My name is difficult. All my life, it’s been mispronounced, misheard, misspelled. It’s such a common experience that I’m surprised and impressed when it’s represented correctly. When my name is used incorrectly, there’s a way in which I feel incorrect, like my presence is not fully accounted for.

We all have stories about our names and, whether they are difficult or common, our experiences with them help cultivate our identities. For people with names that do not subscribe to English language convention, like writer Durga Chew-Bose, the experience of feeling like an outsider due to the treatment of a name represents a belittling of an “essential sense of self.”

It was perhaps with this acknowledgment of the effect of a name that I found myself defending the correct spelling of bell hooks’ name, which I recently included in a profile I wrote about a comedian. The experience was strange — though I argued with editors about the basic fact of respect and the troubling imposition of capitalization and even sent them links to style guides and other publications that have all honored the correct spelling, they stubbornly believed that their conception of “reader clarity” and “stylistic consistency” superseded the proper presentation of a prominent philosopher’s name.

Eventually, dissent culminated to a point it should have never reached and the editors made the right decision to present hooks’ name accurately — but not without reprimanding and patronizing me for posting publicly about the plain fact of the error and the clear embarrassment I felt as the named author of a piece that meant a lot to me and included this egregious oversight.

We all have stories about our names.
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The misrepresentation of hooks’ name amounts to a misrepresentation of, and disrespect for, the educator as a person. That the decision to respect a person by invoking the correct spelling of their name turned into a heated debate perplexed me, though it really shouldn’t have, given that language has always been a site of domination. The experience was a clear embodiment of the exercise of white privilege at a basic systemic level, and it revolved around a writer and thinker whose work seeks to dismantle that very thing. The irony was transparent. (Not to mention the additional irony that lies in the fact that my profile was about the importance of language.)

No matter the reason for hooks’ decision to lowercase her name (according to her Berea College biography, she claims this spelling is meant to draw more attention to her work than who she is), featuring her name incorrectly amounts to a distortion of her identity.

And to distort an identity in the name of grammar is to distort an identity in the name of an imposed convention that has silenced cultures and communities for centuries.

Fundamentally, the power of names is intricately woven into the fabric of our individual and social identities. In many cultures, including the West, the act of naming exhibits dominion or power over something or someone. Examples abound in stories found in mythology, religion, folklore, film, and fiction.

In Greek mythology, invoking the name of the god of the underworld, Hades,summons the god. In the Bible’s Book of Genesis, God names light into being and Adam is tasked with naming the animals of the world in order to exercise man’s dominion. In the Gospel of John, we find the introductory verse naming the Word as God. In fact, A Russian dogmatic sect called the Name Worshippers (heresy according to the Russian Orthodox Church) claim to know that God exists because God can be named. And according to the Kabbalah, the name of every creation is its life-source.

Many stories in popular culture are also rife with powerful name themes. For example, in the Germanic fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin and the 1988 film Beetlejuice, plot is bound up in the way names break a spell or summon a presence. In the novel The Handmaid’s Tale and film Spirited Away, young women are enslaved, the domination inscribed in the act of naming.

One of the most culturally and historically relevant illustrations of how naming and language is bound up with power and the exercise of dominance is the practice of European colonizers attacking, defiling, and altering African names in order to suppress and erase African identity. For slaves, names encompassed their identities as individuals but also aided in the survival of a collective history. Despite this erasure, one of the ways in which enslaved and free Africans sought to preserve culture and identity was through naming. In “Naming and Linguistic Africanisms in African American Culture,” Lupenga Mphande writes that, “The movement for re-naming and self-identification among African Americans started at the very dawn of American history.”

The violence with which name, identity, and colonialism is embedded with slavery is exemplified in the novel and film, Roots, wherein the protagonist Kunta Kinte seeks to retain his birth name at the expense of extreme physical and psychological abuse. First shown on television in 1977, it had a significant impact upon naming in the African American community. As Richard Moore writes in The Name ‘Negro’ — Its Origin and Evil Use, “when all is said and done, slaves and dogs are named by their masters, free [people] name themselves.”

In fact, the history of the English language has always been tied to power and patriarchy. This is most keenly illustrated in the following etymologies, tracing female-centered words back to roots which define women by their relationship to men and how they are useful:

Female: Latin, femina, meaning fetus

Lady: Old English, hlaf dige, meaning loaf kneader

Girl: Old English, gyrlgyden, meaning virgin goddess

Woman: Old English, wifman, meaning female man

Male: Latin, mascul, meaning male

Boy: German, bube, meaning boy

Man; Old English, mannian, meaning man

Words are not merely names or parts of a sentence structure; they represent a dynamic of power relations. They do not exist in a vacuum; they are connected to our relationships. How we communicate language is a social process.

In Language and Power, linguist Norman Fairclough builds upon ideas of linguistic and ideological predecessors like Mikhail Bakhtin, Louis Althusser, and Michel Foucault to assert that language is the primary medium through which social control and power is produced, maintained, and changed, and advocates for “critical language awareness.”

Fairclough writes:

“‘Critical language awareness’ is a facilitator for ‘emancipatory discourse’ . . . which challenges, breaks through, and may ultimately transform the dominant orders of discourse, as a part of the struggle of oppressed social groupings against the dominant bloc.”

Ultimately, for Fairclough, awareness of language and how it contributes to the domination or subjugation of others is the first step toward emancipation. Though language is not the only site of social control and power, it is the most immediate medium at our disposal.

The English language’s implementation as a homogenizing force and its “correct” use is intricately bound up with notions of colonialism. As bell hooks herself writes:

“Standard English is not the speech of exile. It is the language of conquest and domination; in the United States, it is the mask which hides the loss of so many tongues, all those sounds of diverse, native communities we will never hear . . . in the incorrect usage of words, in the incorrect placement of words, was a spirit of rebellion that claimed language as a site of resistance . . . We seek to make a place for intimacy. Unable to find such a place in standard English, we create the ruptured, broken, unruly speech of the vernacular . . . There, in that location, we make English do what we want it to do. We take the oppressor’s language and turn it against itself. We make our words a counter-hegemonic speech, liberating ourselves in language.”

While the history of capitalization in English is obscure, the convention itself seems to be one with no clear function. During the late 17th and 18th centuries, it was customary to emphasize most English nouns with a capital letter. Personal names and proper names were indistinct from ordinary nouns, with the ultimate decision left up to the writer. It seems that typesetters and printers found the abundance of capitalization aesthetically and economically unnecessary, so, slowly over time, common nouns began to be written in lowercase while “important” nouns were italicized and certain proper nouns were capitalized.

Indeed, the arbitrariness of the convention only underscores the absurdity of imposing it onto a person’s name. Deborah Cameron, a feminist linguist and professor of Language and Communication at Oxford University, tells me, “Whoever says, ‘But the rule is, names get upper case initials’ hasn’t really thought it through: Names are a class of words whose ‘correct’ form is whatever the name’s owner says it is.”

