or online, of a woman making reference to her own breasts, and noting down the word(s) she chose to use. This obviously isn’t a sampling method that can support general claims. But I did find it somewhat interesting that in this collection of female breast-references, by far the most commonly-used terms were breasts, boobs (which appears to be the default choice if you’re looking for something informal but inoffensive), and girls (either “the girls” or “my girls”). Tits was pretty rare, and there were no occurrences at all of jugs, hooters, knockers, funbags, mammaries or melons.

The popularity of girls (a locution which is not discussed in Tits Up) was something I found interesting because it reminded me of a pattern I’d noticed in my earlier investigation of penis-terms. Many of the terms used by the young men in my study figured the penis as a person in its own right, attached to its “owner” but with a will of its own (I probably don’t need to spell out what aspect of male physiological experience this metaphor is likely to relate to). The largest group of penis-as-person terms referred to authority figures and fighters (e.g., “his honor”, “the king”, “purple-headed warrior of love”). There was clearly a strong element of humour in these expressions, but it still seemed noteworthy that men did not (even in jest) personify the penis as, say, a best buddy or a beloved child who might be vulnerable and in need of protection (ideas that might also capture something about male embodied experience, or so I’ve been told). Young women, by contrast, sometimes did produce penis-terms (e.g. “winkie”) that implied smallness and vulnerability. Women’s use of girls struck me as comparable: it personifies the breasts in an affectionate, quasi-maternal way.

But for Thornton this gesture might be a bit too tame and twee. Like many advocates of linguistic reclamation, she seems most interested in reclaiming overtly sexualized terms which would normally be avoided in “respectable” discourse. At the strip club, for instance, she notes approvingly that tits is used by workers as “a technical term for an eroticized and monetized body part” (my emphasis). This, she suggests, is “empowering”: the male punters may think they’re in charge, but in reality it’s the strippers who call the shots, using language to assert their agency and to “thwart puritanical taboos”.  

This argument marks a longstanding division of opinion within feminism, and I have to say I’m on the other side of it from Thornton. To me the fact that (some) women make good money by selling sex to men is not evidence of women’s collective power, but on the contrary, of their subordinate status in a market where they may sometimes be the sellers but are always the goods for sale. I would also be inclined to argue that the association of tits with commercial sex is probably a major reason why it’s avoided in most woman-to-woman breast talk, where there seems to be a clear preference for boobs. Considered out of context, tits and boobs are pretty similar in their level of offensiveness (both quite mild), but in context they are not treated as interchangeable.         

When women are urged to reclaim words, or coin new ones, the implication is that our existing vocabulary is inadequate—that we have too few terms, or the wrong terms, to express the meanings we think are important. That’s an argument I find quite compelling in the case of female genital terms, but I’m not so sure it applies in this case. What the word breast refers to is not obscure or vague (whereas research has revealed a startling lack of clarity and consensus on what fanny, pussy and even vagina name), and since it is neither a taboo word nor a technical (clinical) term, it is less contextually restricted in its uses. You wouldn’t (or most of us wouldn’t) talk about your cunt in a doctor’s surgery, and conversely you might find it weird to refer to your vulva during a sexual encounter or in a casual conversation with friends, but breast is acceptable in all these situations. And it doesn’t seem, in any of them, to require the euphemistic substitutions which are often heard even in clinical settings when women’s genitals are at issue.  It’s hard to think of breast-terms equivalent to “down there”, “undercarriage” or “front bottom”.  

As Thornton points out, though, there’s one part of a woman’s breast which does apparently require concealment, both physical and verbal. From her chapter about the process of designing and fitting bras I learnt that professionals in this industry do not call a woman’s nipple a nipple, they refer to it as an apex. And yes, that does strike me as a “puritanical taboo”, not to mention a ridiculous choice of euphemism. It’s hard to disagree with Thornton’s argument that the avoidance of the word nipple is connected to the norm that defines nipple-visibility—though only for women, not men—as immodest and shameful, and on that basis I’d agree there’s a case for reclaiming nipple as just a neutral label for the body part in question.  

But context, as always, is crucial. One idea I find particularly tiresome, and which is rife among professional “creatives” as well as academics, is that sexualized language, whether slang or innuendo, turns more or less any message about women’s bodies into a subversive, quasi-feminist statement. In the past couple of years I’ve written about more than one case where this idea has been deployed in campaigns promoting cervical cancer screening and has badly misfired. The ad designers described what they were doing as “edgy”, “attention-grabbing”, or “playful and a bit cheeky”, but many of the women they were addressing found it off-putting or downright offensive. In most cases that wasn’t because they subscribed to “puritanical taboos” forbidding any reference to sex in any context; they just didn’t think “playful and cheeky” was the appropriate tone for messages about cancer.  

Health messages that focus on breasts have had this problem too—and not just in recent years. After reading one of my posts criticizing sexed-up cervical screening ads, one woman recalled on X that when she gave birth in a UK hospital in 1979 there had been a poster on the wall of the maternity ward which said “Breast is best and Dad can suck on the empties”. Empties is a variation on the same metaphor that gives us jugs, and in this case it reminds women explicitly that their breasts exist to satisfy not only the nutritional needs of their newborn infants but also the sexual desires of their male partners. It’s hard to see how this kind of discourse helps women to “repossess” their bodies: it couldn’t be much clearer whose ownership rights come first.

Women don’t even seem to care for innuendo-laden breast-references when they are used to sell products that are meant to be sexy. The “bra wars” ad campaigns of the 1990s (of which the most famous was Wonderbra’s “Hello, boys”—another slogan that tells us something about who/what breasts are considered to be for) won a slew of industry awards, but they were cancelled when it was noticed that they’d done little to boost sales of the actual product. As one company’s newly-appointed female marketing director observed when she sacked the agency responsible, you’re more likely to sell bras if you “advertise to women, not men”. Meanwhile, attempts to apply the “playful and cheeky” approach to selling men’s underpants (using slogans like “Loin King” and “Full metal packet”) were found to be in breach of the UK Advertising Standards Authority’s rules on “taste and decency”. If sexual objectification were really so empowering, would sauce for the goose not be sauce for the gander too?         

Though the relative neutrality of breast is a point in its favour, I don’t dispute that there’s a place for less formal words; it seems clear that one key function of slang terms like boobs and girls is to construct a nonsexual but intimate/solidary relationship between participants in all-female breast-talk. I wouldn’t choose those words myself, but I can see why many women do.

I can also see, however, why they don’t generally choose, at least for this purpose, terms like hooters, knockers or melons. Whereas some “reclaimed” uses of insulting terms (like the approving use of bitch to mean “a deliberately un-subservient and disagreeable woman”) can convey, in context, a subversive message–they repeat the misogyny of the original in order to disown and mock it–others, including these breast-terms, seem more akin to ventriloquism, adopting a male-centred view of women’s breasts as commodities to be viewed, used and judged by others. Does that really help women to “repossess” their breasts, or is it just acquiescing in the kind of objectification that does so much to alienate us from our bodies?

Sarah Thornton talks about “liberating breasts from…patriarchal prejudice”, and titles her concluding chapter “The Emancipated Rack”–turns of phrase which, on reflection, I find jarring, since they imply that what needs to be freed is the body-part rather than the woman whose body it is part of. In reality the attitudes examined in this book are reflections and expressions of men’s dominance over women. Adopting the kind of language that conventionally encodes those attitudes is not going to liberate women from them.

The birds and the bears

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Over the years I have regularly been driven to distraction by the habit, especially among adults talking to young children, of referring to virtually all non-human animals as “he”. It’s the “default male” principle in action: if the sex of a living being is unknown or unspecified we automatically treat it as male. That impulse is so strong, I’ve often observed it being acted on in cases where the animal was unmistakably female—a lioness, for instance, whose lack of a mane distinguishes her clearly from the male members of her species, or a garden bird whose plumage does the same. Among the birds that frequent my own garden is one we jocularly call “the blackbird’s wife”: that appellation also treats the male blackbird as the default, but at least it acknowledges that female blackbirds (which are, of course, brown) exist.

So, I was excited when I saw that the data-crunchers at The Pudding had been looking into some of the details of this pattern. Specifically, they’d been trying to ascertain whether the default maleing of animals is more likely to happen with some species than others, if so which species those are, and what that might tell us about the logic behind it.    

My own thoughts about this are based on randomly observing, over a period of many years, ordinary people’s interactions in public places like zoos and parks—an approach that produces only anecdata, since the observation is unsystematic and the sample cannot be controlled. The people at The Pudding are made of sterner methodological stuff: they decided to analyse data from children’s books that feature animals. Their sample comprised around 300 titles that were highly rated on Goodreads. There were around 30 items for every decade since 1950, plus some still-popular classics published before that date. To qualify for inclusion a title had to mention a species of animal that was also mentioned in at least nine other items, since a single book about, say, Judy the Unicorn cannot tell you if there’s a general tendency to imagine unicorns as female.   

The researchers were aware that the patterns found in this sample would reflect authors’ conscious decisions, and that these might differ from the more spontaneous decisions made by ordinary speakers. So they also ran an experiment in which 1300 people were asked to continue a story that began

and then the [animal] said “I must go to the river”. Upon arriving…

What appeared in the [animal] slot was randomly selected from a list of seven animals that commonly appear in children’s fiction: bear, bird, cat, pig, duck, mouse and dog. The question was whether the frequency with which respondents chose he, she or it as the next word would vary depending on which animal their prompt referred to.     

So, what did the researchers find? In their sample of published children’s books it turned out that most species skewed male: the only ones that didn’t were birds, ducks and cats—and I confess to being slightly surprised by the cats. Though it’s a cultural cliché that dogs are boys and cats are girls, the iconic fictional felines of my own youth were all male: they included the cartoon characters Top Cat, Felix, Sylvester and Tom (in Tom and Jerry), Orlando the Marmalade Cat, and the pantomime stalwarts Puss in Boots and Dick Whittington’s cat (which is female in some older versions of the story, but is always male in the panto). Maybe that reflects another pattern that’s very clear in the children’s fiction sample, where male animals overall were twice as numerous as female ones. Popular stories about both humans and animals are more likely to feature male central characters–in part because of the publishing industry’s belief that boys won’t read books featuring female protagonists. But in the case of animals the bias seems to be even stronger. And it was stronger still in the responses to the story completion task, where none of the seven species presented skewed female. He was selected three times more often than she, despite the fact that women respondents outnumbered men. There were also some uses of ungendered forms such as “it”, occasionally “they”, or a noun phrase like “the bear”, but these were all less common than he.   

What about the gendering of different species? In the fiction corpus the “malest” animals were frogs, wolves, foxes, elephants, dogs, monkeys and bears, in that order, while the least male were the aforementioned birds, ducks and cats; pigs and mice could swing either way. In the experimental story-completion task, where only seven species were in the mix, the malest animals were bears, followed by mice and dogs, while the least male were cats and then birds—though the birds still skewed slightly male and the cats were right on the dividing line (i.e., as likely to be male as female).

This species-based hierarchy of maleness does not appear to follow any single logic. You look at the list and think “OK, so big and/or fierce animals like elephants, wolves and bears are male—that kind of makes sense”; but then you think, “in that case why are frogs male, in fact the malest of the male?” Can that maybe be put down to the influence of a small number of canonical male frogs that have come to serve as our mental prototypes, like the fairytale Frog Prince, the Froggy Who Would A-Wooing Go and Kermit from the Muppets? It sounds vaguely plausible, but you have to wonder why it doesn’t work for cats, who remain at least somewhat female in the cultural imagination even though so many canonical cats are male.       

