Mind your language by Samantha Mutu-Grigg

Growing up I didn’t notice it. ‘Mankind’ felt like it included me, and ‘you guys’ was a neutral term for groups of people - I used them without thinking. It was normal. I often didn’t use words like chairman and mail carrier over chairman and mailman, it was just an inconvenience to change. It still meant the same thing, why bother? It’s just words - It’s not that deep.

It wasn’t until I started to pay attention, to really pay attention. It wasn’t until I saw how women are treated, and became educated on the oppression of women historically, and in our current society that I saw that it is, in fact, that deep - it’s always that deep.

Language is not something that is neutral. It never has been. The English language, my mother tongue, the language I speak everyday was built and shaped by men, who [only] viewed men as the default, and the norm. Women were the exception. The language treats women as if they are an anomaly, as inessential, yet it treats men as the essential subject and the standard of humanity, an idea Simone de Beauvoir called ‘the other’ or ‘othering’ in her famous book The Second Sex. The othering of women is incredibly prevalent in the English language, but if you aren’t listening, if you aren’t watching you’ll never catch it. You’ll never understand and you’ll never mind your language.

Man up, Businessman and even Freshman, these words place Masculinity as universal. Femininity is the deviation from this. Femininity is to exist separately from normality. When a woman comes out of medical school, she’s a Female Doctor, but when a man does the same thing he’s just a Doctor. We add a modifier for the women. We must announce her womanhood and femininity because we are saying to ourselves: she’s not the default.

We don’t just place men as the neutral in boardrooms, it’s also in the bedroom.
We need to talk about sex. When a man sleeps with ten people, we call him a Stud, a Player or even a Legend. But when a woman does the same thing, what do we call her? A slut, a whore or ran through. It’s the same act. Different judgement. While one gains status, the other loses humanity. The verbs we use about sex also expose the sexism in the English language. Smash, hit and tap - these are not mutual acts. These are things one person, the man, does to another person. The penetrator, men, have the active role, while the passivity belongs to the person being acted upon, which in our culture and society, is the woman. Our language teaches us that women do not have sex, instead, they are had.

Far too often, we are dismissive. Dismissal protects. It protects that language and the violence and struggles which stem from it. I’ve seen it in real time, I’ve seen it unfold. On Tiktok, X, Instagram and nearly every social media platform: online misogyny doesn’t begin with violence. It begins with vocabulary. Terms like Femoid, Foid, and Bop strip women of humanity and individuality. It turns them into categories, into objects. Meme culture will tell you this is irony, but when it’s repeated a thousand times over it stops being irony and becomes normality.

Then normal becomes ‘But she was asking for it’. The Manosphere didn’t create our tolerance and dismissal. Andrew Tate, and later, Clavicular, only had to find a microphone to amplify the language we already allowed. Alpha Male, Beta, Looksmaxxing. Every word that we absorb without question is another barrier stopping us, holding women down.
So, what do we do?

True Feminism isn’t simply believing that men and women are equal - the philosophy and the idea are the easy part. Real feminism is speaking up. It’s saying people or humankind over mankind. It’s calling out misogynistic and sexist language. It’s refusing to laugh at the joke that was never funny. It’s hearing smash and replying with ‘Smash what, exactly?’

We are not helpless. Things change because we change it. Language changes because we change it. Giving women the right to vote felt otherworldly 150 years ago, but now our opinions on democracy cannot exist without it. That’s what happens when we decide not only that we need change, but to make it, when we decide to be the change we want to see.
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The oppression of women survives and thrives because its language feels almost invisible. Let’s make it seen. Be annoying about it! Be dramatic, be sensitive, be loud.
Before its violence, its language. Women are actively being oppressed through the way we, as a society, speak and communicate, so I urge you to mind your language.

By Samantha Mutu-Grigg
​Year 12 ENWN