Therefore, imposing capitalization onto bell hooks’ name, in a cruel irony, alters her identity as an African American woman and a scholar who seeks freedom through language and its resistance. Lisa Moore, professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at UT Austin, bluntly explains, “To misname [bell hooks] by changing the capitalization of her name is to put racist and patriarchal values above the thoughtful decision and strategy of one of our foremost philosophers.”

Imposing capitalization onto bell hooks’ name, in a cruel irony, alters her identity.
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Imposing a convention or prescriptive onto language disregards the fact of its inevitable evolution and represents an attempt to colonize it in some way. Of linguistic prescriptivism, Nicholas Subtirelu, assistant teaching professor in Applied Linguistics at Georgetown University, writes, “Within the field of linguistics (particularly sociolinguistics), prescriptivists are generally seen as looking for a rationalization for their own attitudes toward others, which might include racist or classist attitudes.” Subtirelu believes that “prescriptivism” is worth practicing, but that it should be motivated by political or moral concerns. “We should not be policing others’ language for deviance from arbitrary rules. We should be policing others’ language for the way it represents the world and others in it.” For this linguist, there is only one prescriptivist commandment: “Thou shalt not use language to harm.”

Which bring us to our current moment, one in which people are policing language for the ways in which it represents the world and the people in it, the ways in which it perpetuates or dismantles power which subjugates and dehumanizes. Some are asking for more responsible use of language while others are decrying “political correctness” gone rogue; some are irresponsibly over-policing, while others are irresponsibly sputtering; some even believe that First Amendment rights are being violated because real consequences are the result of careless and disrespectful language.

There is no “correct” language, only thoughtful and careful language. Language informed by its history. Compassionate language. Language which invites rather than excludes. Language which, most importantly, evolves. “Correct” implies there is only one way for language to be, that language is prescriptive. But language is malleable; it evolves because we are malleable and we evolve. Even the existence of the term “politically correct” and its pejorative use embody exactly the opposite of what thoughtful and generous language is about and what it seeks to accomplish.

At a time when a serious presidential candidate wields cowardly language so flippantly and disrespectfully without any regard for the people he is demeaning or emboldening, fighting my editors for spelling hooks’ name correctly felt all the more imperative. What kind of hope remains if we can’t even get the language right?

Sensitivity to language is responsibility to language, and respect for its power to call forth whatever is summoned by its use. The effects of language matter. We can start by speaking to each other by the names that we choose.

What do you call your private parts, to yourself, to your doctor, in polite company? There are plenty of slang words for the female genitalia—some cute, some raunchy, some silly, some banal—but none of them, not even the scientific-sounding vagina, is quite right.

The term vagina refers to the canal that connects the inner, non-visible organs—cervix, uterus, ovaries—to the visible, outer part, which is the vulva. Often, when we refer to our pussy, hoo-haw, cooter, or vagina, we’re actually talking about is our vulva. Given that “vagina” isn’t —arguably— the prettiest or most exciting word out there, why is that our collective, patriarchal culture insists on using it?

Swedish artist Liv Strömquist wants women to reclaim the word vulva. Or, more specifically, she wants us to—finally—claim it. The illustrator, whose book of graphic nonfiction, Fruit of Knowledge: The Vulva vs the Patriarchy, was released in English last month, aims to destigmatize the female body, especially the vulva, the orgasm, and menstruation.

The 40-year-old feminist activist felt a lot of shame about her body growing up, especially when it came to menstruation. As an adult, she decided to start looking into the taboos associated with the female body. She started asking pointed questions, like, “Where does the taboo around the vulva come from? Has it always looked the same throughout history? How does the taboo around the vulva affect us women psychologically?” she told me via email in early October. “All these things were very interesting for me. I wanted to investigate why there is so much shame surrounding women’s bodies—and in particular the genital parts—in order to change it.”

And then, in 2012, she started turning what she had discovered into Fruit of Knowledge (originally published in Swedish in 2014 as Kunskapens frukt), a cultural history that explores—in edgy, satirical tones and comic-book form—the pathologies, politics, and oft horrifying punishments that female and trans bodies have suffered at the hands of religion, science, and men.    

The meticulously researched Fruit of Knowledge chronicles—toggling between dead serious and drop-dead funny tones—the female body’s mistreatment and mishandling, starting with Eve and winding through history, medicine, pop culture, sex ed, contemporary advertisements, and more.

As graphic nonfiction gains more of a foothold in the literary world, we see more and more serious subjects conveyed in comics form. Here it brings awesome power to a misunderstood and hushed-up topic.

Where does the taboo around the vulva come from? Has it always looked the same throughout history?
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“So much is communicated with a well-drawn side-eye, angry eyebrows, etc.,” translator Melissa Bowers told me via email. “The first time I read [Fruit of Knowledge] I was either giggling, cringing, or both. I was so charmed by Liv’s simple, expressive drawing style.” Charmed is a surprisingly accurate response to the way Strömquist conveys information. When asked why she chose the comics form to write about such thorny material, she said, “I’ve always really liked comics, since I was a child. If you see a comic in a magazine you immediately want to read it—and this is why I really like this art form. It’s very appealing, not difficult or pretentious. It’s folksy. Articles about feminism and left-wing politics often tend to be very heavy, academic and serious, so I like to make my work fun to read.”

Fruit of Knowledge certainly achieves that artistic intention, turning a gallery of “Men Who Have Been Too Interested in the Female Genitalia” into an informative yet humorous hall of shame, and, in “Blood Mountain,” poking fun at the superstitions around menstruation, while also digging into ancient times, when it “appears that menstruation was MORE holy and LESS icky.”

For thousands of years and across cultures, Strömquist relays, the vulva and menstruation had been integral parts of the sacred landscape—vulvas made their appearance in Greek myth, Egyptian lore, European fables, and notably, monasteries, churches, and village gates in Celtic culture. It was once believed that the female orgasm was necessary (and thus highly valued) for procreation. Sounds a bit different than the way we treat the female body today, doesn’t it?

Strömquist explains the disparity this way: “The very overt hatred and fixation that the monotheistic religions have with the female body and sexuality [arose because religions]—in their early stage—were in competition with fertility cults.”

During the Enlightenment, and with the rise of medical science (and male doctors), those in power had to come up with new theories for female inferiority.

For thousands of years and across cultures, Strömquist relays, the vulva and menstruation had been integral parts of the sacred landscape.
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Strömquist continued explaining that:

“Science had to try to find explanations as to why women were different from men and couldn’t have the same access to power and money in society. Before they could say, ‘Women have no power in society because that’s what god wants’—but later they had to come up with scientific reasons. That’s when medical science started to obsess on things like the uterus, menstruation and so on.

“In the debate over if women could enter university in the end of the 1800s, there was a doctor who wrote a book that argued that women couldn’t enter university because of their menstruation. If they studied, their brain would use the blood they needed for menstruation, and become infertile. So if women started to study in the university, it would be the end of the human race.”

This might sound extreme to us now, but considering the contemporary struggle to simply close the gender pay gap or support working mothers—how far have we really come? Society continues to use the female body—and its natural functions—against women.

