bossy jerk

 Originally published on Language and Philosophy, February 9, 2016

Sheryl Sandberg, Corporate Operations Officer of Facebook, has created a Ban Bossy campaign to encourage girls to be leaders. Many celebrities have expressed support for the campaign and even advertisers have taken up the cause as a means to market to women.

 

Sandberg makes several distinct claims about the use and meaning of “bossy.” Some have merit, others are misleading. All of them are fruitful for understanding cultural roles, inequalities, and how they play into perception, attitude and emotional response. I want to take them separately and look at some data.

 

• “bossy” is used more to describe females than for males

• this disparity shows an inequality in our cultural stereotypes

• cultural stereotypes influence our perception of behavior and our emotional response to behavior

• the cultural role of boss is masculine so males can’t effectively be disparaged by “bossy”

• the cultural feminine roles include nurturing roles, not boss roles, so females playing the boss role are perceived as inappropriate

• the cultural masculine roles include boss, so when men abuse their authority or are pushy or bossy, their behavior is accepted as a norm

Evidence supports some of these claims but not others. A linguistic analysis leads to a more complex relationship between cultural roles/stereotypes/expectations and human attitudes/perceptions/emotional responses that may be independent of the culture. I’m using a beautiful data mine developed by Ben Schmidt. It mines Rate My Professor, an online website that allows students to review their professors. since the professor’s name is identified, the reviews can be sorted by professor’s sex, give or take a few ambiguous names. Professors are quintessential authorities, the reviews are perfectly suited to an understanding of the use and frequency of words like “bossy.”

 

First, the data clearly show that “bossy” is used more often for female profs than for male ones, although it is used substantially for male professors too. Does this imply that female professors are perceived as bossier than males? That is the Ban Bossy claim — women are rejected in positions of authority. A quick look at “jerk” seems to refute that claim.

“Jerk” is used exclusively for males and it appears in the corpus far more frequently than “bossy” — something like 35 times more frequently. That’s not a little. It’s a huge difference. Are there other negative epithets that might be used for women that are more frequent than “bossy”?

“Mean” is also used more frequently for females than for males. Does this support the Ban Bossy view?

The distribution of “jerk” implies that our language has gendered epithets. “Jerk” is for males, “bossy” for females. If that’s so, then the reason “bossy” is used more for females than for males implies nothing about the emotional response to female roles. It’s used more often because “jerk” is the preferred epithet for males.

The data actually show the opposite of the Ban Bossy view of emotional response to female/male role or expectation. Students object to male authority frequently, possibly more frequently than female authorities. The greater frequency of “mean” for females shows the same: why describe a male as “mean” when there are so many more, and more expressive, epithets for men, including not just “jerk” but “dick,” “douche,” “dickhead,” “prick,” “douchebag,” “son-of-a-bitch,” “bastard” and the declining “schmuck.” Rate My Professor no longer allows the most common epithet for males, “asshole,” but the data mine provides partial data — I assume that Rate My Professor closed below-the-belt epithets shortly after they appeared.

Couple of points here. The wealth of epithets for men imply that in our culture we freely object to male abuse of authority. It’s enshrined in the language. The frequency of their use demonstrates that we object to male abuse of authority. So the differential use of “bossy” is purely linguistic fact, not a fact about our perceptions influencing emotional response. We dislike abuse of authority whether the authority is male or female.

The data also show that our language is gendered. There seem to be many more epithets for male abuse of authority than for females, which does very much correlate with the social fact that men are mostly bosses, or that through the development of our language, bosses were mostly men.

Notice that both “bossy” and “mean” are not particularly gendered in themselves and are literally descriptive and not either metaphorical or metonymic. All the vulgar male epithets are metaphorical or metonymic or both: they refer to taboo body parts some of which metaphorically relate to acts of sexual violence, or they relate metaphorically to the social stigma of illegitimacy. In the context of Rate My Professor, “bossy” and “mean” may indicate a second choice after “bitch” which RMP will not accept as a review. Not exactly a euphemism, but a kind of nonce euphemism.

More important, there are many negative words for females, but they do not cover the abuse of authority. Several include “dits,” “airhead,” “twit” (used for both females and males), “bimbo.” I compare these with cultural female/male attire: pockets are the characteristic of male attire; not only are pants and jackets full of pockets and dresses, skirts and blouses largely devoid of them, but taking a minimal pair — men’s jeans and women’s jeans — you’ll find that women’s jeans’ pockets are often shallow and useless, whereas mens’ are deep and many. Pockets are utilitarian in the sense of of managing the outside world through tools. Pockets hold those tools. Womens’ wear is designed for attractiveness (whether for the male gaze or otherwise), not any other utility besides covering and warmth, and often inadequate for both of those.

