Welcome to a new year, brewed in the same old giddy mix of patriarchy and swearing, often invisible to our sober selves. The act of swearing is embedded in our day-to-day discourse, an expression of solidarity, an act of intimacy, of anger or of humour. To say think before you swear is pointless, for it is meant to be spontaneous and to offend. Or is it ? Now that’s a prickly road. However, I’d like to leave Dale Spender’s golden words here, the bone of contention, “there is sexism in language, it does enhance the position of males, and males have had control over the production of cultural forms…” Truer words have never been spoken.
A general understanding of the swear words that occupy the conversational space, social media, and popular culture would produce the consensus that one cannot swear without insulting the female sexuality, reducing women to bestial characters or by bringing up synonyms and relations to the more offensive genitals, of course, the vagina. The cis-het man is rarely relegated to being the object of insult. It is his mother or sister, the gender-queer, or allusions to feminity and weakness that form the greatest of all affronts he must tackle. The vitriol of gendered slurs is often diluted by the popularity of these in the media culture.
The popularity of English swearwords cuts across socio-cultural spaces, with the existence of regional variations of the beloved English profanities and slang words. Oh, and not to mention the stand-up culture in this country, that has boomed this year, where being funny is proportional to saying the worst things about gender-minorities. Scoop Whoop published a list of top profanities from 17 Indian languages. (Un)surprisingly, in nearly all 17 languages, the top words are gendered and misogynistic, spewing venom at women who are not even part of the conflict.
These little packets of misogyny have also evolved to become inevitable components of pop-culture, magazines and news headlines, social media conversations, and captions. Pottan (a Malayalam word that is used as an alternative for fool) in integral presence in daily exchanges of the community, furtively masking its allusion to the word sissy. This trend is also reflected in how the meanings of words are streamlined. The term “bop”, originally a slang term for a catchy song, has altered itself for the masculine psyche, becoming a marker for a person (read woman) who displays their body on the socials and is licentious. The language of swearing obliviates the female identity, forcing women to adopt the very language that reflects vicious denigration of their self, to sound cool.
This is not a latter-day phenomenon. In the Malayalam movie Megham, as early as 1999, the protagonist calls his wife a “bitch” assuming that she killed their baby on purpose. From Eminem’s 2000 super-hit Superman (perhaps even before that), to BIBI’s Korean hit Vengeance (and a whole bunch after), gendered slurs have predominated various music genres. In subreddits for entrance examinations, students use the worst variants of misogynistic slurs, constantly engaging in discussions of making the subjects (specifically difficult ones like Maths and Physics) their bitches. The idea is plain : something that is more difficult than it should be, requiring the need to be under a man’s control (in subordination or feminised). In sports, this is their mother tongue, with players (ahem, a captain) directing them at teammates or opponents who underperform. To be a bitch is to be insensitive, catty, manipulative, and unnecessarily difficult. To be called a bitch was considered worse than being a prostitute as the latter at least gained financially through the distribution of sexual favours. While women like Kristen Stewart are often branded with the “resting bitch face” for not making an effort to appear appealing or for not smiling for the male gaze, there is no male equivalent to this term. And there likely never will be.
The term “slut” evolved in a similar manner, from Chaucer’s dirty man (in the 14th century), to a kitchen-maid (in the 15th century), to a woman with an unclean house (in the 18th century) to its current use as an exclusive referent for women of “questionable” sexual morals and characters. No man is condemned to being a hoe. It is the woman, shamed for exercising agency over her body. The word “pussy”, with its feline origins, has been one of the harshest insults in male friend groups, used as derogatory slang for a man who is not masculine in the traditional sense, ineffectual, weak, or, to be precise, a feminine man. These words are not content with spouting hatred at women but they make things exceptionally difficult for the gender-queer—a discussion in its own right. In severely patriarchal societies like that in India, swear words are not innocent, but a question of power.
Many of the gendered profanities, especially bitch and hoe, are reclaimed by women in an attempt to strip them of their negative connotations (similar to the reclamations of terms like ‘dyke’ and ‘queer’ by the LGBTQIA+ community). However, the need to understand the misogynistic roots of the language of community building is important. Projects like Gaali Bandh Ghar and The Gaali Project were established to weed out the gendered invectives. Raising Our Voices (ROV) foundation recently brought gender sensitisation to Malayalam with their workshop 'Nava Mozhi'.
As Toni Morrison said, “we do language”; thus, words are not mere utterances of insignificance. They are political acts of power, resistance, or subversion. To put things in perspective, quoting Jessica Valenti from Full Frontal Feminism: “What’s the worst possible thing you can call a woman ? Don’t hold back, now. You’re probably thinking of words like slut, whore, bitch, cunt (I told you not to hold back!), skank. Okay, now, what are the worst things you can call a guy? Fag, girl, bitch, pussy. I’ve heard the term “mangina”. Notice anything? The worst thing you can call a girl is a girl. The worst thing you can call a guy is a girl. Being a woman is the ultimate insult.”
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK.