While much of what Strömquist covers in her work relates to the biologically female body, she also fixes her searing gaze on the binary two-gender system, criticizing the surgeries that intersex babies undergo, often in the first weeks of their life, which only serve to “categorize genitals” and “remove sensitive tissues that the person might miss later in life.”

In “Blood Mountain,” the chapter which covers menstruation, Strömquist explores the fallacy of PMS being linked to a particular gender, illustrating her point with a male figure skater lifting a leg to expose bloody panties, accompanied by the captioned thought that if we didn’t live in a binary two-gender society, “I could have drawn the first page of this chapter like this → Or in some completely different way!! Which I am too socially conditioned to even think of!!!”

Social conditioning plays a strong role throughout Strömquist’s work, and she’s keen to exploit that awareness, not allowing how we culturally perceive biology and gender to dominate her art.  

In all areas of her work, Strömquist explores “provocative” subject matter. Last year, her art came under fire last year when Stockholm’s metro commuters found her subway illustrations of women menstruating “disgusting,” while others insisted it was awkward explaining the red stains to their children.

“There was a big debate over my pictures when they were displayed in the Stockholm Metro-station,” Strömquist says.

“They were vandalized twice so they had to be replaced with new prints. There was a political debate, where the populist right-wing party in Sweden wrote an article criticizing the use of tax money to support this kind of art and promised that if they got in power they would replace this kind of art with pre-modern oil painting. People still have quite strong feelings about [menstruation], which I find interesting.”

Despite the controversy over her artwork, she also “received a lot of support and positive reactions” for depicting menstruation—something that happens to millions of bodies every day—in a celebratory public forum.

Strömquist currently lives in Malmö, where she works for a youth radio station and hosts a political podcast. She has two new books in the works. One, a comic titled “Rise and Fall,” covers “climate change and problems of world capitalism.” The other is “a book about the social construction of romantic love,” which she hopes to see published in English as well.

In her chapter, “Upside Down Rooster Comb,” where she quotes Sartre and The Latin Kings, Strömquist also cites psychologist Harriet Lerner, who has been writing about the consequences of mislabeling the vulva as the vagina for decades. Lerner “likens this misuse of language to ‘psychic genital mutilation.’”

Whereas the vagina is often described in terms of absence, “a ‘hole’ waiting to be filled with a cock,” the vulva is very rarely mentioned—in conversation, and even in biology textbooks.

We are literally discouraged from properly naming the vulva. “If we don’t have the words,” Stromquist says, “we cannot understand what the organ is or how it looks and works. Words are really important. In many languages there isn’t even a proper word for the [female] sexual organ—one that isn’t an insult.”

Imagine being encouraged to call your arm your hand, or being told your entire life that your toes are your leg. This kind of senseless mislabeling encourages confusion, avoidance, and embarrassment, all of which prevent many people from treating the vulva with the respect and veneration it deserves.

If we don’t have the words we cannot understand what the vulva is or how it looks and works.
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Given the current political climate in the United States, Strömquist’s vibrant, excoriating work is more necessary than ever. Fruit of Knowledge is the kind of self-care Western culture needs—accessible, intelligent, and engaging renderings of culture and history—that provide the encouragement to help us finally name and reclaim the female body.

In 2011, RuPaul’s Drag Race season 3 saw need enough to include definitions for slang terms like “fishy” across the bottom of the screen. Watching this season for the first time in 2018, I almost burst out laughing. The thought that a viewer wouldn’t know what “fishy” meant seemed absurd.  But that’s what Drag Race, and other touchstones of queer culture, do: introduce its viewers to a slew of slang terms that quickly become ubiquitous. In 2016, Bernie Sanders accused the DNC of throwing shade, and the phrase “Yass, queen” has permeated from Broad City gifs to Target merchandise. Queer slang has never been more visible in, and interactive with, mainstream Western culture.

Slang used in gay and queer spaces, while yet to be officially named, is considered an “anti-language”—the vernacular used by an “anti-society,” or a marginalized group within a society. Anti-languages generally aren’t full languages of their own, but “provide… a new and different reality in which [members] can construct and portray alternative (i.e., non-normative) identities without fear of censure or reproach” (Levon, 2010).

Queer anti-language in particular is hard to pin down, because slang terms are generally learned from exposure to queer communities, rather than being inherent to them (like a native language). But what we’re here to talk about is when an anti-language like this comes into contact with the mainstream it initially branched away from. Let’s watch the sauce, shall we?

It May Die Out

If you’ve ever looked into the history of queer vernacular English, you’ve probably stumbled across Polari. It was a British vernacular used by performers, thieves, people of color, and, in particular, gay men. It’s also the darling of Lavender linguistics, as one of the best-known instances of queer anti-language. Adapting words from romance languages, Yiddish, and London slang, certain phrases could signal your place in an anti-society, while straight people who overheard you would remain none the wiser.

Polari was necessary because being openly gay was a crime. But the rising homophile movement of post-WWII British civil rights exerted pressure on queer people to abandon identifiably gay characteristics like the use of Polari. Homosexual sex between men was decriminalized in 1967, ostensibly removing the need for covert language among gay men. (So often a chance at legal recognition comes with increasingly conservative politics—what of arguments to segregate trans people from the queer community after the legalization of same-sex marriage?) But the final blow came with the radio show Round the Home, where millions of listeners were treated to an education in Polari that evaporated both the vernacular’s secrecy, and the use of Polari itself.

Anti-languages like Polari fulfill two purposes: creating a community of people in the know, and keeping out people who threaten that community. Once the threat wanes, so does its use, though Polari echoes in both queer spaces (“trade,” for example, was one of its gifts dating back to the 1600s) and beyond (in words like “scarper” and “naff”). Given that shows like Drag Race and Queer Eye are being renewed into infinity, however, the likelihood of this slang dying out altogether is “nada to vada.”

Anti-languages like Polari fulfill two purposes: creating a community of people in the know, and keeping out people who threaten that community.
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Its Meanings May Change

As a niche vernacular becomes accessible to more people, its definitions tend to the general. Where “trade” under Polari meant “sex,” I first encountered it to mean “a straight-presenting man who may have (possibly paid) sex with a man or with a trans woman.” The associations with “macho” presentation were on display in the Drag Race’s Trade challenge (where we learned that some of these girls simply do not know the meaning of the word). A drag queen would seem to be the antithesis of all that is trade, yet during the same season Kameron Michaels is identified as “the trade of Season 10.” All of these meanings have to do with sex, and often with masculinity, but the flexibility for a single syllable to indicate anything from “the sexual act” to “an attractive man” indicates that the ongoing process of meaning expansion. More people are exposed to queer slang means more meaning expansion.

On the other hand, the interaction of queer slang with mainstream English may multiply the meanings available to them both. As Milani (2015) found, when an anti-language (in this case, Tsotsitaal, associated mainly with black South Africans) is exposed to the mainstream, their coexistence can yield new and “highly hybridized linguistic combinations” that didn’t previously exist, or weren’t previously possible. (Think of how “realness,” handed down from ballroom queens of yore, can now be comprehensibly appended to just about any word) Just like connections via the internet have engendered a proliferation of queer slang and in-jokes, the bigger the number of people using the language, the more different uses of it there will be.