Also, what is going on with pigs? Analysing the fiction sample decade by decade revealed that they used to be solidly male (like the Three Little Pigs, or Wilbur in the children’s classic Charlotte’s Web), but since the turn of the millennium there has been an upsurge in stories where sows take centre stage (think Olivia and Peppa). Clearly, pigs as a species do not have the metaphorically feminine qualities which are often said to explain the perceived femaleness of birds and cats, namely that they are small, delicate and fast-moving. Adult pigs are large, heavy creatures who eat swill and enjoy wallowing in mud. That could help to explain their historical maleness—but what explains the recent turn to femaleness? Is this a case of authors deliberately “flipping the script” in an effort to subvert traditional stereotypes?    

Another question the researchers pose is whether language itself influences the gendering of animals. In languages that mark gender grammatically, are animals more likely to be perceived and represented as female if the word for them is grammatically feminine? In many cases this question seems wide of the mark, because animals, like people, can be referred to using either masculine or feminine forms depending on the individual’s sex: a Spanish cat, for example, is either a gato or a gata. But there are some animals that doesn’t apply to: according to The Pudding a Spanish frog is always a rana, and frogs are also more likely to be female in Spanish stories than they are in English ones.

In modern English, where we no longer have grammatical gender but we do still have paired male and female terms for some animals, we might wonder if it makes any difference whether the more generic term, the one we’d use to talk about the whole species, is also the female member of the pair (as with duck/drake and goose/gander) rather than the male one (as with fox/vixen). Are we more inclined to think of ducks as female because female ducks, unlike female foxes, are the unmarked case linguistically?  

These are not uninteresting questions, but in the end I don’t think analysing data from children’s stories (a category in which I include The Pudding’s experimental responses, since the prompt they used was obviously modelled on that genre) can explain the phenomenon I began with—the default male-ing of live animals in real-world settings. Though there are some exceptions (books whose aim is to educate children about the natural world), most animals in kids’ stories are basically human characters in nonhuman form. They live in houses, wear clothes and deal with situations familiar to human children (e.g., Peppa Pig’s fear of spiders or Olivia’s irritation when her little brother copies her). They often have families which mimic human families, and this makes it likely that even if the central character is male, there will be female animals of the same species in supporting roles (like Peter Rabbit’s mum, Babar the elephant’s wife Celeste or Paddington Bear’s Aunt Lucy).

These animal characters are gendered, using the same conventional signifiers of masculinity and femininity, such as names, clothes, hairstyles and stereotyped personality traits, that would be used to gender them if they were human. Though they are also by implication sexed, direct signifiers of sex are typically absent: Paddington Bear, for instance, does not to my knowledge have a penis. He also doesn’t act much like a bear. The values he represents and the lessons his creator set out to teach (e.g., kindness to strangers) are human, not ursine.  

By contrast, the animals we see in nature documentaries are represented as sexed but not gendered. When a bear emerges from hibernation with a couple of cubs, David Attenborough or whoever will refer to this animal as she, not because her appearance or behaviour is “feminine”, but because giving birth to cubs is something female bears do and male ones don’t.

Yet when ordinary people interact casually about animals they have seen or are seeing “in the flesh” (always provided that those animals are not already known to them as, say, their own or their acquaintances’ pets), their approach to the sex/gender question is neither the one they’ve seen modelled in nature programmes (in that they frequently ignore very obvious signifiers of female sex like the lioness’s lack of a mane) nor the one that’s familiar from folk-tales and children’s stories (anthropomorphizing animals, which also means gendering them in much the same ways we gender humans). They just “naturally” seem to gravitate towards masculine forms.

Does that mean, though, that they actually think of the animals as male? That’s not, IMHO, an easy question to answer. It’s at least possible that something else is going on—something hinted at by an observation made long ago by the feminist theorist Monique Wittig.  “There are not two genders”, said Wittig, “there is only one: the feminine. …For the masculine is not the masculine but the general”.   

Her point is illustrated in some studies of the way people gender human referents. For instance, in 2016 and 2017 a group of researchers investigated what pronoun English-speakers in the US and Britain would choose to complete a sentence about “the next US president” or “the next UK prime minister”.  Though historically and culturally the terms president and prime minister are strongly associated with maleness/masculinity (there has never been a female US president, and by 2017 only two British women had ever served as prime minister), this research was conducted in the run-up to two national elections which women were expected to win. In the US it was generally (though wrongly) thought that Hillary Clinton would defeat Donald Trump; in the UK it was (correctly) predicted that Theresa May, the incumbent Conservative PM, would win another term in government. The researchers’ question was whether respondents’ expectation that a woman would be “the next president/prime minister” would influence their pronoun choice—that is, make them more likely to pick she over the more traditional and stereotypical he when referring to the next holder of the role.

The answer turned out to be “yes and no”. The researchers did find that in the course of each campaign, rising expectations of a female victory correlated with a reduction in the frequency with which respondents chose he; but that didn’t prompt a corresponding increase in the frequency of she. Even when the belief that Clinton would win was at its height in the US, he remained more frequent than she. In the UK, the belief that May would be the next prime minister favoured the use not of she, but of the gender-neutral singular they. When the experiment was later repeated during the 2020 mayoral election in Paris, where by the second round all the male candidates had been eliminated, the pattern was much the same: most respondents chose either masculine or gender-neutral expressions to refer to “the next mayor”, despite knowing with certainty that the person in question would be a woman.  

This year a study was published which investigated the use of gendered words (both nouns and pronouns) in children’s TV programmes broadcast in the US between 1960 and 2018 (this was a large dataset, comprising more than six thousand episodes of 98 different programmes). The researchers found that in the sample overall male words were used almost twice as frequently as female ones. They also found that over time this gap had narrowed (though by the late 2010s male words were still one and a half times as common as female ones). But that wasn’t because the use of female words had increased. On the contrary, in fact, it had decreased—but the balance had shifted because the frequency of male words had fallen even more steeply. There had been a shift away from using gendered terms in general, which had a stronger effect on the frequency of male terms because they were more numerous to begin with.    

Though second-wave feminist campaigners for nonsexist language often argued that avoiding the generic masculine would represent reality more “accurately”, that doesn’t seem to be the principle on which most ordinary language-users operate. They apparently take feminine forms to signal a commitment both to the referent’s femaleness and to the relevance of its femaleness, while being willing to use masculine forms without the same commitment to maleness. In effect they do treat the masculine as representing “the general”: in contexts where sex/gender isn’t at issue they will typically reach for either masculine or neutral forms, while avoiding feminine ones.

That could shed some light on why the preference for he seems to be even stronger in talk about nonhuman animals. Someone who points out a squirrel running along a garden wall, a rat scuttling down an alley or a frog jumping out of a pond is unlikely to have any firm beliefs about its sex, or to regard that as a contextually relevant question (in this type of interaction the message is basically just “Look, there’s an [animal]!”). Any pronoun they go on to use is just a placeholder. But he is evidently felt to be a more “natural” candidate for that function than she.

So, I’m suggesting that a speaker’s choice of he might not always reflect their belief that an animal is male. But that doesn’t mean the pattern is not a problem: it’s still reinforcing the more general asymmetry Wittig criticized. Even if it feels unnatural or silly, I think there’s something to be said for using, at least sometimes, unambiguously female terms to refer to the squirrel or the rat. Not because it’s more accurate (unless you can sex a squirrel from a distance you won’t know if it’s accurate, any more than people know if the male terms they typically choose are accurate), but to challenge the habit of equating the male of the species with the species as a whole. (And if you’re thinking “wouldn’t the best solution be to use neutral terms?” I’ll reiterate a point I’ve made before, that formally neutral terms are not automatically “inclusive”. Sometimes they give only the illusion of inclusion, while in practice doing little to counter male bias.)  

As for the more specific phenomenon investigated by The Pudding, the gendering of animals in children’s stories, there are many reasons to see that as a problem—in fact, a version of a more general problem with the way fictional characters are gendered.  The main focus of the children’s TV study I cited earlier wasn’t the frequency of male and female words, but rather their stereotypical associations: they found a tendency for male words to be associated with agentive roles (they were more often found in the grammatical subject position in sentences, and they typically went along with words denoting actions). Female words were more associated with references to appearances, relationships and emotional states. Since this kind of sex stereotyping (men act, women appear/are acted upon) is pervasive in cultural products of all kinds (on this blog I’ve written about it in relation to the verbs of speaking used in both journalism and fiction, for instance), I’d be amazed if it didn’t also turn up in stories about animals. And since animals in children’s fiction mostly are just humans in disguise, it’s as much of a problem there as in cases where the characters are people.

Language on its own is not (at least IMO) responsible for the kind of bias I’ve been discussing, but analysing language can help to make us conscious of it. And if we are conscious of it we can make an effort not to perpetuate it—especially in what we teach our children about the world.           

Remembering Robin Lakoff

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This month we learned that the linguist Robin Lakoff had died at the age of 82. If you’ve heard of Lakoff you will probably know her as the author of Language and Woman’s Place (LWP), an early and very influential contribution to the field of language and gender studies. It first appeared as an academic journal article in 1973 and went on to be published as a book two years later (readers of a certain vintage may remember the image on the cover, a headshot of a woman with a band-aid covering her mouth). Though Lakoff would write other books during a career that continued for much of the next half-century, she remained best known, and will probably be best remembered, for LWP. 

Like Dale Spender’s Man Made Language, which I wrote about following the announcement of Spender’s death in 2023, LWP is a text I had and still do have mixed feelings about—though in many ways these two classics, and their authors, could not have been more different.  Whereas Spender’s feminism was of the radical variety, Lakoff’s was more liberal; whereas Spender was decried by linguists for lacking academic credentials, Lakoff had a Ph.D in linguistics from Harvard, an academic position at the University of California Berkeley and a professional network that included many of the leading linguists of her generation. And whereas Spender embraced linguistic determinism (arguing that man-made language forced everyone to see the world through male/patriarchal eyes), Lakoff held more or less the opposite view: gendered and sexist patterns of language-use, in her opinion, were a reflection of social reality, “a clue that some external situation needs changing rather than items that one should seek to change directly”. She had little time for the 1970s feminist project of reforming sexist language: linguistic change, she maintained, follows (other kinds of) social change rather than vice-versa, and it will only happen if the society in question is already receptive.

When I first read LWP (which was not until the early 1980s: in 1973 I was only 14), that view was too conservative for my taste; today, in an era where some activists seem to believe that social justice goals can be achieved by simply making people and institutions use the “right” words, I think there’s something to be said for Lakoff’s caution on that score. In fact, there are a number of things about LWP which have aged better than I thought they would. But here I’m getting ahead of myself: the aim of this post isn’t (just) to catalogue my own points of agreement or disagreement with Lakoff. but to try to assess the contribution she made to both feminist and popular thinking about language and gender.

One place to start if you’re trying to assess a famous person’s legacy is with the obituaries and other tributes that appear after they die. Lakoff was sufficiently famous to get an obituary in the New York Times; the institution she spent most of her life working at, UC Berkeley, also posted a tribute, as did various websites read by professional linguists and/or amateur language enthusiasts.  And what many of these accounts put at the top of the list of her achievements was “founding”, “inspiring” or “launching” the academic study of language and gender. This did not entirely surprise me, since it was also said when she was still alive, but I admit that it did irritate me: in my view it is a considerable oversimplification of the field’s history.

