The power of words is that they are what we use to give form to thought and feeling. Tellingly, so many of the words we use about gender are loaded with shame and violence. After so many years of writing, researching and thinking about this topic, I am still sometimes surprised by the power of words to create shame and how often this happens without anyone noticing.
The way we use words to describe the victims and perpetrators of men’s violence against women provide an easy example. A “spurned lover” in one headline is the “violent controlling man” in another one. The “drunk teenager” is also the “child raped by a man in his 40s”. A woman’s “fatal errors” could more accurately be described as “a man’s decision to kill her”.
When we describe a violent, controlling man as a “spurned lover” he becomes an object of sympathy because we all understand that rejection hurts and he’s a “lover”- a man who loves a woman, not someone who abuses her. The “spurned lover” is the victim. The “violent, controlling man” is the perpetrator of violence and the only person in the relationship who has power and choices over the abuse.
Words loaded with shame are used to perpetuate all the myths about gender stereotypes that contribute to men’s violence against women. Those words we use to shame anyone who doesn’t conform to the “real man” or “good woman” binary.
Shame is incredibly powerful, partly because it’s so insidious. It doesn’t leave any physical marks, it’s not always easy to identify and it’s so often weaponised in even the most casual of interactions.
If you think about the words we use to shame men, they’re all very familiar, most of us have heard them or maybe even used them without thinking too much about it.
Words like pathetic, don’t be such a girl, weak, gay, pussy, whipped, limp dick, little bitch. These words don’t apply to women, or if they are used about women, they have a very different meaning. Men who don’t conform to the rampantly heterosexual, stoic, “real man”, are punished by being shamed. If shame doesn’t work, physical violence can be the next step. Shame and violence against men for not being proper men is so deeply damaging, especially when it happens, as it so often does, when they’re young. That shaming stole happiness, peace and futures from so many men. Even the ones who didn’t directly suffer still saw it inflicted on others. And they all learned to fear it.
We use different shaming words for women. Slut, ball-breaker, desperate, feminazi, bitch, old hag, ugly. And, of course fat. Because nothing is more shaming for women than being told they’ve failed in their duty to be passively fuckable. These words we use for women who don’t stay small, sweetly quiet and nicely inoffensive. Those words that never, ever apply to men.
Bitch is an interesting one, because it’s used to shame both men and women, but it has a different meaning depending on the gender of the person it’s used against. If I was to call a man a little bitch, most people would understand it to mean that I think he’s small, weak, whiney, unable to physically defend himself. But if I said the same thing about a woman it would mean she’s mean, catty, nasty to people in petty ways. Subtle differences but they point to how we use language to inflict shame on people who are not complying with the arbitrary rules of gender roles.
The language used against people who do not fit the heterosexual gender binary can be so wounding that there is no justification for repeating them. Most of us have heard those words or seen them floating in comment sections sewage. The point and the power of them is to inflict what can sometimes become fatal shame.
Most of my work on the Fixed It project concentrated on how variations in language are used in media reporting on men’s violence against women. The Fixed It book gave me more scope to examine how it works in other areas of media, such as politics, sport, pop culture and entertainment. But gendered shame extends far beyond journalism.
It’s pervasive in entertainment media, slowly getting better in news media and is shockingly ubiquitous on social media. While gendered shaming words are almost always present in obvious aggression, not all occurrences of gendered shaming are obviously aggressive. It’s in the so-called jokes, memes, passing comments, even in the way we express minor frustrations or moments of defensiveness.
Shame becomes so ubiquitous that we stop noticing we are being shamed or worse, that we are shaming others. The imperative to avoid shame by appearing to conform circles in on itself and attempts to shame people who actively object to the use of those words. Weak men, feminazi women and the unmentionable others are forcing fabricated identity politics and political correctness onto real men and good women! We must defend the right and moral way to exist before we all become deserving of shame!
Words, shame and power. So obviously simple and so subtly complex. It’s no surprise we find them so difficult to disentangle but difficulty has never been a good reason to refuse to even try.
Jane Gilmore was the founding editor of The King’s Tribune. She is now a freelance journalist and author, with a particular interest in feminism, media and data journalism and has written for The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Daily Telegraph, The Saturday Paper and Meanjin, among many others. Jane has a Master of Journalism from the University of Melbourne, and her book FixedIt: Violence and the Representation of Women in the Media was published by Penguin Random House in 2019.
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