Sometimes, an anti-language becomes so absorbed by a mainstream one that it’s almost impossible to tell them apart. Just like (probably British) people use “scarper” and “naff,” unaware of their origins in Polari, the incorporation of queer slang terms into mainstream English language obscures their origins. Even innocuous terms like “hot” and “hunk” came to us via the Harlem club scene—the ordinariness of a word seemingly inverse to our familiarity with its history.

In Indonesia, this phenomenon is occurring without the corresponding visibility of queer folk that we see in the West. There is limited understanding or presence of queer people in mainstream Indonesian society, possibly as a result of the lack of legal protection for them and anti-LGBT+ rhetoric among politicians and religious conservatives.

However, a vernacular known as bahasa gay is much more widely known, especially in Indonesian popular culture (Boellstorff, 2004). This is partly attributed to television personality Debby Sahertian, who gave the public an education in the anti-language when she published Kamus Bahasa Gaul, a dictionary of terms that doesn’t hide their roots in bahasa gay. On the one hand, it’s said that she once apologized to queer Indonesians for popularising bahasa gay and destroying the secrecy of the anti-language. On the other, it means that queer people’s uses of language aren’t a potentially dangerous give-away, because they’re common linguistic currency.

The phenomenon of queer anti-languages being ‘outed’ via the media is hardly unique. As soon as Drag Race ceased to define its own terms, the internet stepped in for anyone out of the loop. In the Philippines, the incredibly complex vernacular known as Swardspeak gained wider recognition after a series of instructional videos by (straight-identifying) YouTuber Wil Dasovich. Queer slang has never been better-documented, or more accessible, though whether it will keep in touch with its roots remains to be seen.

As soon as Drag Race ceased to define its own terms, the internet stepped in for anyone out of the loop.
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It Will Probably (Continue To) Be Used To Sell Us Stuff

It’s an ancient cliché that the entertainment industry is especially influenced by queer culture, and it follows that its slang would become the media’s lingua franca. In the Philippines, it’s almost a requirement that people working in entertainment be versed in Swardspeak (Hart & Hart, 1990). Drag Race incorporated the slang of queer nightclubs because that’s where its contestants work. Performers from Katy Perry, to Morrissey, to David Bowie have woven queer slang terms into their work—it was inevitable that the language of the people working in entertainment would bleed into what they produce. Especially with the new forum of social media, like Dasovich’s instructional videos, slang is able to move faster and further than ever before.

This exposure has its perks. Drag queens, once reviled as everything undesirable about gay men, have risen to a point of cultural reverence—and they’re making a mint off of it. Queer media (independent and non-) is able to attract bigger audiences and more lucrative advertisers—can you imagine Nanette or them existing in the days of Drag Race’s infamous season 1 filter? But corporations and non-LGBTQIA+ individuals, too, want a piece of the pink dollar, and speaking the right language is a proven way to get it. Enter the Target shirts.

Being absorbed into the mainstream means being brought into everything Western society represents—including capitalism. When queer slang’s associations shift from the queer simply to the fashionable, those in the know (and those who stand to gain) suddenly and infinitely expand, and as any linguist will tell you, the changes that come with this will be almost impossible to hinder. But don’t mourn what may or may not be lost to history—enjoy this unprecedented chance to write (and speak) it.

“This is America, speak English.”

This refrain is becoming alarmingly common — used liberally on angry Facebook pages and by everyone from angry JC Penney shoppers to belligerent presidential candidates.

During his primary campaign, Donald Trump declared: “We have a country where to assimilate, you have to speak English.” A moment later he added, “This is a country where we speak English, not Spanish.”

Unfortunately, this is not just inflammatory rhetoric — it’s also the basis of current and proposed language policy.

In February of this year, the Michigan House passed a bill to make English the official state language. The bill is expected to pass the state Senate, though it would need Governor Rick Snyder’s signature to become law. If it succeeds, Michigan will become the 32nd state to make English its official language and clear a victory for the “Official English” political movement.

Also known as “English-Only,” this movement has been around for decades, rising to prominence in the late ‘80s and early ’90s. America does not currently, and has never had, a legal designation of any one language as its official one.

Today, three major organizations are trying to change that––U.S. English, ProEnglish, and English First. Of these, ProEnglish has the most active online presence and, notably, political influence: Organization officials have met with Trump administration aides numerous times this year. All three groups, however, have similar missions and goals.

They disparage “multilingualism” and “multiculturalism,” arguing that the lack of a “unifying” national language creates “linguistic ghettos” and limits immigrants’ economic prospects. While they maintain that it’s fine to use other languages in private, they advocate making English the official language of the United States, which would require that nearly all government documents be written — and operations conducted — exclusively in English.

That’s the movement’s long-term goal.

America does not currently, and has never had, a legal designation of any one language as its official one.
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In the meantime they advocate “Official English” laws at the state and local levels, as well as restrictions on the use of other languages in government, schools, and workplaces. To this end, they support English-only voting ballots, driving exams, and workplace policies, an end to bilingual education, and the repeal of EO 13166, an executive order issued by Bill Clinton which entitles people with limited English proficiency (LEP) to translation assistance for government documents and services.

They support the English Language Unity Act, which would make English the country’s official language, restrict access to translation services, and impose an arduous English proficiency requirement for naturalization. They also advocate for the COST Act, which would require federal agencies to document the expense of translation services, and the RAISE Act, which would severely restrict legal immigration and create a points-based immigration system rewarding — among other skills and characteristics — English proficiency.

Advocates claim that these policies, rather than punishing LEP immigrants, will “incentivize” them to assimilate and learn English. They repeatedly invoke the melting pot metaphor, praising diversity while demanding national “unity” — something which, they argue, is impossible in a multilingual society.

But while the movement presents itself as pro-immigrant, its origins are steeped in racism.

U.S. English and ProEnglish were founded by John Tanton, an anti-immigration and pro-eugenicist crusader who has founded numerous racist organizations. These include the anti-immigration Center for Immigration Studies, the pro-eugenics group Society for Genetic Education, and the Social Contract Press, which, with Tanton’s approval, reprinted the notorious The Camp of the Saints, a racist favorite of Steve Bannon.

Tanton was pushed out of U.S. English in 1988 after the leak of some astonishingly racist memos, and there’s no trace of him on either of the group’s official websites. ProEnglish, the group he founded in 1994 (the same year his publishing company reprinted The Camp of the Saints), contains only two mentions of him. This near-absence is unsurprising; Tanton’s more inflammatory statements — say, “for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that” — don’t exactly gel with the movement’s message of national unity.

When You’re Genderqueer — But Your Native Language Is Gendered
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Instead, advocates argue that a “common language” would unite immigrants and native-born citizens alike. It would also, they claim, incentivize immigrants to learn English, save the government billions of dollars in federally-funded translation services, and improve immigrants’ economic prospects. But this argument hinges on two major assumptions: First, that LEP immigrants currently lack motivation to learn English; and second, that “Official English” legislation will lead to increased English proficiency. Both are false.

