The languages with built-in sexism
In Amanda Montell’s Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language, she talks about how penetrative sex is described from the male perspective, not female. She suggests envelopment or enclosure, positing sex as something a woman does to a man, rather than the other way round. “If women were linguistically framed as the protagonists of any given sexual scenario, could that potentially mean that a woman’s orgasm as opposed to a dude’s would be seen as the proverbial climax – the ultimate goal?” she asks.
Similarly, women are defined by their marital status around the globe. Now in my mid-to-late 20s, I am in an awkward stage where Western Europeans bounce between calling me signorina or signora, mademoiselle or madame. Men remain monsieur, señor and signore irrelevant of marriage and age. The non-married equally experience gendered labelling – in Hindi, a bride is kanya, which also means virgin. A groom instead is doolha, a label that has nothing to do with his previous sexual experience. Urdu lacks a word to describe a divorced man, but a woman is a talaq yafta, a derogatory phrase.
Getty Images/ BBCThe social theorist and activist Jackson Katz has a quote from his Ted Talk that goes viral whenever stories of women’s sexual assault and trauma make the news headlines. “We talk about how many women were raped last year, not about how many men raped women. We talk about how many girls in a school district were harassed last year, not about how many boys harassed girls…so you can see how the use of the passive voice has a political effect. It shifts the focus off of men and boys and onto girls and women. Even the term ‘violence against women’ is problematic. It’s a passive construction; there’s no active agent in the sentence.”
