As Deborah Cameron once said, “Teaching young women to accommodate to the linguistic preferences, aka prejudices, of the men who run law firms and engineering companies is doing the patriarchy’s work for it.” It accepts the idea that “feminine” speech is the problem, rather than the sexist attitudes toward it. “The business of feminism is surely to

Young women use the linguistic features that they do, not as mindless affectations, but as power tools for establishing and strengthening relationships.

Almost nothing about our identities can be defined on such rigid terms—gender included. If you’re a woman, you’re a person who self-identifies as a woman, no matter what your body, mannerisms, or style of dress look like.

Sociolinguists agree the creation of these different categories is connected to a deeper human desire to typologize species—to identify groups of living things, sort them, and try to figure out what their relationship is to one another. It’s a form of taxonomy: we create these labels to help make sense of the world around us and ourselves.

I’ve heard the satirical argument that women were given purses to hold and high heels to wear to physically slow them down. While I don’t take this sentiment literally, I think you can compare it to the critique of women’s voices, which are there to steal the focus away from the content of their statements, while distracting women with the anxiety

A 2017 study of body-camera footage revealed that police officers were 61 percent more likely to use low-respect language, such as informal titles like “my man,” with black drivers than they were with white drivers. Interactions like this are not a sign of affection or something the recipient should be flattered by. Because really, they’re just a s

It’s possible that people still confuse the bodily sense of masculinity and femininity (now understood as sex) and the cultural or identity part of it (gender) because these words have been used interchangeably for half a millennium. No one ever posed a semantic distinction between sex and gender until the 1960s, when folks began to realize that ou

Ultimately, language can serve as a rather blatant means of otherizing all things feminine.

Pressures for women to position themselves as “normal” and “nice” are almost always a constraint, no matter who’s listening. “None of us is ever free of the need to keep up some sort of front,” Coates says.