In fact, the real problem is not lack of motivation, but lack of federal funding for ESL (English as a Second Language) classes. According to The Migration Policy Institute, such classes are in high demand but, thanks to funding cuts, suffer long wait times resulting in unmet need. The incentive to learn English is already there — what’s missing is the means.

If the “Official English” movement were truly interested in improving immigrants’ lives and fostering national unity they would address this need, whether through support for increased federal funding or by providing free ESL classes and tutoring. But their websites and social media feeds offer no information about ESL class wait lists or suggestions on what to do about the problem.

As for the second assumption, it’s notable that advocates emphasize the potential benefits of their policies, not the actual effects. State-level “Official English” laws have existed for decades, so if they truly lead to increased English acquisition, wouldn’t we know?

The incentive to learn English is already there — what’s missing is the means.
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In fact, six of the 11 states with the highest percentages of LEP residents — California, Hawaii, Florida, Illinois, Arizona, and Massachusetts — had “Official English” laws for, at the time of data collection, at least 25 years.

States with “Official English” and low numbers of LEP residents, meanwhile, have relatively small immigrant populations in the first place. These data suggest that it is the number of immigrants, not the presence of Official English laws, that determines English proficiency rates. Mandating official English, meanwhile, does nothing but make it harder for LEP immigrants to participate in society. In short, “Official English” purports to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, with solutions that don’t work anyway — and, in the process, neglects real obstacles to English proficiency.

The argument that “Official English,” through the elimination of government-mandated translation services, would benefit the economy is also suspect. In fact, opponents argue, it would do more harm than good. English-only tax forms would result in lost tax revenue, monolingualism would decrease the country’s competitiveness in the global marketplace, and lack of translation assistance would grow an underclass of people who can’t access basic government services.

Even if “Official English” were financially beneficial, there are other concerns as well, including but not limited to free speech, public health, psychological well-being, marginalization of bilingual students, and — especially prescient now — immigrants’ interactions with law enforcement in general, and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) in particular.

 In fact, some of the most dangerous consequences of inadequate translation assistance can be seen at the southern border today.

Such consequences are not new. In 2010 the ACLU issued a letter to the Department of Homeland Security regarding language assistance for LEP immigrants, and cited numerous examples of human rights violations enabled by lack of translation services. Difficulty communicating with ICE officers can lead to — or be used to justify — unlawful detentions, and despite ICE’s supposed commitment to providing language assistance, LEP detainees are at a particular disadvantage when it comes to court proceedings and fair treatment in detention.

How Learning New Languages Has Shaped My Identity
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Detainees are not entitled to legal counsel, and only 14% have a lawyer working on their behalf. Those detainees who have neither lawyers nor English proficiency are forced to navigate a confusing court system alone, without translation services. It’s no surprise, then, that detainees with legal representation are twice as likely to win their cases than those without. The numbers are even worse for child detainees: While 73% of children with legal representation are allowed to stay in the country, only 15% of those without representation succeed.

While in detention, LEP migrants struggle to advocate for themselves or receive adequate medical care. As detailed in the ACLU letter, English-only grievance forms make it difficult or impossible for LEP immigrants to report abuse at detention facilities. (Notably, such abuse is pervasive.)

One particularly distressing case in a recent ACLU report on medical care in detention highlights the dangers of inadequate translation assistance. Moises Tino Lopez, 23, died in September 2016 at the Hall County Department of Corrections in Nebraska due to inadequate communication and medical neglect. Lopez’s primary language was K’iche, a Mayan language; he spoke no English and only a little Spanish. Instead of finding a qualified interpreter for either K’iche or Spanish, ICE officials enlisted a Spanish-speaking Guatemalan detainee and Google Translate to convey crucial medical information to Lopez (a violation of HIPAA as well as Lopez’s right to language assistance and medical care). Without a clear understanding of why he had been prescribed a seizure medication or the risks of not taking it, he opted to stop — and consequently died the next day in an isolation unit. (While lack of translation services harms all LEP detainees, those who speak indigenous languages are particularly marginalized.)

These problems existed well before Trump took office. But the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” border policies — and Trump’s opposition to due process for detainees — put LEP migrants at even greater risk.

Family separation can isolate family members who speak little or no English from those who could act as translators — and although some families are (slowly) being reunited, limited English skills can complicate the already-complicated family unification process. One recent case, for example, involves a 6-year-old girl whose family speaks an indigenous Mayan language and only limited Spanish. She has yet to be reunited with her family, and it’s unknown how well agents have been able to communicate with her.

The family separation policy has also lead to an increase in young children appearing in court proceedings alone. There’s a documented increase in racist abuse on the part of ICE agents, newly empowered by the Trump administration to disregard established protocol and migrants’ human rights.

The danger of English-only doesn’t stop at the border or in detention centers; it carries over into life within the country as well.

Despite the “Official English” movement’s stance against bilingual education, LEP students perform worse in English immersion programs than in well-implemented bilingual education classes. Lack of professional translation services in health care doesn’t just harm detainees, but all LEP medical patients — including, for example, a Spanish-speaking patient with a brain injury who was initially treated for a drug overdose because the paramedics didn’t know Spanish.

The ACLU has already defended a Montana prison inmate barred from receiving letters in Spanish, students banned from speaking Spanish on the school bus, and workers fired for limited English proficiency despite long, unblemished work histories with the company. In 2004, an English immersion teacher in Scottsdale, Arizona was fired for slapping and yelling at students who were speaking Spanish; she claimed she was merely enforcing the school’s English immersion policy.

The danger of English-only doesn’t stop at the border or in detention centers.
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“Official English” advocates often promise certain exceptions to their policies. ProEnglish, in language nearly identical to that in the English Language Unity Act, claims that translation services would be available for measures “protecting public health and safety…in the distribution of information to warn people about the dangers of diseases like HIV/AIDS, etc.” and “actions that protect the rights of victims of crimes or criminal defendants.”

They refer to such exceptions as “common sense” rather than in specific terms. But these concessions elide a larger problem: Without consistent access to translation services, LEP immigrants cannot be reasonably expected to know and advocate for their own rights. This, in turn, can make technically illegal acts effectively legal: Legal protections are meaningless if victims can’t fight back.

Still, you might be thinking, perhaps the “Official English” movement has good intentions. Perhaps they genuinely seek “national unity” and believe that their proposed legislation will benefit immigrants. It may seem unfair to smear them as “racist” over what could be nothing more than a policy disagreement.

But while “Official English” groups make a show of praising “diversity” and have carefully distanced themselves from overtly racist figures like Tanton, their veneer of non-racist respectability slips when convenient. ProEnglish’s Facebook page contains a wealth of race-baiting memes, ranging from the suggestion that LEP immigrants don’t pay taxes (all do) to the implication that “people who require translation services” are not native-born U.S. citizens (some are).