Putting the attire next to the epithets a pattern emerges. The cultural roles for men are ones of control and manipulation of the world including other people. The response to their aggressive control is a wealth of epithets that object to male power. The cultural roles for women include aesthetic appeal. The negative epithets might be described as “pretty but useless.”

It seems to me important that the responses to authority in RMP shows that our attitudes towards these cultural roles do not numb our emotions. Any expectation that the boss will be male does not incline us to accept the abuse of authority or prevent us from objecting to it in the strongest terms. So we can distinguish between the cultural roles and the perceptions of them. The data implies to me that culture does not determine thought, it just gives us different ways to express our thoughts depending on cultural categories.

The Ban Bossy campaign has given us an important avenue of research to discover

a. the cultural roles embedded in our language

b. the independence of our responses to those roles

The feminist agenda is a fruitful lens with which to investigate not just the facts of our society — inequities of pay and power — but also of culture and attitude in our language and our perceptions.

Part II — Questions for further research

A more disturbing fact in the data is the disparity in use of “brilliant” and “genius.” These are not gendered words, yet they are used to describe males more frequently than for females, and “genius,” the more hyperbolic word is even more biased towards men than “brilliant.” Assuming that females are at least as bright as men if not brighter, how do we account for this disparity in perception?

In this case, I speculate that this is not a linguistic fact but a behavioral and perceptual reflex — exactly the opposite of the “bossy” analysis which is merely about the lack of available gendered words for female abuse of authority. If males are brought up in our culture to be special, competitive and superior, while females are brought up to be servants — the nurturer, the mother who serves her children,m the caretaker — it would be no surprise if the male instructor in class would present himself as special, competitive with his ideas and superior, while the female instructor would be focused on the students.

Ladies and lords: refitting the feminist model of pejoration

Originally posted on Language and Philosophy June 11, 2007

It’s become a chestnut of feminist linguistics — maybe it’s better to call it gender linguistics, to remove the politics from the science, if that’s possible or wise — that the frequent pejoration of words for disempowered people on the one hand, and the frequent pejoration of words denoting women on the other, strongly implies that women have been socially disempowered through the history of the language (as if one needed evidence for this!). Words like “knave,” which once meant simply ‘boy,’ and “villein” which meant merely ‘peasant’ have pejorated, and even “boy” is pejorating in exactly the way “knave” did: “I’ll get my boys on it” says the pop culture mobster, meaning not that he’ll get his male children to do it, but that he’ll get his servants, his henchmen. On the other hand, words denoting objects of value don’t pejorate even if they are female: the generic term for cattle is “cow,” for Daffy’s cousins, “duck” not “drake.”

I’m not going to contest the disempowerment of women, but I think the feminist correlation is too neat. The dynamics of pejoration seem to differ depending on the word, some showing signs of disempowerment, some not, so it is good to look at the cases one by one. I have in mind the female&male pairs

lady, lord

governess, governor

queen, king

madam, sir

princess, prince

all of which niftily show pejoration in the female-, not in the male-denoting word.

LADY

Starting with “lady,” the pejoration of which does, I think, show a gender difference in empowerment or prestige: the word began as a designation for the wife of the Anglo-Saxon chief. Each tribe cultivated its warriors, bringing them all under one roof of the chief’s house (remember King Lear and his rowdy entourage his daughters refused to host — Lear was an Anglo-Saxon king). In the warriors’ big house, the chief was the warden of the loaves, or “hlafweard,” (later “laward,” eventually “lord”) and she the loaf kneeder, the “hlafdige” (later “lavedi,” eventually “lady”). A difference in power and prestige is obvious at the origin. Even though labor is more essential to social survival, it is distinguished here from authority and possession which are handed to the male of the pair.

But “lady” was not without prestige. Most important, she and the lord were socially unique. There was but one lady per tribe. The closest equivalent in present-day English would be “queen.” Subordinate she may have been, but she received her tribe’s deference deflected from her husband.

Power relations changed under the Normans. The unique Anglo-Saxon chieftain was replaced with a class of superiors. Under occupation, all the occupiers may as well be kings with respect to the occupied. And the words “lord” and “lady” reflect this widening of denotation, but “lady” much more than “lord.” Feudal Norman male-oriented culture may have helped sustain the prestige and uniqueness of “lord” and while there were many Norman lords and ladies, there was still only one ruling lord in the land, but no corresponding ruling lady.

