You rarely notice the moment when you finally get over a cough; one day you just think, “Oh, I haven’t been coughing for a while.” Similarly, I don’t remember when I stopped getting comments about being blonde. Throughout my early life, “Blondie!” would be shouted from passing cars, or there would be a lame apology right before a dreadful “dumb blonde” joke. I’ve even been asked in the past why I don’t dye my hair, the implication that I’d be taken more seriously as a brunette. But that doesn’t happen any more. There are still remarks shouted from passing cars and apologies before stupid jokes, but the significance of hair colour has faded just as my own has dulled and given way to grey.
My own experience seems to be backed up by research. The Spoken British National Corpus 2014 study has analysed 2.5 million words of conversation and has compared these to similar studies from the 1990s. A few preliminary findings have been released over the past few months, including that the use of the word “marvellous” has declined (sadly and infuriatingly replaced by “awesome”), and that we drank less sherry at Christmas but more champagne. Now the lead researchers claim that men are using fewer sexist terms to describe women than they did in the 90s.
Women are now rarely referred to as “blonde” or “sexy” in conversation and “are being described more in their own right and less in terms of their appearance.” Interestingly, there has been a rise in the term “girly girl” — seemingly because this archetype needs a special description as the cutesy-feminine behaviour of the late 20th century is no longer the norm.
Change in attitude?
But does this change in language mean a change in attitudes? Certainly there seems to be a marked difference between the “lad culture” of the 90s to what we are seeing now. Lad mags are on the decline and are radically shifting in response to changing tastes. The Inbetweeners may have popularised the word “clunge,” but at least they are acting their age and don’t seem to be aspirational (rather them than 40-year-old men going to work on a skateboard and ironically taking pictures of women eating on the Tube). Yet, 2014 seems to have been the year that “Twitter” and “rape threat” became synonymous. It’s also been the year that sexism in video game culture hit the mainstream with Gamergate, and there was the debate as to whether convicted rapist Ched Evans should be able to resume his life while his victim cannot. Even a U.N. expert thinks the U.K. is a “boys’ club.”
So is misogyny just something that we feel uncomfortable displaying in public now? And are the misogynistic conversations simply moving online? Do people talk about “lovely” women to each other, yet threaten to rape them online when they disagree? Of course, language evolves, and just as interesting as the words that have disappeared are the ones that have emerged. Apparently new words for describing women include “international,” “gypsy” and “Italian.” Depending on the context, these could all be derogatory terms and based on appearance rather than actual nationality (although goodness knows what an “international woman” is, I just hope it’s suffixed with “of mystery”). “Italian” is obviously far from a negative term in itself, but given the size of that country’s population and recent immigration trends, it seems unlikely that there has been an influx of Italian women into Britain that we were unaware of.
Men seemed to have been increasingly pigeoned-holed by their occupation, as there is a rise in the terms “city,” “business”, “working” and “rich” in relation to them. These may hint at men’s continued power, wealth and influence but are also just monumentally boring. And just as social networks can veer towards the rapey, they can also be well used to address sexism with campaigns such as Lose the Lad Mags, No More Page 3 and the Everyday Sexism project.
As women have increasingly taken to dying their hair regularly, any claims to characteristics based on hair colour have gone from immature to nonsensical. Instead there appears to be an increased interest in ethnicity or perceived ethnicity. Perhaps another sign of the times. But there is clearly a divergence between what people say about women between themselves, and the emergent language of online interactions which are extreme, polarised, often violent and far from marvellous. Given the speed of change online, hopefully 2015 will be the year that we look back with embarrassment at old-fashioned flaming. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2015