Lakoff was, in the words of UC Berkeley’s tribute, a “pioneer” whose work helped to shape the field, but she was certainly not its sole originator: by the mid-1970s a lot was going on. Some other linguists (for instance Cornell professor Sally McConnell-Ginet, who would later write several now-classic articles as well as co-authoring a widely-used textbook) were teaching courses and presenting research at conferences; other work was being done not in linguistics but in disciplines like communication, English, anthropology, education, sociology and social psychology. There were also some serious writers on the subject (such as Casey Miller and Kate Swift, whose Words and Women first appeared in 1976) who were not academics but editors or lexicographers.

A selection of this early work appeared in a collection entitled Language and Sex: Difference and Dominance, edited by (sociologist) Barrie Thorne and (psychologist) Nancy Henley, which was published in the same year (1975) as the book version of LWP. This volume contains a number of classic pieces which inspired many later researchers and are still sometimes cited today, like Muriel Schulz’s “The semantic derogation of woman” and Don Zimmerman and Candace West’s article on interruptions. While many contributors referred to LWP, it’s clear that not everyone who read it at the time either shared Lakoff’s views or saw her approach as a model to emulate. Barrie Thorne, for instance, wrote quite a critical review for the women’s studies journal Signs. Then as now, there were disagreements—both intellectual and political—among feminists, and it does bother me when this perennial feature of our collective history gets airbrushed out of the record.   

Another feature of many tributes to Lakoff (one that’s also visible in other sources, such as her Wikipedia entry) was their selective presentation of the actual content of LWP. The book is divided into two main sections, one discussing the way women speak (it’s headed “Talking like a lady” and it introduces the concept of a distinctive “women’s language”) while the other, “Talking about women”, considers the ways in which the English language conventionally represents women as secondary to men—appendages, objects, different but not equal. In the book itself these two sections are presented as equally important: both are meant to contribute to the overall argument that linguistic patterns are a revealing source of evidence about the attitudes and social structures that subordinate women. But many summaries of LWP, including those that appeared in some of the tributes marking Lakoff’s death, focus entirely on the “women’s language” section.

The New York Times obituary, for example, devoted a fairly large proportion of its overall word-count to rehearsing the details of women’s language as laid out in LWP:

Dr Lakoff observed that women’s speech was marked by hedging phrases (“like”, “y’know”) which convey that the speaker is uncertain; empty adjectives like “adorable” and “lovely”, which trivialize statements; so-called tag questions at the end of sentences, which convey hesitancy; overly polite phrases like “won’t you please close the door?”, which suggest submissiveness; and a habit of ending declarative statements with a rising tone of voice which saps them of force. She also observed that women are less likely to tell jokes than men, less likely to use vulgarity, more likely to use hyper-correct grammar and to speak with exaggerated politeness, and more likely to “speak in italics”—that is, stressing words because the speaker fears she is not being listened to.          

This points to the main reason why I (and other feminists) have had a problem with LWP.  In reception—particularly once it was published in book form for a wider audience—Lakoff’s description of women’s language became increasingly detached from her larger argument about language and power, and was treated instead as a “deficit theory”, a straightforward, freestanding account of what women were doing wrong. Fifty years later, the Times repeats this gesture. Its use of indirect speech (“Dr Lakoff observed that…”) (a) implies that what Lakoff presented in LWP was a factually accurate description of women’s speech, and (b) endorses the judgment of that speech as deficient (if a way of speaking is said to “suggest submissiveness” or “trivialize statements” that can’t really be interpreted as anything but a criticism).

In reality, however, both the accuracy of the description and the validity of the judgment were disputed right from the start. In the Signs review I mentioned earlier, Barrie Thorne suggested that Lakoff’s presentation of women’s language, which by her own account was based on introspection rather than empirical analysis of actual linguistic data, might owe more to cultural stereotypes about women than to facts about their real-life behaviour. She raised, in other words, the basic question of whether claims like “women as a group use more hedges/ tag questions/ rising intonation /politeness than men” would stand up to rigorous investigation. In the years that followed there were many attempts to investigate these claims empirically, and overall the results were mixed: in some cases there was little or no evidence that any significant sex-difference existed, while in others the evidence supported Lakoff’s intuitions. But even in those cases, another question arose: was Lakoff also right about what women’s ways of speaking meant or did? Was the “deficit” reading of hedges or tag questions the only or the most convincing interpretation?

As I pointed out in an early post about women allegedly over-using the word just, there are very few linguistic features that can only have one meaning or function. Tag questions, for instance, can indeed convey uncertainty (“she didn’t really say that, did she?”), but they can also be used to elicit the views of others, often in a way which is directive rather than tentative. “That was a stupid thing for her to say, wasn’t it?”, for instance, conveys not only that the speaker herself thinks it was stupid, but also that she expects or wants the person she’s addressing to agree. In a study I published with two of my students in 1988 we found that it was typically the more powerful party (e.g., the doctor in a doctor-patient exchange or the presenter on a radio phone-in programme) who made more use of tag questions; in the contexts we took our data from, what the use of tag questions reflected was not the speaker’s gender but their role in the interaction. It’s easy to conflate the effects of gender with those of role or status because in many real-world settings these variables are not entirely independent, but if you examine them separately it will often turn out that gender is not the best predictor of behaviour.

If you wait long enough it may also turn out that what you initially identified as a feature of women’s language was actually evidence of a more general change in progress–it’s just that women adopted the innovative form slightly earlier than their male peers. This is how many sociolinguists today would analyse the phenomenon of rising intonation on declarative sentences (aka “uptalk”). Though when Lakoff remarked on it fifty years ago it was mainly associated (at least in the US) with young women, it has since become common among younger speakers generally. But its adoption by so many young men as well as women casts doubt on the deficit explanation of it as something women do because as subordinates they are constantly driven to seek others’ approval. The continuing popularity of that story says more about our attachment to sex-stereotypes than it does about the functions of uptalk.

The disagreements and debates this element of LWP has prompted ever since it was published were never purely academic (in the sense of having no relevance beyond the proverbial ivory tower): Lakoff’s description of women’s language was if anything even more influential in the so-called “real world”. Though she made use (as Barrie Thorne pointed out) of pre-existing popular stereotypes, in LWP these were repurposed to tell a larger and more compelling story about where they came from (patriarchal socialization), what they had in common (sapping the speaker’s message of force) and how they affected women’s position in society (by causing them to be seen as weak, subservient and powerless). And this turned out to be a story which many feminists, and people who claimed to support them, could get behind. By the 1980s Lakoff’s list of women’s language features was being used (albeit often without acknowledging the source) as a foundation for training courses, self-help books and other kinds of advice that set out to “empower” women by eradicating the speech-habits that were allegedly holding them back. Over time the list of these so-called “female verbal tics” has expanded, but the original items taken from LWP–hedging, uptalk, tag questions, hyper-politeness–are still going strong. As a longtime student of these materials I can attest that even if the person who wrote them has never heard of Robin Lakoff, a reader familiar with LWP will be able to discern its traces.

You might think it’s unfair to hold Lakoff responsible for the use made of her work by the female self-improvement industry. Up to a point I agree: I’m certainly not suggesting that she actively encouraged it. I do think, however, that the popularity of LWP in that context played a part in giving the book its remarkable longevity, and turning its always-disputed claims about women’s language into “zombie facts” that no amount of evidence-based debunking can kill off. As a culture we love sweeping claims of the form “men do this and women do that”; we also love the idea that ambitious individuals from a historically disadvantaged group can overcome their dysfunctional social conditioning and reinvent themselves by going on a course or downloading an app that teaches them how (not) to use language. Lakoff did not tell that particular story (which I imagine she, like most linguists, thought was bullshit), but the story she did tell was grist to its mill–and that too, at least IMO, must be considered a part of her legacy.

For me that makes her a complicated figure. She did, without doubt, make an important contribution to the academic enterprise I would later become part of myself, and that should be acknowledged; so should her contribution as a teacher and mentor to many other women in linguistics. And my feelings about LWP are, as I said earlier, mixed: it’s not that I see nothing in it to admire. Though I basically agree with Barrie Thorne about the shortcomings of the introspective approach, I also think Lakoff’s original essay was an incisive and elegant piece of work—in part precisely because it was a think-piece, led by ideas rather than data. If you’ve never read it you might be surprised by how readable it is, with very little of the kind of clutter (like endless citations and definitions of terms) that makes most academic journal articles so tedious.

I also want to say for the record that IMHO the book’s “other” section, the one that seems almost to have been forgotten, has aged surprisingly well. Or maybe that should be “depressingly well”: what strikes me when I re-read it is how much of what Lakoff said about the linguistic representation of women in 1975 (“language works against the treatment of women as serious persons with individual views”) is still relevant in 2025. Though far more women today occupy roles which ought to qualify them to be treated as “serious persons”, the language used by the media to talk about them continues to rely on the same sexist tropes that Lakoff and others drew attention to fifty years ago. Formulas we expected to be long gone by the 21st century have somehow persisted: in February this year, for instance, the Oxford Mail reported the human rights lawyer Amal Clooney’s appointment as a visiting professor under the headline “University role announced for George Clooney’s wife”.

Lakoff said herself that she viewed LWP as a preliminary exploration of the territory rather than a detailed map (she expected others to undertake further research), an attitude which arguably made it easier for her to ask questions, and make proposals, which generated controversy and thus debate. In academia those are not bad things: in the early stages of a field’s development it can actually be helpful for some bold soul to give what many people think is the wrong answer to a question, if that helps to clarify why the question is important and prompts others to look for better answers. Which is exactly, I would say, what happened in this case. Over the years on this blog I’ve featured many examples of work which, in revisiting the question of how women speak and why, has provided us with better answers than we had before (here are some examples dealing with apologies, swearing and slang). Everyone who does that kind of work is part of a tradition that includes Lakoff; their work is to some extent in dialogue with hers, even if her name is never mentioned.

But the answers I consider “better” (meaning more theoretically sophisticated and with more evidential support) have not captured the popular imagination in the same way as the account sketched in LWP. In terms of popular uptake, the only serious rival to that account has been the one put forward by Deborah Tannen (a former student of Lakoff’s at UC Berkeley) in her 1990 bestseller You Just Don’t Understand, which reframes male-female inequality as quasi-cultural difference and social conflict between the sexes as misunderstanding. And one conclusion I might draw is that feminist linguists, like women speakers, are caught in a double bind. If what we say resonates (or is capable of being made to resonate) with popular folk-beliefs about men’s and women’s language, there’s a good chance it will be taken up more widely–though it may also be exploited for commercial or personal gain by know-nothings and grifters. But if it directly challenges what most people believe, it will gain little or no traction outside our own community.

Which, I wonder, is worse? To be cited as an authority by the “wrong” people, or to be ignored by virtually everyone? Robin Lakoff was one feminist linguist who did make an impression on both the academy and the wider world; but whether the positive consequences that flowed from that outweigh the ones I regard as negative is a question I find genuinely hard to answer.   

Gender, communication and Trump v. Musk

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Last week the bromance between Donald Trump and Elon Musk ended in a spectacular war of words on social media. As the world watched, the US president and his “First Buddy” traded accusations, threats and insults. But while some people just reached for the popcorn, others apparently saw a golden opportunity to expound their pet theories about language and gender.  

