Years ago, I wrote a brief post about feminism and language, but it didn’t go into very much detail. Here’s a new version, with a bit more detail.
One of the first gender studies courses I ever took at Berkeley was an upper-division anthropology course taught by the great Nancy Scheper-Hughes. It was in a class discussion one day (I think in the spring of ‘87) that I heard something that rocked my world. We were discussing Andrea Dworkin’s novel “Ice and Fire” and her (then still-forthcoming, but already publicized) “Intercourse”. I hadn’t read the books at the time (they were optional for the class). One classmate made the case that on a biological level, all heterosexual sex was, if not rape, dangerously close to it. “Look at the language”, my classmate said; “penetrate, enter, and screw make it clear what’s really happening; women are being invaded by men’s penises.” Another classmate responded, “But that’s the fault of the language, not of the biology itself; we could just as easily use words like ‘envelop’, ‘engulf’, ’surround’ and everything would be different.” The discussion raged enthusiastically until the next class irritably barged in and chucked us all out. I was electrified.
My classmates were having, as I came to discover, a classic intra-feminist argument: to what extent is the sexual domination of women by men part and parcel of our biology, and to what extent is it a construction maintained by language that deliberately disempowers women? The consensus seems to weigh more heavily to the latter position, particularly within the contemporary (so-called “Third Wave”) feminism which was very much still in its incubation when I was discovering Women’s Studies in the Reagan years.
In every women’s studies class I’ve taught here at PCC, and in many guest lectures about feminism I’ve given elsewhere, I use the “penetrate” versus “engulf” image to illustrate a basic point about the way in which our language constructs and maintains male aggression and female passivity. Even those who haven’t had heterosexual intercourse can, with only a small degree of imagination required, see how “envelop” might be just as accurate as “enter”. “A woman’s vagina engulfs a man’s penis during intercourse” captures reality as well as “A man’s penis penetrates a woman’s vagina.” Of course, most het folks who have intercourse are well aware that power is fluid; each partner can temporarily assert a more active role (frequently by being on top) — as a result, the language used to describe what’s actually happening could shift.
Except, of course, in our sex ed textbooks and elsewhere, that shift never happens. If the goal of sex education is to provide accurate information to young people before they become sexually active, we do a tremendous disservice to both boys and girls through our refusal to use language that honors the reality of women’s sexual agency. We set young women up to be afraid; we set young men up to think of women’s bodies as passive receptacles. While changing our language isn’t a panacea for the problem of sexual violence (and joyless, obligatory intercourse), it’s certainly a promising start.
As another part of my introductory lecture on language, I talk about “fuck”. I first dispell the urban legends that it’s an acronym (I’m amazed at how persistent the belief is that the word stands for “for unlawful carnal knowledge” or “fornication under the consent of the king”; I have students every damn year who are convinced the word is derived from one of those two sources.) I then ask at what age young people in English-speaking culture first encounter the word. Most of my students had heard the word by age five or six; many had started using it not long thereafter. I then ask how old they were when they realized that “fuck” has multiple meanings, and that its two most common uses are to describe intercourse and to express rage.
There’s a pause at this point. Here’s the problem: long before most kids in our culture become sexually active, the most common slang word in the American idiom has knit together two things in their consciousness: sex and rage. If “fucking” is the most common slang term for intercourse, and “fuck you” or “fuck off” the most common terms to express contempt or rage, what’s the end result? A culture that has difficulty distinguishing sex from violence. In a world where a heartbreakingly high percentage of women will be victims of rape, it’s not implausible to suggest that at least in part, the language itself normalizes sexual violence.
I challenge my students. I don’t ask them to give up all the satisfactions of profanity; rather I challenge them to think about words like “fuck” or “screw” and then make a commitment to confine the use of those words to either a description of sex (”We fucked last night”) or to express anger or extreme exasperation (”I’m so fucking furious with you right now!”) but not, not, not, both. Rage and lust are both normal human experiences; we will get angry and we will be sexual (or want to be) over and over again over the course of our lives. But we have a responsibility, I think, to make a clear and bright line between the language of sexual desire and the language of contempt and indignation. Pick one arena of human experience where that most flexible term in the English vernacular will be used, and confine it there.