Despite the movement’s insistence that “Official English” laws would only affect government documents and services, numerous memes try to incite anger over any use of non-English languages — for example, this post lamenting people speaking Spanish at home, or the many variations of “Do you resent being ordered to ‘Press 1 for English’?” above pictures of angry white people shouting into landline phones. (The U.S. English page shares similar memes, albeit less often; English First doesn’t use social media.)

Although ProEnglish maintains their mission is non-partisan, their tweets include support for the Trump administration followed by the hashtag #makeenglishgreatagain, and the account liked numerous pro-Trump tweets months before Trump secured the Republican presidential nomination. Both their website and Twitter linked an article complaining that bilingualism in the U.S. “means a lot of promotions for Hispanics,” which calls into question ProEnglish’s stated concern for immigrants’ economic prospects.

And despite attempts to shed their racist legacy, “Official English” groups overwhelmingly focus on Latinx Americans and immigrants, implying a Spanish-speaking “takeover” of the U.S. which echoes John Tanton’s more overtly racist statements. This racist dogwhistling makes it difficult to buy the movement’s ostensibly pro-immigrant agenda.

While it’s tempting to dismiss “Official English” as a fringe movement, they have scored real legislative wins — and the Trump administration only makes their vision more possible. Already notoriously hostile toward immigrants, the administration has shown an openness to “Official English” proposals; the Trump campaign even, ProEnglish giddily observes, polled on the issue.

But while it’s true that language acquisition is crucial to social and economic success in the America we inhabit today, the movement’s solution would only exacerbate inequality.

Real “national unity” is achieved not through government-imposed monolingualism, but through policies and attitudes that assist LEP immigrants in navigating society and don’t punish them for failing to instantaneously acquire a new language. The responsibility of learning a new language, moreover, shouldn’t fall solely on non-native speakers, but on English speakers as well. A true commitment to supporting immigrants always, but especially during the Trump administration, requires that their voices be not only be heard, but understood.

Over the last few years, we’ve progressed significantly in our acceptance of gender fluidity: One seminal 2015 poll found that half of millennials in the United States believe gender isn’t limited to male and female, a meaningful change from previous generations. Today, Facebook offers a custom field for people to express their gender identity, and Tinder and OkCupid have expanded gender options that people can select before swiping left or sending a DM.

Wrapped up in this revolution is an understanding that conventional gender pronouns are extremely limited. But what if you spoke a language that didn’t even have separate words for “him” or “her”? Or what if just about every noun in your world was masculine or feminine — seemingly at random? What impact would this have?

Inside Planned Parenthood’s Push For Gender-Neutral Language
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It turns out, the way language is constructed can have a significant impact on the way people think and interact with the world. One rather chilling study, for instance, found that people who read in gendered languages responded with higher levels of sexism to a questionnaire they took after the study.

For those who don’t identify along the gender binary, these distinctions also matter. To find out how and why, I spoke with people from several countries who have come out as genderqueer, nonbinary, or gender-questioning. Their insights reveal the crucial, and often overlooked, importance of one’s native language in the expression of gender identity.

Before diving in to the intersection of language and gender identity, it’s important to understand some details. Broadly speaking, there are three ways gender can be incorporated into language:

*Natural gender languages, including English and Swedish, don’t typically categorize non-human, non-animal nouns into male or female categories. A table and tree are it, while people are he or she.

*In gendered languages like Spanish, German, and French, both people and objects are given a gender. A table, for instance, is a feminine noun in French — “She is a lovely table!” — while a tree is a masculine noun in German. “I planted him in the forest, where he will grow very tall!”

*Chinese, Estonian, and Finnish are examples of genderless languages, which don’t categorize any nouns as feminine or masculine, and use the same word for he or she in regards to humans.

Half of millennials in the United States believe gender isn’t limited to male and female.
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“Natural gender” languages like English perpetuate the idea of a strict gender binary for humans. But there is one option to challenge these parameters: the use of gender-neutral terms. In English, these terms include they as a singular, ze/zir or zie/zir, ze/hir or other variations, and Mx. in written forms.

These terms are undoubtedly beneficial, helping to allow for expression across the gender spectrum. But are they enough?

In a 2016 survey — Bucking the Linguistic Binary — 20% of monolingual, transgender English speakers said, “yes, English gender-neutral language allows me to express my identity”; 31% said “no, it does not allow for adequate identity expression”; and 19% said “yes and no.” About 4% specified that they felt that it currently did not allow them to express their identities, but, “the situation was improving and that they were hopeful that time and advocacy would lead to increased acceptance of the language that would allow them to express their identities.”

Those who answered “yes and no” detailed both positive and negative aspects. One participant wrote:

“When I was using gender-neutral pronouns in English, it was almost impossible to get anyone who wasn’t in the queer community to use ‘they’ for me consistently. This was at an early stage of me asking them not to use ‘she’ (the pronoun I was ‘assigned’ at birth), so I think people were still getting used to the idea of any pronoun other than ‘she’ for me. But I had the impression that people outside the queer world (not LGBT but ‘queer’ as in challenging gender binaries) had an even harder time with the idea of a gender-neutral pronoun than with the idea of someone ‘crossing’ gender lines (i.e. requesting ‘he’ instead of ‘she’). So people would default to ‘she’, which was unbearable to me. So ‘he’ felt lots safer to me since it was farther away from ‘they’ and easier for people to wrap their minds around.”

If it seems like English-speakers are dissatisfied, the situation for speakers of gendered languages is worse. In the same survey, transgender French respondent #171 was clear and succinct:

“[S]peaking a gendered language as an agender person fuckin’ sucks. I’m constantly misgendered, or I’m misgendering myself in order to be understood.”

Misgendering in a gendered language was explained by another respondent:

“For example, in English, there are multiple nouns that I can use to classify myself (partner, student) without making reference to gender, whereas in German I’m supposed to say the feminine form of many common categories into which I fit, like student (Studentin), and have to explain myself when I refuse.”

In English, one can say they are a teacher with a partner, and no one’s gender is revealed; French and German lack that luxury.

Transgender German respondent #98 added:

“The options that English presents work reasonably well for me and I can express my gender identity and use preferred pronouns […]. [In] German I struggle a lot with language and [I am] often very unhappy with the situation of [the lack of] German gender-neutral language. I lack usable and easy to learn/apply pronouns and descriptions of myself. That the language is very gendered is a big problem in my life.”

Russian is a gendered language that does feature a neuter third-person pronoun, оно [it]. This pronoun is not typically applied to people — instead it is used only for objects with neuter noun names, typically borrowed words like кафе (cafe) that do not take a masculine or feminine case. A few gender pioneers, however, have co-opted it. For example, Seroe Fioletovoe [Grey Violet] — a transgender Russian activist who is part of the artist collective Война [War], best known for spawning punk activists Pussy Riot — uses “оно” to describe themself.

