by Emma Byrne
The same attitudes exist on the other side of the Atlantic, too. Dr. Robert O’Neil of the University of Louisiana carried out a study in 2002 in which he showed transcripts containing swearing to both men and women. If he told the volunteers that the speaker was a woman, they consistently rated the swearing as more offensive than when they were told that the speaker was a man.9 I asked him why he thought that might be. Gender roles are, it seems, still largely to blame—and these roles are as prescriptive for men as they are for women. “Men are expected to be aggressive, tough, self-reliant, always looking for sex, and most importantly, not effeminate. Women are evaluated first and foremost on appearance. But we also expect women to be caring and nurturing, and to be nice to everyone.” Dr O’Neil also thinks that power plays an important role: “Because women and children have been seen as weaker than adult men, it has been deemed necessary to protect them from profanity, pornography, and other privileges of power.”
As we saw in Chapter 2, on pain and swearing, women with cancer who swear even tend to alienate their friends over it, while men don’t face the same condemnation (here). With social censure like this in place, it wouldn’t be surprising to discover that women bow to the pressure to swear less. But when you look at the numbers, women have been bucking this pressure and starting to swear more since at least the 1970s. We know that the differences between men and women swearing are not so clear-cut in practice.
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If you want to study how people actually use language, the best place to start is with a corpus: a huge collection of written and spoken language that is representative of how that language is actually used. The British National Corpus (BNC) has thousands of examples of spoken and written English and is representative of how the language is used in British society. Created by the Oxford Text Archive in the early 1990s, it contains 90 million written words and 10 million spoken words of British English taken from letters, newspapers, books, school essays, and informal, unscripted conversations. If we want to understand the differences between the way language is used by different groups of people then we can mine this database and compare vocabularies.
Most words will be used identically by everyone. Some, such as “and,” “it” and “the,” will be used too commonly to show any difference. Others, such as “xylophone” or “platypus,” will be used too rarely. Some words make for terrific indicators of social difference: think of the class and age distinctions in England that underlie the difference between “mum” and ‘‘mummy.”
If we examine how the utterances and writing in the BNC differ between men and women we find some interesting patterns. While women swear almost as much as men in public (45 percent of public swearing in 2006),10 the nature of male and female swearing is quite different. In the BNC, “fuck” and its variants turned out to be the most significant indicator of male speech—that is: if the word “fuck” was used and you had to guess the sex of the speaker, you’d be right most of the time if you said that the speaker was a man. On the other hand, of the top twenty-five words that were characteristic of women’s speech, not a single one was a swear word.
Does that absence of swear words in the female lexicon mean that I’m an aberration? Surely not, if women account for nearly half of all publicly recorded swearing. So what is going on? It turns out that the type and variety of women’s swearing is very different from that of men’s swearing. In the Lancaster Corpus of Abuse (a database that is a lot like the BNC but is restricted to swearing), Professor Tony McEnery found that British women were just as likely to swear as men.11 The most significant difference is that women tended to use milder swear words (“god,” “bloody,” “pig,” “hell,” “bugger”) than their male counterparts.
But that seems to be changing. In a brand-new study, set to be published in 2018, Professor McEnery analyzed about 10 million words of recorded speech, collected from 376 volunteers. Women’s use of “fuck” and its variants has increased fivefold since the 1990s, whereas men’s use has decreased. If you’re interested in the exact scores, women now use “fuck” and its variants 546 times per million words, while men use them only 540 times per million.12
In the United States, gender differences still appear to prevail, although that might simply be an artifact of exactly who is asking the questions. Professors Lee Ann Bailey and Lenora Timm from the University of California, Davis, discovered that their male students swore more and used stronger swear words than their female students. However, they also found that people have a strong tendency to curb their bad language in front of parents, children, and the opposite sex.13 Might women appear to be using milder language because the majority of data collection carried out until the 1980s was done by male professors?
In order to test this hypothesis, Dr. Barbara Risch of New Mexico Highlands University carried out a study of the insulting swear words that women used for men.14 Dr. Risch asked her female students to stay behind after class and ensured that all of the interviewers carrying out the study were also female. She asked the young women the following question: “There are many terms that men use to refer to women which women consider derogatory or sexist (broad, chick, cunt, piece of ass, etc.). Can you think of any similar terms or phrases that you or your friends use to refer to males?”
After some initial reticence, the women in her class—all university undergraduates—let rip with an impressive array of swearing that Dr. Risch organised into categories such as animal (“bitch,” “pig,” “dog”), birth (“bastard,” “son of a bitch”), head (“dickhead,” “shithead”), dick (“dick,” “prick,” “cocksucker”), and others (“jerkoff”—sadly “wanker” hadn’t yet crossed the Atlantic).