Words matter, I tell my students. We’re told over and over again that “a picture is worth a thousand words” — but we forget that words have the power to paint pictures in our minds of how the world is and how it ought to be. The language we use for sexuality, the words we use for rage and longing — these words construct images in our heads, in our culture, and in our lives. We have an obligation to rethink how we speak as part of building a more pleasurable, safe, just and egalitarian world.
Thank you for this post. I absolutely hate the F-word, more than any other word in the English language, but I hadn’t been able to put my finger on exactly what was so offensive to me about it until yesterday. (Oddly enough, in the middle of my constitutional law class where we were discussing Cohen v California, the infamous “F– the Draft” case.) It was exactly what you said in this post - that the same word is used to express contempt and intercourse.
Cue the wingers and trolls complaining that you’re trying to legislate politically correct language so that they will eventually only be able to use a handful of words in some new approved politically correct dictionary and how dare you, sir, have you no respect for freedom of speach?
Bonus points if they come up with an example of a word that gets used by some women to describe some men (brute?) and explain condescendingly how that’s exactly, precisely, just as bad, and if he’s not crying about it, then by definition we’re crybabies.
A predictable response to a request to think about one’s privilege — rage and fuck.
Thanks for the thorough analysis of how language expresses and shapes worldview.
On a very basic level, it’s a simple grammatical issue—is the penis the subject of the sentence or is the vagina the subject of the sentence. If the vagina is the subject and the penis the object, then obviously the active verb would be envelope, as opposed to penetrate.
The problem with Hugo’s suggestion is that it simply is not practical, particularly in the digital age, and that what he suggests is not the way language actually works. Words naturally shift meaning or possess multiple meanings because it is the human tendency to either create a new word to describe something or use an existing one.
While Hugo noted the association of the f-word with sex and rage, he failed to note the actual usage of the word in context to sex. The word describes a very specific, typically emotionally driven type of sex. That is likely the reason the word is used to express a host of emotional responses. The focus is on the intensity of the emotion — and not just rage, but any emotion. That it is used more commonly in anger is just the current cultural tendency.
It is, however, highly unlikely that the word has any correlation with the normalization of sexual violence against females given that males probably use the word mostly against each other. One would expect to see a higher rate of normalization of sexual violence against males if there was any actual correlation between the word and cultural opinions about sexual violence, yet male sexual victimization is not only not normalized, it is largely ignored.
I’m sorry, but I really couldn’t resist. ;)
All joking aside, I think that this gives both the word and the two (and only two) realms of human experience to which the word refers rather short shrift. Yes, it defines copulation, most often of the penetrative variety, as well as rage, contempt or indignation. Those are its two most common meanings, but not it’s only.
How about it’s use as an enthusiastic exclamation or as emphasis? I commonly hear, and every now and then say, “fuckin’ A!” or “fuck yes!” In the sexual sense, I’ve heard the word used and often used it myself, quite enthusiastically, in the climax of the act. I’ve also often heard women use the term in describing a sexual act in the first person. “Yeah, I’d fuck him.” I take something of an appreciation of that, as a sort of jaunty and maybe even empowering appropriation of the term. Describing the word as referring merely to the active part of penetrative sex seems limiting, both to the word itself and to the broad universe of sexual experience that goes beyond active-passive penetrative sex in which one partner always performs one of those roles and the other, the other.
Beyond mechanics, I’d say it gives even short shrift to the richness of human sexual experience. We have the trap here again, I think, of reductio ad raptum, the questionable linking of something or another all the way to rape, but can we say that there always is, far short of rape or anything like it, all that bright a line in every circumstance for every person between sex, exasperation, even anger or contempt at times?
I knew the second I read this people were going to focus on “fuck” and not the distinction between “penetrate” and “envelope” and take out of context George Orwell.
With Newspeak, the whole purpose of it was designed to limit what you could and could not think, as well as say. Which is precisely what our current language does. It limits our ability to think of women as active participants, and it limits our ability to think of sex and rage as distinct.
“Fuck” I think is a lot more interesting than “penetrate” or “envelope” or “engulf”. Who uses “penetrate” or “envelope” or “engulf” to describe sex except in the most dry and clinical terms? They sound like words from a postmortem exam or an incident report of some kind. “Fragments from engine number two penetrated the fuselage approximately 0.6 seconds before the starboard wing was engulfed in flames.”
“Fuck” seems flexible and rich enough to serve as a perfectly gender-neutral term at this point. Why shouldn’t it be? Otherwise, it’d be an interesting project to better develop a powerful but maybe non-profane vocabulary for sex either from a gender-neutral or from a female perspective. I’ll go metaphorical: how about “swallow” or “devour”?