Jack Posobiec, for instance (described in Wikipedia as “an American alt-right political activist, television correspondent, conspiracy theorist and former United States Navy intelligence officer”), expressed impatience with people who found the spectacle unseemly:

Some of y’all just can’t handle 2 high-agency males going at it and it really shows. This is direct communication (phallocentric) vs indirect communication (gynocentric)

The last time I saw words like “phallocentric” and “gynocentric” being bandied about in public was probably in the 1980s, when poststructuralist theory was all the rage. Had Posobiec been dipping into the work of Jacques Lacan and Luce Irigaray? On reflection that seemed unlikely: more probably he was just recycling what my book of the same name calls “the myth of Mars and Venus”, a set of stereotypical generalizations about men, women and communication which were popularized in the early 1990s in a series of bestselling self-help books, and went on to be repeated so widely and so often that they became part of our culture’s mental wallpaper. For instance:

  • men are rational and action-oriented, women are more emotional and more attuned to others’ feelings
  • men talk about things in the world, women talk (aka gossip) about people and relationships  
  • when men have something to say they say it directly, whereas women favour indirectness
  • men can tolerate verbal conflict (and may even engage in it for fun), but women avoid or try to defuse it
  • when women do engage in conflict they prefer indirect, manipulative or passive-aggressive strategies to the overt aggressiveness of men

Posobiec was not the only right-wing commentator who invoked these ideas to explain the Trump/Musk bust-up as a clash between two elite Martians. (“I know you’re not used to it”, he added, implicitly referencing the alt-right belief that the modern quest for sex equality has turned the once-noble cultures of the West into soft, effeminate places where manly men are in short supply.) The same point was made by another online MAGA-supporter, the aptly-named Joey Mannarino. “People forget”, he mused, “how men with testicles spar. You’re watching two people with balls the size of the moon debate an issue. This is what masculinity looks like.”

But to many people this take was not convincing. What struck them about Trump and Musk’s behaviour was not its manliness but on the contrary, its reliance on communication strategies which are stereotypically associated with teenage girls and/or effeminate gay men. One commentator called the unfolding saga “Mean Girls, White House version”. The Hollywood Reporter headlined a report on it “The girls are fighting”. Elsewhere we were said to be witnessing “a catty gay breakup” or “two gay dads divorcing”.  

It’s not hard to see where this view came from. Approving references to what the two men were doing as “sparring”, “debating” or “going at it”—all terms which imply direct, head-to-head combat, whether physical or verbal—gloss over the point that they were not talking directly to one another, but rather using social media (in each case primarily a platform they owned—X for Musk and Truth Social for Trump) to address attacks on each other to their own followers. This is an indirect way of sending a message to your actual target; it’s a digital-era version of the time-honoured mean girl tactic of saying nasty things about your enemy behind her back, while knowing full well that they will soon get back to her.

Musk in particular deployed a range of stereotypical mean girl moves in his posts attacking Trump. These included emotional manipulation (“I got him elected, how can he be so ungrateful?”), spreading damaging rumours (“he’s on the list of [child abuser and trafficker] Jeffrey Epstein’s associates”) and calling for other people to shun or punish him (“he ought to be impeached”). Trump made more use of direct threats (in particular, to cancel Musk’s lucrative government contracts), but he also used the classic manipulative technique of trying to discredit an adversary by accusing him of being crazy (“Elon has lost his mind”). At one point he insinuated that Musk’s behaviour reflected his excessive consumption of Ketamine. That may of course be true—and I don’t rule out the possibility that the Epstein rumour is also true—but my point is about the strategic weaponizing of rumour and gossip, which is stereotyped as something women rather than men do.   

Also interesting in this regard were some of the interventions made by fans of Trump and Musk. Not all were of the type I’ve already mentioned, attempting to reassure anyone who was worried that what the two men were doing was just normal behaviour for “people with balls the size of the moon”. Some used language that was more reminiscent of the worried best friend in a romcom attempting to get the lead protagonists’ relationship back on track, or the wise elder in a marital melodrama urging the warring parties to stay together for the sake of the children (one right-wing billionaire urged them to “make peace for the benefit of our great country”). Others sounded as if the children themselves were pleading with their parents not to split up. Kanye West’s much-lampooned response, for instance, was “Broooos please noooooo. We love you both so much”.   

Is this kind of emotional outburst really “what masculinity looks like”? In the mythological universe of Mars and Venus, definitely not; but in the real world it’s a bit more complicated. I’ve written before about the concept of “fratriarchy”, a modern form of male dominance (aka “patriarchy”) which depends less on the absolute authority of fathers (over younger men as well as women) and more on the homosocial bonds men of similar status forge with each other. Those bonds are maintained through various practices, including and especially forms of talk, which are culturally coded as female, though in reality they are not gender-specific—their function, whoever uses them, is to cultivate intimacy, trust and loyalty. We saw this, for instance, in the gossipy, confessional talk between Trump and a couple of other men that was captured on the infamous Access Hollywood tape; we also saw it at the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who had been accused of sexually assaulting a high school classmate. The Republican Senators who came to Kavanaugh’s defence were nothing if not emotional—some were moved almost to tears by the suffering he claimed the accusation had caused him.

These were both classic cases of—putting it crudely—“bros before hos”, which is essentially fratriarchy’s motto. And when fraternal bonds fracture, as they have between Musk and Trump, that will often provoke emotional responses: it undermines the assumption that you can always count on your brothers, and forces men like Kanye West, who feel a strong allegiance to both parties, to decide where their loyalties should lie in future. (Musk obviously grasped this: one of his posts rather pointedly noted that 78-year-old Trump had only a few more years in office while he, unelected and much younger, would be around for decades to come.)   

For me what this sorry saga has highlighted is (as I argued in The Myth of Mars and Venus) that men are from earth and women are from earth. Communicators of both sexes have access to, and make use of,  the same broad range of communication strategies. Whether a particular way of communicating is interpreted in context as masculine “sparring” or feminine/effeminate “cattiness” depends not on the objective qualities of the language being used (e.g., whether it’s direct or indirect), but on who is using it and what lens we view it through.

It’s not, of course, a coincidence that the “masculine” interpretation of Trump and Musk’s behaviour was advanced by their supporters on the right, while the “feminine” reading was used by more liberal commentators to mock them. (As usual, “feminine” was the negative term–something progressive types might want to consider when they criticize powerful men for acting like girls.) But it surely says something about the power of Mars and Venus mythology that gender was the lens through which both sides viewed Musk v. Trump. Commentators reached immediately for well-worn gender stereotypes and metaphors: either the two men were “going at it” like rutting stags, or else they were catty, passive-aggressive mean girls proving that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

There are other metaphors these commentators could have chosen that would arguably have been more illuminating. What came to my mind as I watched events unfold was not the binary opposition between male and female but the contrast between adults and children. These ultra-privileged, wealthy and powerful men were behaving like giant toddlers, having tantrums in public and throwing their toys out of the pram. They displayed a toddler-like lack of self-control and self-awareness, along with the toddler’s uncontrollable rage when crossed; it was their egos rather than their balls which were “the size of the moon”.

To me this childish behaviour is not so much “what masculinity looks like” as what autocracy looks like–self-aggrandising, thin-skinned and vengeful. And while it’s true that autocrats tend not to like being laughed at, it generally takes more than ridicule to bring them down.    

Linguistic engineering

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Since my last post was about the phrase “women of a certain age”, I was intrigued to see a report in the Mail Online last week which claimed that Bristol University wants to ban it, along with other ageist expressions like “golden years” and “silver surfer”. According to the Mail this is yet another example of “woke” universities “stifling free speech”—a view they chose to underline with a quote from the King of the Usual Suspects and doyen of Anti-Woke Studies, retired sociology professor Frank Furedi.

“As a 77-year-old man”, he frothed,

I find it incomprehensible that terms like “golden years” or “over the hill” apparently need to be excised from our vocabulary. This exercise in linguistic engineering assumes that there is actually something disturbing about being old.

Actually, Frank, that’s a non-sequitur: what implies there’s something disturbing about being old isn’t avoiding euphemisms like “golden years”, it’s using them. But I’ll bracket that, because what really interests me about this comment is the reference to “linguistic engineering”. Not because it’s original: on the contrary, it’s a cliché. But what is it really saying, and does that make any sense?  

Engineering in itself does not have particularly negative associations: few of us think it’s a bad thing if we have planes that fly and buildings that stay up. Engineers can be heroic figures: think of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Guglielmo Marconi, Nikola Tesla (feminists should feel free to add Hedy Lamarr, Mary Jackson and Grace Hopper). The job they do has high prestige: at one time it was suggested that if we wanted to elevate the status of housewives and give them proper credit for their skills we should call them “domestic engineers”.

But that, of course, would be “linguistic engineering”, which does have negative associations—as do “social engineering” and (for a lot of people) “genetic engineering”. In these cases the term engineering implies a deliberate and sinister attempt to interfere with the natural order of things. Instead of applying the techniques of engineering to their proper objects—inanimate ones designed to serve the needs of humans—the social/linguistic/genetic engineer applies those techniques to humans themselves, either directly (by tinkering with their DNA) or more indirectly (by controlling the way they speak, think and live their lives). This is thought of as sinister because it robs humans of their freedom and makes them objects to be manipulated by others.

Linguistic engineering is often thought of as particularly dangerous–the even more sinister handmaid of social engineering–because it enables the powerful to control people’s thoughts, and so ensure that they will meekly consent to whatever social arrangements are imposed on them. The best known and most compelling presentation of that line argument is a work of fiction, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, in which Newspeak, a re-engineered form of English, excises words from its users’ vocabularies on the assumption that this will render them unable to think about certain things at all. The ultimate aim is explained by a character representing the Party:

In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.

Though Orwell, writing in the 1940s, was critical of linguistic engineering on both the left and the right, today it’s most commonly perceived as a technique used mainly if not exclusively on the left. It’s been associated with feminism for as long as I’ve been a feminist (which is now almost 50 years): the Mail story even begins with a dig at institutions which have supposedly “outlawed” the word mankind. To begin with I was disoriented by this reference to a shift in usage that started around the mid-1970s (though to say mankind was “outlawed” is a bit of a stretch) as if it were something the present generation of “snowflake” students had come up with. But then I realized it was meant to be a slippery slope argument: first they came for sexism; now they’ve turned their sights on ageism; what will they be trying to excise from our vocabularies next?

But if the people at the Mail want a genuine, topical word-banning story they’ll need to look a lot further west than Bristol. Specifically, to the White House, where recently the Trump administration announced a blanket prohibition on the use of certain words (including gender, diversity and pronouns) in Federal government documents, grant applications and publications by government-funded scientists. In a move which might make even Orwell blink in astonishment at his own prescience, this ban does not only apply to documents as-yet unwritten, but also to those which already exist. Trump’s minions have apparently gone full Winston Smith: they’ve been searching the archives for forbidden words and then removing any text that contains them. Last month it was reported that they’d taken down a 2015 training video on plain writing for government websites which advised authors to address citizens as “you”— which is, as the author helpfully explained, a pronoun.

Meanwhile, Big Brother—sorry, Trump—has decreed that the body of water formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico shall henceforth be referred to as “The Gulf of America”. (We have always been at war with Eastasia!) For refusing to implement this diktat in its own style guide (which is used by journalists around the world), the Associated Press (AP) has had a number of its White House press privileges revoked.

Yet as much as I deplore these sanctions on principle, in this case I can’t help seeing a certain irony, because the AP has for some years been a leading exponent of “woke” linguistic engineering. One earlier post on this blog was inspired by its attempt to expunge the term mistress from news journalism. And who can forget its pronouncement, issued on Twitter in 2023, that “the French” was a dehumanizing phrase—or the response asking sarcastically if the correct expression would be “people experiencing Frenchness”?  The truth is that neither the left nor the right has a monopoly on word-banning: both are OK with it so long as the words being banned are words they consider Wrong and Bad.    

But…are these examples making you wonder if banning words from government documents (or newspapers, or in universities) actually accomplishes what the banners hope it will, or what their critics fear it will? If so, I think that’s a good question.  