‘That the language is very gendered is a big problem in my life.’
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Polina Ravlyuk, a Russian blogger who runs an information portal on gender and gender identification, wrote to me in an email:

“We don’t have a gender-neutral pronoun [for people]…Agender people use feminine or masculine pronouns according to their personal preference. There can also be situations where a woman can refer to herself in the masculine way grammatically and vice versa. It’s worth noting that the issue isn’t widely discussed [yet] in Russia, because in my opinion society isn’t ready to accept gender on a spectrum. ‘Homosexual propaganda’ is still a fineable offence in the Russian Federation…”

Tosha, a young Russian who identifies as agender, told me:

“I use masculine pronouns, even though they don’t suit me very well. Plural or ‘neuter’ cases in Russian aren’t comfortable for me. Maybe someday I could use them, though. I also speak English, and I use the ‘they/them’ in English. Because of the language barrier, that doesn’t feel unnatural for me, and besides, [i]n Russian almost all the verbs and adjectives have gender, and in English it’s not like that. Pronouns in English don’t hurt me, as long as no one does it on purpose.

In my opinion, the language plays a pretty large role in how agender people feel about themselves, because [Russian] isn’t flexible enough for us. It doesn’t allow for a lack of gender; you always have to pick something. It shapes how we are thought about and sometimes contributes to social dysphoria. In my own family, it’s been difficult for most of them, though my friends, mother, and grandmother easily adjusted to using masculine pronouns to refer to me. Those who don’t know why I use that case either question it, or they think I think I’m a guy, or they just ignore it.”

Tosha also notes that there’s the option to use a plural pronoun when referring to agender people. “When I don’t know someone’s gender, I talk about them in the plural,” they say. “I think after some time I’ll be able to do the same for myself [in Russian].”

It’s clear that, not surprisingly, natural gender and gendered languages pose problems for identity expression. But what about genderless languages? Are these, then, the gold standard?

A young Estonian agender person interviewed for this article who prefers the name Paul does find “tema,” the genderless Estonian pronoun, helpful. Temais used only for humans, and when used in a sentence, it is neither masculine nor feminine. Paul writes:

“Usually people use the gender-neutral ‘tema’ [when] talking about any person, and because it’s the most common way to refer to a person, there is no issue with which pronoun to use. I prefer ‘they’ or ‘he’ in English, but I don’t usually say it to people unless they ask. That is because I am not really out as non-binary. In Estonian there is no gender in pronouns, but there are marker words like ‘tüdruk’ (girl), ‘preili’ (Ms.), or ‘neiu’ (a young woman) that I don’t identify with, but which are used by older people addressing me. I would prefer the gender-neutral pronoun ‘tema’ or my name.

Friends and close acquaintances call me ‘Paul,’ which I really like to be called. I somehow identify more with neutral or masculine marker words, and names. In English when I use ‘they’ to refer to a person, most people don’t notice it. But that’s maybe because the people I talk to in English are not native speakers. So there is some slip of pronouns going on unintentionally, especially with Estonian people speaking in English. We don’t have gendered pronouns, so a regular person might call a cis man a she by accident, and not be corrected, because we are not native speakers.”

Asexual Finnish student Kati agrees, saying, “I’m so happy Finnish has only one [ungendered] pronoun. It makes some things so much easier…one does not need to make assumptions about gender when trying to address someone.”

Having just one pronoun for humans doesn’t equal perfect equality in society, though. Turns out that genderless languages can include “seemingly gender-neutral terms” that do in fact have a sneaky male bias, just like natural and gendered languages. For example, the word lakimies (literally lawman or lawyer) in Finnish is what is called a false generic. In principle, it refers to all lawyers, but in practice, it refers only to male lawyers. Female lawyers are called just that: female lawyers. Men are the standard and everything else is the exception.

What can we take away from all this? Agender people have the hardest time expressing their identity in highly gendered languages, but genderless languages are not the utopia one may imagine. Assumptions about the binary nature of gender and the status of masculinity seem to survive intact, even under genderless language conditions. Though Estonian people using the term tema may not specifically picture a man or a woman, they invariably picture either a man or a woman, not anyone else in between.

In Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, authors Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman emphasize the politics of language itself and of having “the agency to have our own words and definitions of them, and insist upon them to linguistic passers-by.” A natural gender language with a history of borrowed words, like English, has the flexibility to create pronouns to suit a person.

This is far from perfect — but it may be the best option yet for those who identify along a spectrum.

At this point, “mansplaining” is a crucial part of the American cultural consciousness— but in fact, the now-ubiqitous term only dates back to 2008. Its first known use was among LiveJournal blog commenters, shortly after the publication of Rebecca Solnit’s Los Angeles Times essay, “Men who explain things.”

Although Solnit did not coin the phrase, she later told Guernica, “the essay makes it clear mansplaining is not a universal flaw of the gender, just the intersection between overconfidence and cluelessness where some portion of that gender gets stuck.”

Soon after, “mansplaining” became a linguistic phenomenon, helping women to finally define an experience that had long plagued them. “Mansplain” made its way into the Urban Dictionary in 2009. In 2010, “mansplainer” was a New York Times Word of the Year. In 2014, Salon declared the word dead (the true sign of making it); the Oxford Dictionaries added “mansplain” as an entry; and the Macquarie Dictionary named it Word of the Year.

At its most basic, “mansplaining” refers to — as a 2015 Merriam-Webster “Words We’re Watching” column put it — “what occurs when a man talks condescendingly to someone (especially a woman) about something he has incomplete knowledge of, with the mistaken assumption that he knows more about it than the person he’s talking to does.”

But there’s a bit more to it than that. Kat Tanaka Okopnik, author of the forthcoming Dictionary of Social Justice, goes into more detail:

Mansplaining doesn’t mean “explaining done by a man.” It means “a man chose to barge in with explanations without checking the credentials of anyone else in the conversation, assuming his were better than anyone else’s in the room — i.e., that he was the expert by default.” It is the consequence of a culture that devalues non-men, especially non-white non-men. The individual man who does this is just as likely to be unaware that he’s doing this as he is to be a blatant sexist. It’s only avoided by conscious consideration of context and a willingness to cede the pedestal to others.

Basically, ’splaining — be it mansplaining, whitesplaining, or Trumpsplaining — is about wielding one’s privilege in a way that undermines the folks who get ’splained. It’s a silly word, but serious business.

As Solnit said of her original essay, “The battle for women to be treated like human beings with rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of involvement in cultural and political arenas continues, and it is sometimes a pretty grim battle. When I wrote the essay…I surprised myself in seeing that what starts out as minor social misery can expand into violent silencing and even violent death.”

’Splaining is about wielding one’s privilege in a way that undermines the folks who get ’splained.
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Although the term “mansplaining” originated in the United States, the practice may very well be universal — and in fact, the term has already moved abroad. In 2015, the Swedish Language Council welcomed “mansplaining” to its list of new Swedish words. Iceland made its own variant (“hrútskýring,” or “ramsplaining”) the 2016 Word of the Year — and named a beer after it. In Greek, Japanese, Portuguese, Swedish, and many other languages, the English “mansplaining” just gets dropped into the conversation, and folks nod.

Having the words to describe a problem makes sense of a problem, changes how you regard yourself and your ’splainer, and provides fellowship: I’m not the first person to be treated this way; I’m not the first to fight back.

As one professor of Women’s Studies told me, “Knowing the word allows you to discover your outrage. You learn it, then you know what it is you’ve been seething about. Man, it’s fucking annoying!”

