Did you know that “grooming” only began to be used in courtrooms in the 1990s? Before then, the word was “seduction”. And did you know that the term “revenge porn” was only coined in 2007? “Over a decade too late,” writes Sarah Ditum in her new book Toxic, “to be of any use in explaining the injury done to [Pamela] Anderson.”
Reading about the ills of 90s pop culture this week – Britney Spears also has a new memoir out – I was struck by a recurring theme. Of the many forces that helped push us out of that particularly misogynistic decade, a non-trivial element, I think, was the invention of new phrases to describe what was happening to women. “Slut-shaming”, “body-shaming” and, of course, “revenge porn” – these synthetic words had yet to take off when Lindsay Lohan and Amy Winehouse were being bullied by the media on a daily basis. And this, I think, mattered.
The birth of a popular neologism – “mansplaining”, “snowflake”, “doomscrolling” – tends not to be treated with much seriousness. These words are variously kicked around, sneered at and applied to everything in sight. They’re seen as a bit of trivia, an eye-rolling testament to “where we are now” as a culture. But there’s a case to be made, I think, for them being much more powerful than we acknowledge. Particularly when they’re attached to a political movement, such as the feminist one.
Take mansplaining, for example – a word manufactured around 2008. Women had been describing the phenomenon – essentially, being patronised by men – for at least a century and a half. Here’s George Eliot in Middlemarch writing about the travails of her heroine on honeymoon: “If she spoke with any keenness of interest to Mr Casaubon, he heard her with an air of patience,” she writes. “[A]t other times he would inform her she was mistaken, and reassert what her remark had questioned.”
But the notion that this was a feminist issue – a sort of insidious claim that women are less competent than men – only really took off when someone came up with a catchy name for it. This happened about a month after a now famous essay by Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me, went viral. The portmanteau word showed up in the comments section of an online message board, and quickly started to appear in feminist blogs. Suddenly it was everywhere.
Coining a modern, trendy term seemed to shift the terms of debate. The claim that men routinely patronised women was both easy to dismiss and too boringly familiar to get excited about. But mansplaining quickly became so established and high profile that the opposition was forced to concede a point before it started. Rather than argue mansplaining didn’t exist in the first place, those who disagreed with the idea confined themselves to trying to limit its scope – that such-and-such incident was not mansplaining, or so-and-so was not a mansplainer.
Or take “mental load” and “weaponised incompetence”, phrases that now speckle feminist discourse. The idea that household labour is unevenly distributed between male and female partners has of course been kicking around for decades. But these new terms seem to have reignited debate – not only in public but between couples themselves. Lawyers say they have even been cropping up in divorce proceedings this year.
Several things are happening here, I think. One is that activist movements are helped by novelty. In order to draw public attention to a social issue you must first make it seem fresh – and a trendy new name does the job. (People unmoved by the plight of women whose sex tapes had been leaked suddenly found themselves caring about the victims of “revenge porn”.)
But the other is that putting a name to a social problem gives its victims a certain dignity, which then makes it more likely they will speak out. Suddenly, instead of going through something unique and embarrassing (which, who knows, might have been their fault) they have merely been witness to a cultural trend. The issue is no longer individual, but structural – something for society to deal with. In fact you could say the project of feminism is taking bad things that happen to individual women and calling them by a single name.
After all, you can really only take on oppression once you find a word for it. A recent paper by the Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin notes that the word “discrimination” was rarely used to describe the treatment of women until the late 1960s. Only then was progress made in addressing it.
The women’s movement of the 60s began to make strides only once it found a word for the injustice it was to fight. An early candidate for this was “male chauvinism” – but this faltered at the hands of the media, which sought to caricature this “man hating” movement. “Up against the wall, Male Chauvinist Pig!” ran a satirical Playboy headline.
The movement eventually plumped for “sexism”, a word coined in the US in 1968 as a direct analogy to “racism”. The comparison was important – Americans already acknowledged racism as a definite evil. Feminism, then much ridiculed, could borrow the public dignity won by the civil rights movement. The choice of word propelled the cause forward. “To those who had never thought of women as an oppressed class, the verbal analogy suggested for the first time the possibility of such an analysis,” writes Fred R Shapiro. “A slogan that carried with it associations of established seriousness was a potent weapon in the movement’s arsenal.”
Once the problem was named, the fight could begin.
• Martha Gill is an Observer columnist
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