Did you know that “grooming” only began to be used in courtrooms in the 1990s? Before then, the word was “seduction”. And did you know that the term “revenge porn” was only coined in 2007? “Over a decade too late,” writes Sarah Ditum in her new book Toxic, “to be of any use in explaining the injury done to [Pamela] Anderson.”
Reading about the ills of 90s pop culture this week – Britney Spears also has a new memoir out – I was struck by a recurring theme. Of the many forces that helped push us out of that particularly misogynistic decade, a non-trivial element, I think, was the invention of new phrases to describe what was happening to women. “Slut-shaming”, “body-shaming” and, of course, “revenge porn” – these synthetic words had yet to take off when Lindsay Lohan and Amy Winehouse were being bullied by the media on a daily basis. And this, I think, mattered.