With no men around, they were much more comfortable swearing. “Do women swear?” gets a different answer depending on who’s asking, it seems. While Dr. Risch’s study doesn’t prove that women have been hiding their swearing from male sociology professors down the years, it did open up the possibility that women’s swearing had been systematically underreported and that “Why don’t women swear?” is actually the wrong question to ask altogether.
No Shit, Sherlock: Women Swear Whether You Like It or Not
It isn’t just American undergraduate women who are prepared to swear in front of female (but not necessarily in front of male) instructors. A slightly later study in South Africa replicated this result.15 Dr. Vivian de Klerk at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, Eastern Cape, showed that teenage girls were just as likely to know and use bad language as boys of the same age and background. In fact, these teenage girls have an impressive array of words for boys, both ugly and good-looking: my personal favorite is the phrase “ovary overflow” for an attractive man.
In the UK too, women have been using swearing for self-expression. In the early 1990s, Dr. Susan Hughes of the University of Salford was studying the language used by women who attended a family center in Ordsall, Greater Manchester, a deprived, inner-city area of the north of England.16 Here, male unemployment is common. Female employment is usually in menial jobs such as cleaning or factory work. The women have tiring and challenging lives as both the main breadwinners and heads of the family.
Tasked with keeping their families together in the face of poverty, unemployment, and social blight, they adopted matriarchal personas. These women needed to be obeyed and, perhaps, even a little bit feared. By using strong language these women earned respect, both from each other and from the men they taught to swear. When faced with a choice between the language of purity and the language of power, collectively they decided that purity could go and fuck itself.
Dr. Hughes was volunteering at the family center to help with a literacy program. She noticed that these women didn’t speak the way the scientific literature said that they should. All of the existing literature suggested that women would be more likely to use polite forms of speech than they were to swear, particularly in their roles as mothers. Instead, she found that the women were proud of their swearing, and of passing on t
he skill. “It’s not swearing to us. It’s part of our everyday talking,” said one woman at the center. “We’ve taught men to swear. Foreigners what’s come in the pub,” said another proudly.
Among these women, swearing isn’t being used to shock anyone. Dr. Hughes noticed that the women didn’t much care who did or did not hear, nor did they care about the effect on the listener. However, the women did differentiate between swearing as an insult and swearing “just because.” “To call a child ‘a little bastard’ or ‘a little twat’ is at times almost like an endearment,” she observed, although the same words were used when telling children off.
However, some swearing was off limits, or at least frowned upon. The women at the community center tended to be more religious than the general population. While they were comfortable with “bastard,” “cunt,” and “shit,” most of them said they would never use “Jesus,” “God,” or “Christ.”
The women in the Ordsall community center were dealing with extremely stressful circumstances. It might well be that their profanity was another example of swearing as a response to social pain. But their cursing was mainly friendly and jocular, especially among themselves and toward their children. To me, it seems to be propositional and strategic, chosen for the effect of shrugging off restrictive gender norms and reclaiming some power.
Something happened in the twentieth century that helped to take the lid off women’s swearing. In the 1970s, the women’s liberation movement encouraged women to seek the same fulfillment in the workplace and in society in general as their male counterparts. Along with this social shift came a change in women’s language. One of the earliest studies to show this came from Professors Marion Oliver and Joan Rubin.17 They discovered that the greatest predictor of whether or not a woman swore was whether or not she was married: women who had rejected the status of wife and homemaker were more likely to feel comfortable swearing. For some participants in the study, there seems to have been an element of protesting too much: those women who wanted to be liberated but were still working hard at becoming so were more likely to swear than the women who already felt fully liberated. The earlier mentioned study by Professors Bailey and Timm (here) was carried out around the same time. In their research, they found that women in their early thirties were marginally more likely to use slightly more strong swear words than their male counterparts. Perhaps these were women who didn’t feel confident in their liberated status and were overcompensating.
The willingness to swear—and even a certain pride in doing so—had spread to the UK by the turn of the twenty-first century. A study of teenagers on MySpace from 2003 by Professor Mike Thelwall of the University of Wolverhampton found that there was no significant difference between male and female British teenagers overall, but that boys were slightly more likely to use very strong (e.g. “cunt”) and mild (e.g. “tosser”) swearing, while girls were more likely to use strong swearing (e.g. “fuck,” “asshole”).18 What’s more, British teenagers were much more sweary than their American peers, to my immense patriotic pride. One of the young women wrote on her profile: “I am foul mouthed but if you’re gonna get any man to listen to you these days you have to talk like them (motherfucker!).”
She makes an important point. Most swearing is neither aggressive nor an anguished explosion. It’s something we choose to do for a deliberate effect. Ironically, what began as a move to restrict women’s power has actually resulted in a kind of backhanded prestige. By refusing to accept restrictions on their language, these women are making a deliberate statement: “Take me seriously (motherfucker!).”