To be clear, I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t be concerned about what Trump is doing: it’s extreme, it’s authoritarian and it will clearly have real-world consequences. But not because removing certain words from public documents is equivalent to removing them from people’s minds. The reason it will have consequences is that Trump has other kinds of power which are material rather than symbolic—in particular, the power to withhold funding for research or policy initiatives in “forbidden” areas, and to fire any government employee whose work or views he disapproves of. He can do those things (though whether it’s legal for him to do them is now a question before the courts) without banning words; the word-banning is just an extra provocation, a reminder that, like the Mail, he thrives on outrage. Personally I’ve been encouraged to see that what his attempts at linguistic engineering have mostly generated is ridicule. So many jokes, so many memes…public awareness of the name and location of the Gulf of Mexico must surely be at an all-time high.  

I don’t mean to be flippant about the threat autocrats like Trump pose to democracy, nor about the role of language in our ultra-polarized and volatile politics. I have many concerns, for instance, about the increasingly authoritarian regulation of speech which is happening on both the populist right and the “woke” left. But there’s nothing “Orwellian” about how that works. It’s not about controlling people’s thoughts and making them sincerely believe that 2 + 2 = 5. It’s more about making them fear the consequences of non-compliance—like losing their jobs, being ostracized or ending up in prison.  

In real life it’s pretty hard to control either the language people use among themselves or the ideas they have stored in their minds. Nearly fifty years of communist rule did not stop the people of central and Eastern Europe from dispensing, as soon as the ruling regimes collapsed, with the jargon they’d been obliged to use in public, and reverting to the older terms the communists had tried to erase. Even in Nineteen Eighty-four, what breaks Winston isn’t Newspeak, it’s the threat of torture.

In my view, the effectiveness of what most people understand to be “linguistic engineering”—banning words, redefining them by fiat, trying to force people to use new words invented by engineers—is seriously overrated. If it were held to the same standard as actual engineering (does this work? Can we rely on it to keep working?), it would fail almost every time. Which is not to say we shouldn’t criticize it (though I’d prefer it if we didn’t only criticize the other side’s version while giving our own side a free pass); but I think we should probably focus less on the idea that “they” are messing with our minds, and more on the other, more prosaic tools which are used to crush dissent and enforce compliance.

Women of a certain age

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Recently, as everyone reading this in Britain will already know, the Masterchef presenter Gregg Wallace became the latest in a long line of Men On TV (the industry term is “talent”, though in this case it’s never been clear what talent TV producers thought he possessed) to “step back” from his presenting duties following allegations of our old friend “inappropriate behaviour”. Behind that bland euphemism is an all-too familiar story of serial sexual harassment: unwanted touching, insults, bullying, gross sexual comments, and allegedly an incident where Wallace was naked in the studio except for a sock covering his penis. Many women complained, and for years their complaints were ignored. Now they have finally caught up with him, Wallace has responded with his usual humility and grace by dismissing the complainants as “middle-class women of a certain age”.  

When I started to get messages from the media asking me to comment on this phraseology, my first thought was “you don’t need a linguist for that: it’s obvious what he was trying to do”. First, he was playing the class card, presumably in an attempt to present himself as the underdog in this scenario—a sort of male Eliza Doolittle (she sold flowers, he once had a veg stall) tripped up by his failure to meet posh people’s standards of decorum. Which is bullshit, obviously. The complainants weren’t saying he used the wrong fork, they were saying he got his tackle out in the workplace and told contestants their food smelled like his aunt’s vagina. You don’t have to be Lady Muck to think that’s out of order. If Gregg’s working-class grandma was anything like mine, anyone who spoke to her like that (much less tried to sell her potatoes while wearing nothing but a sock) would have been in line for a clip round the ear.  

Second, of course, he was playing the age(ism) card: if there’s anyone more prudish than a middle-class woman, it’s a middle-class woman “of a certain age”. But that was when I paused, and thought: wait, maybe there is something to say about his language after all. Because “a woman of a certain age” is a more interesting expression than might be apparent at first glance.

“A certain age” can be just an ordinary phrase, one whose meaning is basically the sum of its component words, as in “when you get to a certain age employers just put your CV in the bin”. You could swap the words for others with a similar meaning (e.g. “when you get to a particular stage of life…”) and still be saying essentially the same thing. But “a woman of a certain age” is an idiom, a fixed sequence of words which functions as a single unit. If you substituted different words the resulting phrase might still make sense, but it wouldn’t have the same meaning. Which is…well, what is it? Every woman alive is, in the literal sense, “of a certain age”, but only some are, in the idiomatic sense, “women of a certain age”. So what exactly does it mean to be “a woman of a certain age”?  

A quick look at the Oxford English Dictionary reveals that “of a certain age” has been used since the 18th century as a euphemism for “middle aged” (or as the Historical Thesaurus puts it, “of an age which it is not polite or necessary further to define”). And though the dictionary says it is mainly used of women between the ages of 40 and 60, it’s by no means only used in reference to women.

The authors of the Grammarphobia blog report that the earliest example they found in a search of literary databases appeared in a female-authored treatise on midwifery published in 1709, which argued that while men should not normally be permitted to examine women’s genitals,

It may perhaps be granted that men of a certain age, men past the slippery season of youth, may claim the benefit of exemption from impressions of sensuality, by objects to which custom has familiarized them.

The OED’s earliest example comes from a text published nearly fifty years later, and also refers to a man:

I chose my Lord Davenant here, a man of a certain age, a widower, d’ye see; not only fit to husband you, Louisa, but to father you (R. Cumberland, 1753)

If you search the illustrative quotations that appear in every OED entry, you find that men of a certain age are still going strong in the twenty first century. For instance:

The wizards commenced that…table-thumping which is the mark of appreciation amongst men of a certain age (Terry Pratchett, 2009)

Whereas the two 18th century examples I’ve quoted are neutral or even slightly positive about middle-aged men, in the 21st century these men tend to be presented as faintly comical or a bit pathetic—out-of-touch old buffers, or in the throes of an embarrassing midlife crisis. Applied to women, by contrast, “of a certain age” seems historically to have had two main meanings, which are not only different from the ones I’ve just described for men, but also quite different from each other—though as usual, what they do have in common is that they conceptualize women primarily in sexual terms.  

The first of these two meanings is the ageist one—that a woman is too old for men to find her desirable (and in many though not all cases a spinster or an “old maid”). What counts as “old” in this context is predictably elastic. “Of a certain age” can mean actually old: in 2006, for instance, the Daily Telegraph announced that

after decades of tireless service to millions of women of a certain age, the era of the blue rinse is over.

As far as I’m aware, blue rinses were for white-haired old ladies, not women in their 40s and 50s. But the idiom can also be used about women who are not yet middle aged, especially if they are still unmarried and no longer considered eligible. One example in the OED, from a novel published in the 1850s, describes a character as

a young lady of a certain age—say liberal thirty—an ardent Bloomer”

Given the date I’m guessing this is a reference to Amelia Bloomer, the US women’s rights advocate and popularizer of “rational dress”, suggesting that the character may be one of those ugly, unnatural and therefore unmarriageable feminists.

But there are also many cases in which the implication of the phrase is more or less the opposite: rather than being disdained as unattractive and undesirable, the “woman of a certain age” is praised for her knowledge, experience and sophistication—qualities which young girls, however beautiful, cannot offer. Honoria Scott’s Amatory Tales (1810), for instance, describes a character as

a woman of a certain age, and handsome person; her understanding intelligent and cultivated; she had moved much in the circles of fashionable life.

By the mid-twentieth century this positive depiction of the middle-aged or older woman has acquired a more openly sexual dimension. Sexually she is in her prime, and her experience is as great as her enthusiasm: consequently she can still provide men with at least one very useful service. As Somerset Maugham explained in a novel published in the 1940s,

there’s no better education for a young man than to become the lover of a woman of a certain age.

Like Mrs Robinson in that 1960s classic The Graduate, she can train him up so he’ll know what he’s doing when he eventually falls for a woman who could be (and in The Graduate literally is) her daughter.

The OED’s examples suggest that recently there’s been more emphasis on women’s own pursuit of pleasure when they reach “a certain age”.  In the mid-1990s a piece in a St Louis newspaper queried the view that only men can be “silver foxes”, maintaining that

Some Silver Foxes are women ‘of a certain age’ who live with zest and elan.

If you Google “woman of a certain age” you’ll find it being used in this sense by various businesses selling fashion, beauty or lifestyle products to women over 50. It’s still a euphemism, but instead of just covering up the negative associations of middle and old age it’s become associated with what’s supposed to be positive for women about ageing—like the increased freedom and self-confidence that enable them to “live with zest and elan” (and of course, to spend money on themselves).

You’ll find even more of these businesses if you also Google the French equivalent of the English phrase, “une femme d’un certain age”, which turns out to be quite popular with businesses owned by English-speakers. It trades on the stereotype of the French as a sophisticated people, especially when it comes to sex, and the belief that older women in France are—so long as they keep themselves in good shape—more appreciated by men than their English counterparts (though once again, “older” is a pretty flexible concept–the illustration at the top of this post is meant to show “a woman of a certain age in Paris”, for instance). It’s often assumed that the English idiom “a woman of a certain age” originated as a calque, a French phrase translated into English. That’s certainly possible—the French version first appeared in the late 1600s, so slightly before the first English examples in the early 1700s, and before about 1800 most upper-class Englishmen were fluent in French—but the evidence is not strong enough to make it certain.

None of this really explains, though, what Gregg Wallace meant by “women of a certain age”. Clearly he wasn’t paying tribute to the sexually experienced woman who “lives with zest and elan”, but I also doubt he was saying that the women who complained about him were ugly old boilers who should have been grateful for the attention; almost none of the celebrities he was referring to are even remotely plausible candidates for that kind of insult. TV companies may tolerate bad behaviour from their male “talent”, but one thing we know they don’t tolerate (ask the former Countryfile presenter Miriam O’Reilly) is more than the slightest hint of visible ageing in women who appear on camera. Nor do they tolerate actual unattractiveness in female talent of any age: as the former Crimewatch presenter Nick Ross once sagely observed, “There are not many mingers who make it on to TV in their 20s and 30s”. (In case you’re wondering what occasioned that pearl of wisdom, he was arguing that yes, older women get pushed out sooner than men, but younger women, if they’re attractive, get hired sooner than men, so it all cancels out in the end.)

The female Celebrity Masterchef contestants who’ve said publicly that they complained about Gregg Wallace—in some cases not on their own behalf, but because they had witnessed him harassing (often much younger) production staff who were not in a position to complain—are mostly in their 50s (they include Ulrika Jonsson, Kirsty Wark, Kirstie Allsopp and Emma Kennedy). My guess is that what really ticks Wallace off about these women (women of a certain age that happens to be more or less his own age—he’s 60) is simply that they weren’t afraid to speak up. They didn’t just assume they couldn’t complain or that no one would take them seriously (though at the time, of course, no one did). How dare these uppity, over-privileged women act like a bunch of bossy Karens, reporting the host of a programme they were guests on to the manager?

That’s really the question to which the answer is “they’re middle-class women of a certain age”. And in publicly airing his views on that demographic, perhaps Gregg Wallace has done us a favour. He’s pointed the way to a (re)definition of “a woman of a certain age” which is not about her sexlessness or, conversely, sexiness, but rather her lack of respect for the rules men have historically expected women to play by (“don’t bother to challenge our bad behaviour, darling, we’re more important than you so you’ll only be hurting yourself”). Experience—professional as well as personal—has given women like the ones who complained about Wallace the confidence and the clout to say “to hell with that”.

Though I’m no longer young enough to be “of a certain age” myself, this is one sense of the old idiom I can definitely get behind. So, thanks for that, Gregg—and please close the door quietly on your way out.   