Believe it or not, Tom, sex ed textbooks even now (which are widely read) use “penetrate” and “enter” rather than ‘engulf” or “envelop”. We need to change the language of the classroom as well as the casual idiom.
FWIW, there’s always a huge gender divide in my gender studies classes on this issue — overwhelming majorities of male students think the language problem is oversold; substantial majorities of female students think the problem is very real.
I’m a good guy here. I don’t have to choose which meaning to ascribe to “fuck” because I hardly ever use it–only alone, when something goes wrong! If sex is the issue, “fuck” seems to make it exploitive or cruel, and even if that’s what I was talking about, I’d find some other way to describe it. “Exploitive sex”, most likely.
That “envelop” versus “penetrate” is interesting. I’m trying to think of other contexts in which we use one or the other. You’d say “Put the nut on the bolt” if the bolt were stationary, but it would be “Insert the bolt into the nut” if the nut were stationary–but what if it’s two people with an innie and an outie between them? I suppose we assume the man is the most active one. And oh this is soooo heteronormative!
I’ve certainly read enough messages on feminist discussion boards where they talk about “PIV sex” meaning “penis in vagina”. Should it equally often be “vagina around penis”? I’ll have to suggest that next time someone talks about PIV.
I believe it, Hugo. I can see that it is a problem. I’m all in favor of expanding the vocabulary, from each gender’s perspective, plus both of them together, to allow to better and more richly describe the experience.
Oh, yes, there definitely exists a divide this way. Or, at the very least, every time I’ve argued the point the discussers have fallen that way. It seems pretty obvious to me that it’s the underlying concepts, and not the words themselves, that are the problem, and the euphamism treadmill shows pretty clearly that historical attempts at fixing the words has never worked, while the ideas are still entangled. Back when I rode the short bus, retarded was preferred terminology, today it’s just as prejudicial as “short bus”. The same’ll be true of whatever it was replaced with (if it ain’t already)
It’s not true for everything, of course. That “lame” has any meaning beyond “vaguely disappointing” is probably unknown to vast swaths of people (especially young people). The meanings aren’t connected, so the words might be disentangable. Similar to “gyp” (hell, I was twenty-five when I learnt it’s etymology).
But fuck? The others words can fill the same negative meaning (e. g. screw - I’m fucked is the same meaning wise as I’m screwed) suggests to me the problem is how we’re thinking, not what we’re saying.
I didn’t learn the “F word” until I was about 11, although I think I was somewhat late. I have to admit, it’s a favorite to use (among friends, anyway).
As for the PIV example, why not also VAP sex? Vagina around penis — I think it works :)
Hugo,
I am wondering if you know the book Metaphors We Live By? (The authors escape me at the moment.) But it would be very interesting, I think, to apply the line of reasoning and analysis in that book–which basically argues that there is an infrastructure of metaphor, expressed through language, that shapes our experience–to the word fuck and its many uses, as well as to the question of “penetrate” vs “engulf” in terms of how we not just describe, but conceive of the deep cultural structuring of sex and of all other actions that are metaphorically like sex: hammering in a nail, screwing, etc. (In my class, I always get a laugh out of students when I use “fuck” to illustrate the different parts of speech; as far as I know, it is the only word in English that can be used as all of them.)
In Metaphors We Live By, for example, the authors show how, culturally, we understand argument as war. Think of the metaphors we use to describe it, not just in terms of winning and losing, but we “defeat” arguments, we “defend” arguments, we “deploy” (or “martial”) evidence and so on. Then they ask you to try to imagine a culture where argument is conceived of as a dance, where the point is not to win or lose, but rather to create something beautiful.
I’d also like to point out that the semantic areas of language that are used for obscenity differ by culture. In English, for example, our obscenities tend to revolve around sex and elimination; in other cultures, they do not; and so there is no getting around the fact that the word fuck is used as an obscenity–and even when it is used as a positive intensifier, “fuck yeah!” or “fan-fucking-tastic,” it is still clearly impolite speech–says something about the values we attach to sex as a cultlure.
The problem of language limiting thought is a real one, varying in severity among people and situations. It is not trivial, despite what some think. Some people I suspect don’t want to admit they are less than invincible thought-wise, and the idea that their very language could be restricting their intellectual processes, scares them. For me, since I’ve battled lack-of-words all my life, it’s a given that English is primitive and vocabulary-short.