When women swear they tend to do so for the same reasons that men do. But discovering that women do, in fact, swear has perplexed some researchers. While there hasn’t been a study to look specifically at the reasons why men swear—perhaps because it’s seen as the default, normal, not in need of explaining—women’s swearing seems to have demanded an explanation.
Why Do Women Swear?
Dutch linguists Eric Rassin and Peter Muris, perhaps inspired by Sigmund Freud’s “unanswered question,”† published a paper with the title “Why Do Women Swear?”19 Professors Rassin and Muris don’t tell us whether they were surprised to discover that their female students happily confessed to using, in decreasing order of frequency, the words “shit,” “kut” (Dutch for “cunt”), “Godverdomme,” “klote “(“bollocks”), “Jezuz,” “tering” (“tuberculosis”), “kanker” (“cancer”), “lul” (“prick”), “tyfus” (“typhus”), and “bitch.” But they did find that, even among a relatively homogeneous group of young female students, the use of swearing was extremely varied, with the reported number of swear words used per day ranging from zero to an impressively loquacious fifty. Not all women (and presumably not all men) are equally comfortable with—or motivated by—swearing.
While most research into swearing suggests that it is mainly used positively and constructively, the women who took part in this study said that they swear most often when they want to express negative emotions, then when they want to insult someone, and, in last place, when they want to express a positive emotion. Women who rated themselves as highly aggressive tended also to swear more but there was almost no connection with how satisfied they were with their lives.
Is there really a difference in the reasons why men and women swear? There might be. Men tend to feel comfortable using swearing in a jokey manner, as well as using it as a tool. For women, swearing is much more likely to be instrumental, to be used very carefully for effect. Professors Bailey and Timm found that the women they interviewed were also more likely to use swear words as a rhetorical device, to inject a bit of “punch” into their conversation. Said one interviewee: “I like ‘that’s fucked’ or using ‘fucking’ as an adjective, and am impressed by others who can effectively interject a curse into conversation. It makes for dynamism in communication.”20
Dr. Karyn Stapleton says that women use swearing instrumentally to make an impression or ensure they are heard in mixed conversations—mainly because swearing is still seen as a “gender transgressive” act—it’s still a hallmark of being one of the boys, especially if you’re a girl.
“Among the women I’ve interviewed some of them definitely swear to subvert gender expectations: they’re swearing to resist being seen as the good girl,” she told me. However, that’s not the whole story. Women also swear for much the same reasons that men do: to express or cover up their feelings, to make an impact, to raise a laugh, even as a form of politeness, but women run a much greater risk of social censure if a jocular bit of swearing goes flat.
“When you ask people about swearing, their first association is with aggression but their use of it is much more nuanced,” says Dr. Stapleton. Women might say that swearing—even their own—is mainly negative but in practice we are capable of using it to be funny or inclusive: remember Ginette from the Power Rangers in chapter 4.
Ironically, despite its association with aggression, Karyn believes swearing might be a way of communicating pain and sadness for men and women alike: “That perceived association with verbal violence is one reason why swearing is more traditionally associated with a male speech style. However, swearing can actually be a way of covering up vulnerability for both genders.”
I asked her if this might be another reason why the frequency of swearing is still higher for men than women in the various corpus studies that have been carried out. Men are under greater social pressure to hide their vulnerability, whereas it’s still more acceptable for women to talk about their feelings of uncertainty or hurt. There’s definitely more research to be done but we do know that both women and men will adopt whatever kind of speech is expected from them in different social contexts. Both genders feel a pressure to conform, but in different ways.
“If you work in a context where swearing is the norm then women are going to swear, partly because they have to keep up with the men,” Karyn told me. “But in interviews, women told me that they tend to
use swearing for its social aspects—for humor and bonding. Women do a lot of this type of swearing.” So rather than becoming more aggressive, we women are probably adopting more swearing as yet another way of being polite.
Women Are Bitches, Men Are Cunts: Gender-Specific Swearing
While women might be swearing alongside the men, men and women swear differently. In particular, the words we use about each other differ.
One of the big differences between men and women is the language we use about each other. In 2002 Claudia Berger from the University of Illinois looked at the ways in which male and female students insulted people, either to their faces or behind their backs.21 She found that the students came up with more insulting words for men than for women (seventy-nine different male-specific swear words versus forty-six female-specific ones). Among those, the bad language used about women and men is very different.
These students were more likely to use words that implied women were sexually incontinent (“slag,” “whore”). Men, on the other hand, tended to attract swear words that suggest they aren’t red-blooded heterosexuals who will shag any available woman. Men are most likely to be insulted with names that question their sexuality (“fag,” “nancy”) or masculinity (“cunt,” “girl”).