Talking about the Taliban: culture versus politics

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Last week the Taliban in Afghanistan published a 114-page document setting out the latest official version of its laws on “vice and virtue”. Western news coverage focused particularly on Article 13, which according to press reports states that

if it is necessary for women to leave their homes, they must cover their faces and voices from men.

“A woman’s voice”, the reports explained, “is deemed intimate”: like the sight of her face, the sound of her voice is a “temptation” from which men must be protected. To that end, the new code requires women not only to be silent outside their homes (even praying or reciting scripture is forbidden), but also to speak quietly inside, to make sure they can’t be overheard by passing unrelated men. Singing and reading aloud are forbidden everywhere.    

Most of the reactions I saw were horrified, but some people took a different tack. On one hand, we had right-wing anti-feminist trolls accusing western feminists of being insufficiently outraged (allegedly because they fear they’ll be accused of racism if they criticize Muslims); on the other, I saw a few comments from progressive types (most of the ones I saw came from women, though I don’t know if they’d call themselves feminists) that actually did accuse the Taliban’s critics of cultural imperialism: “the west”, as one put it, “has no right to impose its values on other cultures”.  

I’m always taken aback when I see this argument presented as progressive, because actually it’s as reactionary AF. Not only does it treat “culture” as a monolith, uncontested and unchanging, in this case it also treats it as belonging to men. “Afghan culture” is assumed to be whatever the men of the Taliban say it is; what women think apparently doesn’t count. And it’s not as if we have no idea what women think. After the new vice law was announced, numerous women inside Afghanistan (as well as activists living in exile elsewhere) took to the internet to urge the world to condemn it. These women have made it abundantly clear that they reject the definition of Afghan culture which has been imposed on them–not by western colonialists but by the Taliban, and not just without women’s consent, but in defiance of their actual cultural traditions.

There is, for instance, a long tradition of Afghan women singing and reciting poetry. Those who are now protesting against the new law by uploading videos of themselves singing to X and TikTok and YouTube are not just defying the Taliban’s latest edict, but continuing a much older tradition of women using poetry and song to criticise the abuse of male authority (one example, collected in 2012 by Eliza Griswold, translates as You sold me to an old goat, father. May God destroy your home; I was your daughter). Listening to what these women are telling us, in their own words and by their own choice (despite the potential risks) is the opposite of “imposing our values” on them.

There are other reasons for feminists to criticize this kind of “culture talk”. As human rights activists long ago pointed out, governments and transnational organizations have frequently avoided taking action against states that deny basic rights to women by putting that issue in the box marked “culture”, as opposed to the box marked “politics”. We might not think much of the way other human rights abuses have been handled in practice, but at least they are seen as meriting a political response; the status of women, by contrast, is often treated as a “cultural matter” on which it would not be appropriate for outsiders to take a view. CEDAW, the 1979 UN Convention on Eliminating All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, allows member-states which ratify it to enter culture-specific “reservations”—that is, specify they will not be bound by particular clauses which they say are incompatible with their culture. This has allowed various countries to sign up to a non-discrimination treaty while continuing to discriminate in the very areas of law that affect women’s status most (e.g. marriage and divorce, inheritance, taxation and the passing on of nationality to children).

Culture talk is also used by antifeminist men like the trolls mentioned earlier to argue that women in the west have nothing to complain about: they should shut up and be grateful they live in a culture whose values in no way resemble the Taliban’s. But in fact those values are part of the western cultural tradition too, and their influence lingers on even now.   

The suppression of women’s speech is a case in point. It’s hard to think of any civilisation in recorded history which has not placed restrictions on when, where and to whom women may speak. Prohibitions on women speaking outside the home and/or to men other than close relatives have been common everywhere, and often they’ve been based on the same argument the Taliban uses: that the female voice is “intimate” (a euphemism for “sexual”), and like other intimate parts must be concealed to preserve its owner’s modesty.

The Greek philosopher Plutarch, for instance, maintained that a virtuous woman “should as modestly guard against exposing her voice to outsiders as she would guard against stripping off her clothes”. According to the poet and classicist Anne Carson, the idea that women had two mouths (the actual mouth and the vagina) was a commonplace of both Greek and Roman discourse: both orifices, she explains, “provide access to a hollow cavity which is guarded by lips that are best kept closed”.  

But this isn’t just ancient history. The same connection between verbal and sexual (in)continence was made by western authorities for most of the modern era. In Europe and North America from the 16th century to the 20th, advice to women on how they should behave continued to link silence with modesty (which also meant chastity), and there was still particular anxiety about women speaking to male strangers outside their homes.

In the early 19th century that anxiety intensified as more women became active in social reform movements such as the campaign to abolish slavery: some of them, like their male counterparts, travelled around making speeches at political meetings. Even when their audiences were exclusively female these women’s presence on public platforms attracted criticism; but when they spoke to audiences that included men the disapproval was stronger, and had a clear sexual dimension. In Massachusetts in 1837, Congregationalist ministers issued a pastoral letter declaring that a woman who addressed a mixed-sex audience in public was not merely presumptuous but unchaste: like a prostitute or an adulteress she would “fall in shame and dishonor into the dust”.

Even as late as the 1980s—150 years after the Congregationalist ministers’ letter—conservative Christian men were still worrying that women’s voices would lead men into sin. At the height of the campaign for women to be ordained as priests in the Anglican church, Graham Leonard, the Anglican bishop of London, explained his opposition by saying that if he encountered a woman in the sanctuary (the space where priests conduct sacred verbal rituals like the consecration of the bread and wine at Mass) he would be “unbearably tempted to embrace her”.  

This wasn’t just a religious thing. In the 1970s, when the BBC made the momentous decision to let a woman (Angela Rippon) present the TV news, it did so in defiance of two arguments that had been around for decades. One was our old friend “women’s voices lack authority”, but the other was the idea that a female voice would “distract” men from the serious contemplation of current events. No prizes for guessing what “distract” meant in this context: when women’s voices are deemed “intimate”, “private”, “distracting” or “tempting”, these are euphemisms for male sexual arousal. (Angela Rippon would later reveal that one of her colleagues flashed her while she was on the air.) And since men apparently cannot control themselves, they must instead control the women they hold responsible.    

It’s true, of course, that at the level of institutional policy things have changed since the 1980s. Today female newsreaders are unremarkable, and the Church of England has not only women priests but women bishops (albeit some Anglicans still refuse to recognize them). Today there are very few platforms, religious or secular, from which women in western democracies cannot, in theory, speak. But in practice women’s speaking rights are still not equal to men’s: a lot of policing still goes on, and some of it is highly sexualized—like the graphic rape threats which are now routinely sent to women who participate actively in public debates (for politicians and journalists particularly this has become a predictable occupational hazard). Nor is it rare for women’s speech, both inside and (more especially) outside the home, to be policed by their male partners or family members. Restricting how and with whom a woman may communicate, and surveilling her to make sure she doesn’t interact with anyone “unapproved”, are classic coercive control tactics which thousands of men use every day.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that women on the receiving end of these tactics are in the same position as the women of Afghanistan: clearly they are not. They are not totally excluded from public life; they are not at risk of being thrown in jail if their voices are heard outside their homes; the law does not leave them with no protection at all from abusive men. The situation of women under the Taliban is dire, and no one should have any qualms about saying so.

But I still find it frustrating when the Taliban are presented as exceptional, not just in the lengths they’re prepared to go to in reducing women to faceless, voiceless non-persons (in that respect I agree they’re in a league of their own), but in the beliefs about women, men and sex that underlie their project. In some form or other those beliefs have existed, and still do exist, in cultures around the world. They are not confined to Islamic societies or non-western societies. And one reason I think it’s important to recognize that is because some of the westerners who have most to say about the misogyny of Other Cultures are not, in reality, feminist allies: control over women is part of their political agenda too.  

If you haven’t already guessed, I’m talking about the white nationalists of the far right in North America and Europe, who maintain that western culture is threatened by the presence of non-white and Muslim immigrants. One argument they’re fond of using is a quasi-feminist one—that immigration harms women’s rights by bringing in large numbers of men from cultures whose sexual attitudes are unenlightened and predatory. But if you look at the language they use it quickly becomes clear that what they’re really defending isn’t the supposed “western value” of sex equality, it’s the ownership rights of white men over white women.

Here’s an example of the kind of thing I mean, which I saw on X last week:

You are witnessing the biggest act of cuckoldry in history. An entire civilization giving away its land and women because the alternative is to be mean.

When you see women being discussed in the possessive—my woman, his woman, our women, their women, or in this case its (“an entire civilization’s”) women—you can be pretty sure you are dealing not with someone who subscribes to “the radical notion that women are people”, but with someone who thinks women are property. For white nationalists this goes beyond the commonplace idea that individual women belong to individual men; collectively women are the property of the nation or the race, an entity composed of men who share a common ancestry. Their big fear (expressed most dramatically in the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory) is that white women will either be taken by, or will give themselves to, men who don’t share that ancestry, and the result will be the destruction of the white race. That’s what this is about, and no one should confuse it with caring about women’s—or even just white women’s—rights.   

Nor should anyone think that the misogyny is incidental, just a means to a more important (racist) end. You can tell how fundamental it is by looking at the way the writer frames his complaint, using the metaphor of cuckoldry. White civilization is being compared to a husband whose wife cheats on him, leaving him emasculated and humiliated. The threat these men perceive isn’t just to their culture, or their racial privilege, but to their manhood.  

Cuckold is, or used to be, an archaic term. As an English student in the late 1970s I learned what it meant by reading texts that had been written several centuries earlier (Chaucer, Shakespeare, Restoration drama). If you’d asked me then what I thought the chances were of it ever returning to everyday use I’d have put them on a par with the chances that prithee or Zounds would be revived. Yet 40 years later it did return: by the mid-2010s the abbreviated form cuck had become the alt-right’s insult of choice for a beta-male, a weak and unmanly man. Often it was used as a political insult, meaning that the target was not sufficiently hardline to satisfy far-right extremists. But sexual inadequacy was also implied: for the kind of man who calls other men cucks, power and sexual prowess go together.  

But although cuck is a male-on-male insult, it’s also intimately connected to the misogynist belief that women have power over men by virtue of their ability to provoke desire, and that they use this sexual power to entrap, exploit and dominate men. One of the great truisms of the manosphere is that women are users and liars: they can’t be trusted not to cheat on you and saddle you with raising some other man’s child. Without cheating women there could be no cuckolded men. If white men don’t want to be cucks, they must take back control not only of their borders but also of the women inside them. In far right circles it’s not unusual to see the argument that this reassertion of male control will necessitate the removal of women’s civil rights. One X-user’s reply to the complaint quoted above observed that the rot had set in when “we gave women the vote”.  I don’t think he was joking.

If you spend time lurking in the manosphere you will also find men proposing, or fantasizing about, social policies which are even more reminiscent of the Taliban. MGTOWs (“Men Going Their Own Way”), whose aim is to free themselves from the weakening effects of women’s sexual allure, complain about women dressing “provocatively” and suggest that they should be prohibited from dressing in public in ways that arouse men against their will. Some incels (“involuntarily celibate” men) have argued that women should not be allowed to choose their own partners, but should be (re)distributed by the state, like tax credits, so that self-identified beta-males like themselves are not unjustly denied access to female sexual services.