I always had trouble with the term “penetration” in regards to sex. That’s because I always thought of penetrating as going all the way thru, not stopping somewhere inside, as when light comes thru the window glass. The dictionary finally assured me that going partway thru does count, but I was well into adulthood, and quite surprised. Now, after years of drilling, tapping, broaching, and other machinist-type work, I still have problems with that usage.
Right about the introduction of terms such as enveloping or enwrapping, but I don’t know how to enforce their adoption, just like with any word I favor and want to see spread. I conclude that in some cases it’s sheer luck which ones catch on.
I love this passage from The Female Man by Joanna Russ. It depicts an act of intercourse between a woman and a man, where the language makes the woman look powerful and active, and the man look passive. I’m always torn between perceiving it as beautifully erotic (for reasons that should be obvious) and perceiving it as creepy (because the narrator is having sex with what amounts to a male Real Doll, not with an actual person).
Warning: language pedantry ahead.
There are at least three distinct things going on here: what the subject of the sentence is, what verb you choose, and whether you use the passive voice. You could say “The penis was engulfed by the vagina”. There, “the penis” is the subject, “the vagina” is the object, and you’re using the passive voice.
I’ve never quite understood how this was supposed to work. Are you allowed to inflect, or not? If yes, then why not “draft” (The draft is coming. They’ll draft you, and you’ll have to live in a drafty barracks, through which the wind blows draftily) or “drunk” (The drunk had drunk the whole bottle and was wandering drunk down the street, mumbling drunkenly). “Right” doesn’t even seem to require inflection (I have a right to right these upturned barrels, both the left one and the right one, and I’m right proper annoyed that you’re trying to stop me).
If inflection is not allowed, how do you get “fuck” to be an adverb? Maybe you just use “fucking” the whole way through? (That was some lovely fucking. I enjoyed fucking that fucking cantaloupe; it was fucking awesome.) (Ew. Sorry about that.)
P. Burke:
A quick response. Yes, of course you need to inflect, but also, of the examples you have given, neither of those words can function as an infix (fan-fucking-tastic) nor can they function as an interjection (Fuck! That was great.) I confess that I cannot now think off the top of my head of how to use fuck as a preposition or conjunction, but I know I have seen examples of at least one of them somewhere.
This just in (or as some would say, surrounded)!
Say what you like, it’s a fine thing to see literacy demonstrated.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125737663000529407.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_RIGHTTopCarousel
We look forward to the, uh, excrement, hitting the fan.
RJN: I think “right” can be used as an interjection. (Right! I’ll go do that then!) You’re right about infixes, though. Are there any non-swear words that can be used as infixes in English?
It just occurred to me that “goddamn” works the way “fuck” does, even without inflection. (Goddamn! I don’t give a goddamn if you goddamn me to the goddamn bowels of hell, although I think it’s goddamn rude of you to do so. But if you feel like it, that’s just fan-goddamn-tastic.)
I like fuckily for the adverb version, e.g. “I did pretty fuckily on that test.”
I don’t know if it works, but it always gets a laugh.
I like the entirely not related by homonymious (it sounds to me like “f*cked-up”) jewish term — “verkahtka”
as in “That’s just completely ~ !”
As for the way language defines the limit of cognition, let’s not forget Oliver Sacks work on sign language “Seeing Voices.”
A short quote on point:
it “shows us that much of what is distinctly human in us–our capacities for language, for thought, for communication, and culture–do not develop automatically in us, are not just biological functions, but are, equally, social and historical in origin
– Sacks
I thought I’d read about that from somewhere else! Goodness. I totally took that to heart and used it in some erotic fanfiction (fanfic readers are a lot more open to such linguistic experiments) that I recently wrote. For some reason I thought it was figleaf at Real Adult Sex, not you. No wonder I was searching completely fruitlessly at his blog! XD
I write erotica professionally. For me there is no getting around the word “fuck.” (or some of the female genital terms which are almost NEVER right for the story, but the publisher demands them anyway)
So far, I don’t have a lot of heterosexual work out there, but in the three I do, there is eveloping, taking him in and active female sex. Of course there is entering and penetrating as well because I write imaginary egalitarian sex, where they’re both doing it for the pleasure.
Sometimes, I think it’s easier just to write the GLBT stories.