Dick Leith, in his Social History of English, tells a story of the replacement of informal “thou” with formal”you” in class-mobile industrial society where one never knows who is a genuine social superior and who is just new money, so people hedge their bets to err on the side of formality just in case. No doubt the same with “lady.” And again, the association of unique power to rule may have prevented “lord” from wallowing in such commonality. To have many ladies in ones social order may be an embarrassment of riches, but it is no contradiction. To have many lords is both. And so, today a lady is distinguished from the general class of adult females by the least mark of prestige. That it retains some prestige is evident from its ironic use in “ladies of the night,” which wouldn’t hold its humor and irony if it weren’t that whores don’t count in the usual inventory of the set denoted by “lady.”

The word today is full of surprising contrasts. As a common title of address it is formal but insulting:
Excuse me, lady (so demeaning it isn’t used anymore)
Compare:
Excuse me, miss (according to my students, always preferred to “ma’am”)
As a descriptor, it is distinguishable from “woman” only in its absence of sexual, warm-blooded connotation
It’s that lady over there
It’s that woman over there

Sensitivity to gender inequality is rendering this “lady” obsolete. It survives in “ladies and gentleman,” and in circumstances where “gentlemen” is perceived as too formal, “women” is often perceived as too human.
The men on the left, ladies to the right
though it can depend on the gender of the speaker — women in polite situations often seem to feel the need to show more delicacy addressing men and vice versa.

The standard denotation of “lady” has widened immensely, spreading its girth almost to cover the entire class of adult females, its only vestige of prestige its lack of human warmth and sexuality.

However, it has great vitality as a colloquialism, where its connotations of dignity and respect reappear. Your lady is your girlfriend. It’s a title that seems to combine endearment with deflected respect (my woman deserves the respect I demand for myself) and subordination all rolled into one. Not too far from “hlafedige.”

MADAM

As a term of address and a title, this word has not lost any more prestige than its male counterpart. The expansion of both reflects the decline from feudal rules to bourgeois pleasantries. It’s its use as a euphemism for the brothel administratrix that is claimed by feminists to distinguish “madam” from “sir.” It must be the power of the prestigious male that spares “sir” the place of “pimp.”

I don’t think so. Euphemism replaces an unacceptable word or covers an unacceptable idea with an acceptable word. (There are euideisms as well, but I leave that for another discussion.) There’s no eu if the stand-in word isn’t in itself acceptable and prestigious. In the case of “madam,” the denotation itself commands some respect. The pop culture image of the madam is full of dignity. She resembles nothing so much as an imperious, rigid, protective prioress of an abbey, and she’s usually tougher to bring down. The image of the pimp: a vile and villainous, cheaply and comically pretentious, tasteless and reprehensible predator. The pimp holds a special place in our culture. He is universally despised. There have been many sympathetic treatments of drug addicts, whores, indigents and criminals of all sorts, murderers, rapists, serial killers, even Hitler is probed for his motives and the possibility of an underlying human interest, but the pimp is such an unworthy worm no one will take his cause even to investigate his human motives. Why euphemize him? We don’t.

(A pander is a different person entirely.)

Euphemism as a road to pejoration doesn’t always prove disempowerment. But it does by definition prove the prestige of the euphemic word. If the euphemic word doesn’t have some prestige, then it can’t serve as a euphemism, there is no euphemism. Euphemisms have prestige by definition.

GOVERNESS

Another case of euphemism. And again, it is the prestige of the word and the (small) prestige of the position that invites the euphemy. And it’s not just a euphemism for baby-sitter or nanny: it pays better and provides better references and maybe even accommodations of an au pair. Apparently “governor” has undergone worse as “gov’nah” though not stateside, where governors all rule one or another of the fifty states of the union. Other uses of “governor” have an air of anachronism in the US.

The point here is not to deny that the female-denoting word has pejorated — it has — but to learn something from the particular process of pejoration. It is not enough to describe these euphemisms as simple reflections of lack of empowerment or prestige. Euphemism is a reflection of prestige, not its lack. The euphemism is dragged down by the denotation of the word it replaces, not by social disempowerment. It’s a case of no good deed going unpunished. The feminist story is not entirely wrong. It’s just partial.

QUEEN

Gender inequality is most evident here at the top. There’s no “queen of the mountain,” no female Elvis “the Queen,” no “Queen Kong.” The cross-gender epithet carries such an intensely negative implication, that one has to wonder whether males have commandeered social affect and mores in the language, here at least. Male disparagement of femininity is nowhere more evident than in this one epithet that equates everything anathema to manhood with womanhood, and not just womanhood, but the ultimate woman, the queen. The word virtue itself derives from Latin vir, ‘man.’ We’re at a puzzling place for the understanding of linguistic values. Mothers’ linguistic influence is surely greater on children, male or female, than fathers’. So what is the origin of this capitulation to maleness? Were women so thoroughly marginalized in common discourse? Were they treated as mere chattel? Judging from the language, they were.

More later, I have to get to rehearsal.