And let’s not forget the form of religious fundamentalism which has most political influence in the west. Conservative Christians are also big on women dressing modestly, speaking softly, and submitting to the authority of their husbands. And in some places they haven’t just fantasized about curtailing women’s rights. In the US, for instance, they’ve recently been able to realize their long-held ambition of getting the Supreme Court to overturn the 1973 judgment in Roe v Wade which gave women the right to legal abortion. In half of the 50 states that right no longer exists. And the measures some states have proposed to stop women getting around the ban are not unlike the Taliban’s approach to enforcement—for instance, making it a crime to assist a woman who plans to terminate a pregnancy by driving her across state lines. (In Afghanistan drivers can be punished for transporting a woman who is not accompanied by a suitable male guardian.) Or forbidding hospitals to treat women unless and until they are at imminent risk of death. Again, I’m not saying all these things are exactly the same. But they are surely similar enough to give us pause when someone says that “our” culture, unlike “theirs”, respects the rights of women.

As a political movement which seeks to end the oppression of women—wherever it exists and whatever form it takes—feminism needs to start from the assumption that cultures are not monolithic or static, and that one way they can be changed (both for the better and for the worse) is through organized political action. Sex equality is not a “value” which some cultures have and others don’t: it is a political goal that has had to be fought for everywhere. In all societies there are political currents which pose a threat to women’s rights, and in all societies there are currents of resistance with the potential to make women’s lives better. The business of feminism is to oppose the former and support the latter.

So, don’t tell me that as a white western feminist it’s not my place to condemn the Taliban; but also don’t tell me that as a white western feminist I can only condemn the Taliban, and not the male supremacists in my own backyard. It’s perfectly possible—and in the current state of the world, I would say, necessary—to do both.

A modest proposal

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After a knife attack in Southport left two dead and nine injured—six of them critically (one of whom has since died)—the police announced that a person described only as a 17-year old male had been charged with murder and attempted murder. Beyond that, they warned the public, speculation about what happened and why should be avoided. But of course people did speculate, not least on why one very obvious question had been so carefully left unanswered in public statements.

In everything from the Home Secretary’s official response to the reports in newspapers and on TV, we were told that the Southport attacker targeted “children”, along with a smaller number of “adults”, at a Taylor Swift-themed yoga and dance class. None of these sources acknowledged that most or perhaps even all of the victims were girls and women: that was only deducible from the accounts given by eye-witnesses, who spoke, as most people naturally do, in the more personal language of “girls”, “daughters” and “mums”.  

This was, of course, no surprise. Girls are exactly who you’d expect to have been participating in an exercise class for 6-11 year-olds featuring the music of Taylor Swift, and mothers or other female carers are who you’d mostly expect to have been supervising them or picking them up. But hey, we shouldn’t be speculating when there’s an ongoing police investigation. Heaven forbid that anyone should name this atrocity as male violence against women and girls (MVAWG).  

Apart from being an insult to the public’s intelligence, what’s galling about this obfuscation is that it’s literally only a few days since MVWG was being described as a national emergency in need of urgent, coordinated action. A report issued by the National Police Chiefs’ Council presented a grim picture: reported offences have risen by nearly 40 percent in five years, to a staggering 3000 a day. In Britain it’s estimated that some 4 million men pose a significant threat to women and girls.

Obviously there is no quick fix for such a vast and multifaceted problem, though it’s good news that the new Labour government has promised to make tackling it a high priority. But in the meantime I have one modest proposal that would take no time and cost no money to implement: officialdom and the media could stop obscuring the nature of the problem by persistently using gender-neutral language to talk about male people victimizing female ones.   

This is not a generalized broadside against gender-neutral language, which is appropriate, and often preferable to sex-specific terms, in contexts where a person’s sex is either unknown or irrelevant, and where specifying it reinforces male bias. When obituarists described the late Zaha Hadid as a “great woman architect”, for instance, that implied not only that “normal” architects are male, but also that Hadid’s achievements, while remarkable for a woman, were not in the same league as men’s (though in fact she was generally regarded as one of the most significant architects of her time). If women do the same thing as men, it’s generally a good idea to use the same label for both. But it doesn’t follow that neutral language is optimal in every context. In some contexts it’s not specifying sex that can make a story biased and misleading.

There could be no more sobering demonstration of that point than the reporting of violent crime, especially though not only MVAWG. That isn’t a new observation, but this year has produced some particularly terrible examples.

Consider, for example, a news story which was widely covered in March, about the findings of a survey investigating the experiences of NHS staff. The survey is carried out every year, and its headline findings are usually reported in the media, but this year they were a bigger story than usual because of the responses to a new question about “unwanted sexual behaviour”. Here’s how the Guardian summarized the survey’s findings: 

Of the 675,140 NHS staff who responded, more than 84,000 reported sexual assaults and harassment by the public and other staff last year.

About one in 12 (58,534) said they had experienced at least one incident of unwanted sexual behaviour from patients, patients’ relatives and other members of the public in 2023.

Almost 26,000 staff (3.8%) also reported unwanted sexual behaviour from colleagues.

This Guardian report is typical in using gender-neutral labels for both the perpetrators of “unwanted sexual behaviour” (patients, relatives, [members of] the public, colleagues) and the NHS employees they targeted (staff), and in giving no other information about the proportions of men and women in either group. It’s possible that this information was not available: perhaps the survey didn’t ask respondents to specify either their own sex or the sex of their abuser(s). If so that’s not the media’s fault, it’s a problem with the design of the survey. But for whatever reason, the language of the news reports did not specify who had been assaulting or harassing whom, leaving readers free to infer that the roles of perpetrator and victim were equally likely to be filled by people of either sex.

If they did infer that, would they be wrong? IMO, almost certainly. While I wouldn’t suggest there are no cases of female patients/relatives sexually harassing male NHS workers, I’d be surprised if that scenario were anything like as common as male patients or relatives harassing female staff (who are an overall majority of all NHS workers). And it would be very surprising if either female patients or female staff were responsible for more than a tiny fraction, if that, of the more serious sexual assaults reported by some respondents: we have plenty of data from other contexts which shows that such assaults are virtually always committed by males. Of course it’s theoretically possible the NHS is different, but there’s no obvious reason to think so. And if you do have information on the sex of perpetrators and victims of sexual abuse, there’s surely no argument that it isn’t relevant for a news story on the subject to include it.     

Yet that information often isn’t included even when we can be sure the media had access to it. In January, for instance, the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) issued a report analysing cases of child sexual abuse and exploitation recorded by 42 police forces in 2022. The press release announcing the report included a statistic which then became the main focus of most news reports: in 2022 the majority (52%) of recorded sexual offences against children had been committed by people who were themselves under 18. Below I’ve reproduced the first few paragraphs of the story that appeared on Sky News’s website:

More than half of child sexual abuse offences recorded in 2022 were committed by other children, new figures reveal.

Police say the rise of child-on-child abuse is fuelled by access to violent pornography and smart phones.

Data from 42 police forces in England and Wales shows that a total of 106,984 child sexual offences were reported in 2022, up 7.6% on the previous year and more than five times the just-over 20,000 reported in 2013.

The landmark report found 52% involved a child aged 10 to 17 as a suspect or perpetrator, up from a third in 2013.

Once again, Sky was typical in using the neutral terms child and children for both abusers and their victims. Some reports did include a quote from the NPCC’s Ian Critchley in which he clarified that these offences were committed predominantly by boys against girls. But that information, when it was given, appeared a long way into the story. A reader who just scrolled through the headlines would see only neutral formulations like Sky’s “Children committing half of reported child sexual abuse offences”. Even one who read the whole report would find no details of what Critchley meant by “predominantly”.

In this case that’s definitely not because no statistics were available. They were included not only in the NPCC’s report, but also in its press release, which stated that 82 percent of those who committed sexual offences against children in 2022 were male, and 79 percent of victims were girls. It’s true that the 82 percent figure included adult offenders as well as minors, but there’s other evidence showing that if you narrow the focus to “child-on-child abuse” the numbers are much the same. When the BBC’s Panorama programme investigated sexual abuse perpetrated by and against schoolchildren it found that boys were responsible for 90 percent of reported incidents, while girls made up 80 percent of victims.

Evidently the media made an editorial choice to report the NPCC’s findings in gender-neutral language (“other children”, “child-on-child abuse”), and to make no reference to the figures in the press release. It’s hard to see a justification for that choice when the pattern was so stark. Sex-specific language (e.g., “Around half of reported child sexual abuse offences now committed by boys aged 10-17, new figures show”) would not have been inaccurate or misleading: arguably it would have given readers a clearer understanding of the facts.

So why have formulas like “child-on-child abuse” and “abuse between children” (the BBC’s preferred phrase) become the norm in reporting on this subject?  One possible answer is, because it’s assumed readers already know the vast majority of abusers are male, and can apply that knowledge when they interpret the words on the page. If a proposition is already “given” information then it doesn’t need to be spelled out explicitly. But in this case I suspect that something else might be going on. Two things, actually. One reflects the view which has become orthodox in much of the media, that the gender diversity of contemporary societies demands a shift to more inclusive (which means neutral rather than sex-specific) language. The other, though, comes from a totally different place.

There is ample evidence that “gender-based” violence of all kinds—rape and sexual assault, child abuse, domestic violence, “intimate partner homicide” and cases where an individual with a grudge against women kills or attempts to kill multiple victims (the best-known such cases have involved self-proclaimed incels; in the US they are classed by the FBI as “misogynist terrorism”)—is  overwhelmingly committed by males. But for the last three decades, and especially in the last few years, men’s rights activists have made a concerted effort to cast doubt on that well-established fact by continually repeating two other propositions: first, that many or most accusations of violence made by women against men are false; and second, that there is a huge, hidden problem of violence perpetrated by women against men and children. In both cases, MRAs say, the truth has been suppressed because of anti-male/pro-feminist bias in the justice system.    

We may associate this story primarily with extreme misogynists—incels, MGTOWs, Andrew Tate—but in my experience a less extreme version has gradually gained some traction among more moderate people. Today I quite often find myself arguing with someone who, though not a fanatical woman-hater, thinks that there are “two sides to every story”, and that female violence against men and boys is a larger problem than the official figures show. I’ve even heard that belief expressed by feminists, who suggest that the problem has been underestimated because of gender stereotyping. As a feminist myself, they ask me, don’t I think that women and girls can be “just as bad” as men and boys?

If that’s a general claim about moral conduct, then the answer is yes: for me “the radical notion that women are people” entails the belief that women are no more virtuous than men. But if it’s specifically a claim about sexual and domestic violence, then the answer is no, because it simply isn’t true. People who think it is or could be true, however, are unlikely to be reading reports about “child-on-child abuse” and mentally translating that as “boys abusing girls”. For those people the media’s use of non-sex-specific terms is more likely to be reinforcing the MRAs’ message—or put another way, amplifying disinformation put out by extremists.

Am I saying that the news media are in league with the men’s rights lobby? No: I’m asking if the media’s understanding of what it means to report impartially (which in criminal cases they have a legal duty to do) has been influenced—possibly unconsciously–by the idea MRAs have worked so hard to embed in popular thinking, that the way certain subjects are dealt with and discussed in public exhibits an unfair bias against men. If that’s a concern, neutral language is the “safe” choice. You can’t be accused of being anti-male, and if someone objects that it’s misleading you can point out that there’s nothing factually inaccurate about referring to people under 18 as children, or to employees of the NHS as staff. Which is true as far as it goes, but it overlooks the point that you can mislead, distort or obfuscate by omission: bias isn’t just about what you do say, it’s also about what you choose to leave unsaid.  

It’s true, of course, that anxiety about being unfair to men can’t explain the reporting of the Southport case, where there was never any attempt to suggest that the perpetrator might not be male. If you scrolled through what was being posted on X/Twitter, however, it quickly became clear some people suspected the authorities of trying to cover up something else about him (it has since emerged that he was born in Wales to Rwandan immigrant parents). If it’s true that the victims’ sex was deemed “sensitive” information because of the way racists have exploited offences committed by nonwhite men against white girls, my own view would be that trying to address one serious social problem by denying or misrepresenting another is neither morally justified nor likely to be effective (if you don’t want to stoke racist conspiracy theories, don’t withhold information: you’ll only reinforce the message that ordinary Brits are being lied to by the powerful).

In any case, the explanation might be far simpler—that most people don’t see anything problematic about the pattern I’ve been describing. What’s wrong, they might ask, with calling a child a child? The horror and sadness we feel about what happened in Southport surely has far more to do with the victims being children than with the fact that they were female. And of course I agree with that; but if what happened was related to the fact that they were girls (and while we don’t yet know if that was the issue in this case, it has undoubtedly been the issue in some cases) then we need to resist language which obfuscates that. No problem can be addressed effectively without a clear understanding of what it is; and when girls and women are attacked by violent men, neutral language is the enemy of clarity.

Election special: things can’t only get better

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The last few weeks have been All About The Men—and I’m not talking about the football, I’m talking about the election. According to Loughborough University’s Centre for Research on Communication and Culture (CRCC), which produces a weekly report on the media’s election coverage,

Mansplaining has dominated the Media Election… While male voices have dominated in terms of political party representation, this pattern has also been replicated in the reporting of other voices… Men appear far more frequently than women as representatives of businesses, academia, trade unions, think tanks, opinion poll companies, show business, government, and public professions. Crucially women only achieve parity when being featured as ‘citizens’ or as representatives of media organisations and voluntary organisations.

Yet only a few years ago we were told that the future of politics was female: instead of shouty men talking over each other we’d have kinder, gentler politicians like the three women party leaders who featured in the 2015 campaign (Natalie Bennett for the Greens, Nicola Sturgeon of the SNP and Plaid Cymru’s Leanne Wood). Their distinctively female virtues became a prominent theme in election coverage: after the first TV debate the Guardian declared “it was the women wot won it”. Even the Tory Telegraph said they had “brought a certain dignity to an occasion which could have descended into chaos and rancour”.  

Though I was (and still am) critical of this essentialist waffle about women’s leadership styles, I thought the gushing enthusiasm would eventually morph into a simple acceptance of female leaders as ordinary and unremarkable. For a while that seemed to be happening: between 2016 and 2019 all the mainland British parties except Labour chose at least one woman to serve as their leader. But it’s amazing how quickly that moment seems to have passed: as if we’ve been there and done that, and now it’s back to business as usual. In this election only 31 percent of all candidates are women, and only one party has a female leader (Carla Denyer of the Greens, who shares the position with a man): consequently the debates and other set-piece events that form the backbone of the “media election”—generating the largest audiences and the most commentary—have featured all or nearly all-male line ups. There’s been plenty of shouting, not to mention “chaos and rancour”.

The media obviously can’t control who political parties elect to lead them, but in other respects the maleness of their coverage reflects their own editorial decisions. If men still vastly outnumber women as expert commentators on policy issues, that’s not, in 2024, because there aren’t enough women who’d be qualified to comment. And yes, it does matter: if the voices of knowledge and authority are male, and the only women we hear from are ordinary voters giving opinions in a five-second clip, the message that sends is that politics, or at least Politics-with-a-capital-P, is men’s business rather than women’s.  

In 2015 the feminist campaign group Fawcett ran a campaign called #ViewsNotShoes which criticised the way the media trivialized female candidates by paying more attention to their footwear than their political ideas. This year that problem hasn’t arisen, because women are hardly being talked about at all. The CRCC’s weekly report includes a list of the individuals who’ve been referenced most frequently in election coverage: halfway through the campaign it included just two women politicians, the shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves in fourth place and the Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner in tenth place. Carla Denyer, though a party (co-)leader, did not even make the top twenty.

But these rankings on their own do not capture the extent to which women’s voices are marginalized. Even the highest-ranked woman, Rachel Reeves, got only 5 percent of the week’s coverage, whereas the three men above her got a combined total of 70 percent. Across the CRCC’s sample (which includes both the main TV channels and the national press) women got less than 20 percent of the time or space allotted to politicians’ speech.   

Another female absence was pointed out last week by the Telegraph, which criticized Keir Starmer’s refusal to use his “vivacious and glamorous” wife Victoria as a prop. Why was he failing to capitalize on her potential to “humanise him in the same way Samantha Cameron humanised David, or Michelle Obama boosted the popularity of Barack”?

In Telegraph-world it’s obvious that this is what Important Men’s wives are for, but if Victoria Starmer thinks otherwise, good for her. The importation of the whole “First Lady” thing has always annoyed me, reaching a peak in 2015 when David Cameron’s wife Samantha was mentioned more often in election coverage than any female politician apart from Nicola Sturgeon. That wasn’t repeated in 2017, when there was no prime ministerial wife to play the SamCam role—though Theresa May did do a buttock-clenchingly awful interview on the One Show with her husband Philip—nor in 2019, when Boris Johnson was between marriages. But this year wives could have made a comeback and they didn’t. For this relief, much thanks.

It isn’t just the Telegraph that thinks Starmer is in need of being “humanised”: both he and Rishi Sunak are generally regarded as lacking in charisma. Sunak is seen as aloof and out of touch; Starmer is seen as competent but boring. During their head-to-head debate last Wednesday (where they were both, IMO, offputtingly shouty, ill-tempered and defensive) an audience-member was applauded when he rudely asked if they really believed they were the best leaders the country had to offer.

The answer to that will obviously depend on how we imagine the ideal leader. The traditional preference for male over female leaders reflects the ingrained cultural belief that men are more naturally suited to the role: they’re tougher, more self-confident and more decisive. But as well as doing women an injustice, this stereotype places a heavy burden on men who don’t conform to it. I’d put both Starmer and Sunak in that category. Neither seems comfortable with power in the way that, say, Barack Obama was—or the (arrogant and narcissistic) way Donald Trump is. Their attempts to personify the alpha-male leader are strained and unconvincing—and when they miss the mark the results can be excruciating.

An illustration of this was Starmer’s statement, repeated on more than one occasion, that he agreed with Tony Blair that women had vaginas and men had penises. What made this excruciating wasn’t just the banality of the observation, it was the fact that Starmer was ventriloquising Blair. As bitterly as feminists may disagree about sex and gender, we can surely all agree that there is no reason whatsoever to treat Tony Blair’s pronouncements as definitive. Citing Blair as his authority made Starmer sound not only sexist (“for years I’ve ignored or rebuked any woman who said this, but when Tony said it I suddenly saw the light”) but also overly dependent on his alpha-male predecessor to tell him what to think.

There’s one leader in this campaign who has been more successful at projecting alpha-maleness, and it’s not a coincidence that he is also a far-Right populist.  I speak, of course, of Nigel Farage, who made (what he presented as) a last-minute decision to reclaim the leadership of his party, Reform UK, and to stand for election as the MP for Clacton—a contest the polls predict he will win.

Like Trump in the US, Farage is more popular among men than women. He appeals to the “aggrieved male entitlement” of Right-wing white men by serving as a mouthpiece for their anger, and like all populists he makes a virtue of plain-spokenness, meaning he does not shy away from overtly rude and bigoted comments. Anger and rudeness tend to play less well with women, even if they share the speaker’s politics. That’s probably one reason why men make up two thirds of the former Conservative voters who say they’ll be switching to Reform; women who’ve become disillusioned with the Tories are more likely to say they won’t be voting for anyone.

In the past Farage has not presented himself as particularly anti-women (so long as they were white and British): though his persona has always been blokey, in his political rhetoric he has tended to stick to the racism and ultra-nationalism his brand was built on. That’s been true of British far-Right politics more generally: compared with the US or European versions it’s put less emphasis on antifeminism and misogyny as such (though if you looked, they were always there in the background). Recently, however, Farage has been leaning into a more self-conscious, ideological misogyny—not the “kinder, küche, kirche” variety embraced by Viktor Orban and Giorgia Meloni, but the more aggressive variety associated with the online “manosphere” and its cheerleaders on the US far Right. He’s been photographed with Andrew Tate, the popular misogynist influencer who’s currently awaiting trial in Romania on rape and sex trafficking charges, and in February he did a podcast interview in which he praised Tate for defending “male culture” and being a voice for “the emasculated”.  

This parroting of manosphere talking points seems to me to be a sign of the times. Misogyny was always part of the far-Right package, but in the last two decades its importance has arguably increased, in part because it seems to act as a “gateway drug”, drawing disaffected young men into the larger alt-Right world of white nationalist and neo-Nazi extremism. Perhaps Farage’s embrace of Tate is a bid to increase Reform’s support among young British men, who recent surveys suggest are becoming more and more antifeminist. If so, that makes it even more alarming that he may soon be an MP, with the platform and privileges of a mainstream elected politician.

Not that he has ever lacked a platform: the media love Farage, for many of the same reasons they loved “Boris”. Unlike Sunak or Starmer he’s a Character, a maverick, a maker of gaffes and a generator of clickbait outrage. The CRCC found that in the week he took back control, his party received more media coverage than all the other small parties combined; he himself shot up to third place in their list of the most-mentioned individuals.

I find this irresponsible. Getting media exposure has always been Farage’s superpower: it’s what’s given him such extraordinary influence (together with zero accountability, since he was never the person actually making the decisions). It’s obvious why some media outlets are continuing to indulge him (because they like his brand of far-Right populism), but those that purport to find his politics repellent should consider paying him a bit less attention. It’s true that his coverage hasn’t been uncritical, but I don’t think that’s the point: even negative attention contributes to the perception of him as a significant political figure, and it also plays into his Trump-like persona as a voice “the elite” will go to any lengths to discredit.  

It’s clear that, barring catastrophe, by this time next week we’ll have a Labour government—most likely one with a large majority. I’m not disputing that will be a positive change: I’m as keen as anyone to see the back of the Conservatives who have (mis)governed us for nearly 15 years. But beyond that I don’t think women will have much to celebrate. They will remain seriously underrepresented among our lawmakers; as a majority of the nation’s poor and of its carers (both paid and unpaid) they will suffer disproportionately from Labour’s reluctance to commit to spending what would need to be spent to rebuild our public services and reverse the other dire effects of austerity; and if Reform gains the kind of foothold the polls are predicting they’ll have reason to worry about the longer-term implications for women’s reproductive and employment rights.   

But it’s also the smaller things that rankle. Things like the persistence among male politicians of the belief that you can communicate alpha-maleness by shouting and interrupting constantly (extra points to Rishi Sunak for repeatedly talking over the debate moderator Mishal Hussein). Or like the ubiquity of the “two blokes having a blokey chat about politics” format for commentary, as epitomized by Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart: they’ve had hours of airtime on the BBC, and on election night they’ll be joining the Channel 4 line-up, while copycats Ed Balls and George Osborne, another podcasting duo comprising two middle-aged white blokes from opposing parties, will be on ITV. Both these channels’ results programmes will feature the familiar combination of a senior male presenter with a woman sidekick (if you want to see a results show fronted by a single presenter who is not a man, your only option so far as I can tell will be Sky News).

The fact that all this is still seen as just the natural order of things makes me want to scream. So does the absence (AFAIK) of any discussion of the statistic I cited earlier, that more than two thirds of the candidates in this election are men: if the results reflect that, the percentage of women MPs will be lower in the next Parliament than in the last one (where it was 35 percent). Comparing this campaign with 2015, or 2017, is a reminder that progress is not inevitable. What women need is not just a change of government, but a change in our whole political culture.