Identifying, critiquing, and stopping mansplaining can also be a feat of linguistic cunning, humor, and solidarity. We plumb our languages to find the funniest puns and most trenchant critiques of sexism; we laugh, because humor diagnoses and deflates the behavior; sometimes we invent words, but then rethink our assumptions (as in the case of certain terms for mansplaining, based on body parts, which are wrong and implicitly transphobic in their suggestion that genitalia determines gender).

bell hooks And The Extraordinary Power Of Names
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In honor of this term and its many iterations, we decided to roll out mansplaining translations in 33 other languages.

This list was crowdsourced among friends, writers, and scholars, who reached out to their own friends and families around the world to collect the words on everybody’s lips — and even to coin a few. Like the original term, new words for “mansplaining” get invented on the fly, sometimes in a single, offhand tweet. From that point of origin, they go viral on social media, or get adopted by a national tourist board, and finally make their way into lexicons.

Imagine us all talking, multiple generations of native and non-native speakers, our elders DM-ing us the fine points of orthography, grammar, and party popper emojis — because that’s how glad they are that we wrote to ask them about gender, power, and the love of language.

By all means, feel free to run these examples by your aunties and listen while they vie to invent better ones. Different words offer different ways to discover, think about, and respond to the problem.

Ultimately, this list sheds light on the potential language has to help us critique and battle sexism — making not just our lexicons, but our very lives, better.

American Sign Language

(man) + (explain) + (above you)
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Arabic

رجلفسير /rajulfsir = رجل /rajul (man) + تفسير /tafsir (explanation)

Chinese

Mandarin: 直男癌 = 直男 (straight/direct man) + 癌 (cancer/sickness)

Another collaborator felt that 直男癌, vivid though it is, didn’t sufficiently convey mansplaininess, so she offered different terms meaning “arrogant explaining man” in:

Mandarin: 傲释男风= “arrogant explaining man tendency (or style).” She adds, “the character 风 (wind) gives the ‘mansplaining’ term a poetic, slogan, or more official feel, like it’s a proverb.”

Hokkien: 傲释查埔

Cantonese: 傲释佬

Danish

mandskueliggøre = mand (man) + anskueliggøre (clarify/illustrate)

farklare = far (father) + forklare (explain). Says our correspondent, “That would technically be dadsplain, I suppose. Still, the implicit paternalism is apt.”

Finnish

miesitelmä = mies (man) + esitelmä (presentation)

“It’s not uncommon to say someone droned on by saying they made an esitelmä.”

French

mecspliquer = mec (guy) + expliquer (to explain)

German

herrklären = Herr (gentleman) + erklären (to explain)

Hebrew

הסגברה/hasgavrah = הסברה/hasbarah (explanation) + גבר/gever (man).

“It helps that there is a verb, hagbarah/הגברה, meaning ‘to amplify,’ that comes from the root ג ב ר and sounds like hasbrah — so the mashup sounds right.”

Hindi and Urdu

gyanmardi = gyan (knowledge) + mard (man)

“Gyan is from Sanskrit, so maybe call this a Hindi/Urdu neologism.”

Hungarian

fickótúlmagyaráz = fickó (fellow) + túlmagyaráz (expounding/overexplaining)

Icelandic

hrútskýring = hrútur (ram, an uncastrated male sheep) + útskýring (explaining)

Indonesian

lakiterang = laki-laki (man) + terangkan (explaining)

Our correspondent’s parents debated about removing the e after the t to make the term easier to pronounce (i.e., lakitrang, instead of lakiterang).

Irish Gaelic

fearmhíniú = fear (man) + mínigh (to explain)

Italian

maschiegazione = maschio (man) + spiegazione (explanation)

Japanese

横柄な男の解説= “patronizing man’s explanation”

マンスプレイ二ング= “mansupureningu” This transliteration incorporates the English into Japanese.

Korean

오빠 알어/Oppa Aruh = “Big Brother knows”

One correspondent says, “On Korean Twitter they like to use an English variant, oppa knows (oppa means “big brother,” also well-known from PSY’s song ‘(Oppan) Gangnam Style’).” Another adds, “Oppa Aruh means: 1. My boyfriend knows. 2. My brother knows. 3. A man who is older than me and whom I know (like a friend) knows…”

Mohegan

Bookque (pronounced “bokie”) = “Dirt blowing in the wind”

“When I was growing up, there was a term used for when a woman thought that a man was full of baloney or talking to hear themselves speak. It was Bookque, which literally means “dirt blowing in the wind,” our correspondent notes. “Bookque was also the nickname that Mohegan Chief Matahga’s elder sister, Nettie Fowler, called him, back in the early 1900s, according to my great-aunt who was Matahga and Nettie’s niece. This was a term of sarcastic endearment. Additionally, in the case of a Chief or any Native leader, it’s one of many traditional strategies used to keep a person from getting a big head.”

Occitan

masplicar = mascle (male) + explicar (explain)

Polish

wytłumęczenie = wytłumaczenie (explanation), with one letter changed to suggest męczyć (“to torture, bore, annoy, oppress, tire.” Another related word is męka, meaning “martyrdom or annoyance, or an obnoxious or grueling task”). Our correspondent notes that this word can be “all-purpose for mansplaining, whitesplaining, straightsplaining,” but a strictly “mansplaining” neologism could be:

wytłumęższczenie = wytłumaczenie (explanation) + mężsczc (from męższczyzna, man)

Portuguese

Speakers of Portuguese tend to use “mansplaining,” but have also been noted as saying:

homexplicar, homeplicanismo, homexplicação = homem (man) + explicar (to explain)

Romanes (Slovak dialect)

Muršaxaľarel = Murš (man/masculine) + axal’arel (explain)

Russian

мужобъяснение = мужчина (man) + объяснение (explanation)

Spanish

hombrexplicar = hombre (man) + explicar (explain)

machoplantear = macho (male) + plantear (to lay out an idea)

Swahili

Our correspondent is a man, who says hesitantly, “Mtumeleza would maybe be the Swahili equivalent. Mtu is man (but a lot of Swahili isn’t gendered, which complicates this), kueleza is to explain, and the m in the middle denotes an object (and we all know mansplaining requires a female object to be explained to!). Subjects would change the prefix, so ‘you are mansplaining to her’ would be unamtumeleza, ‘he is mansplaining to her’ would be anamtumeleza, ‘I am mansplaining to her’ would be ninamtumeleza. I’d run it past other Swahili speakers before you do anything with it haha.”

Tagalog

pareliwanag = pare (man) + ipaliwanag (explain). Literally, “Man explains it to me.”

Our correspondent says, “There’s no real word in Tagalog that’s like mansplain. I would go for ‘ipaliwanag mo sa akin pare sige,’ which would be very sassy.” That means, “Go ahead and explain it to me, I dare you.”

Tamil

ஆண் விளக்கம் /aannvilakkam = ஆண்/aann (male) + விளக்கம் /vilakkam (explanation)

Ukrainian

мужяснення (pronounced “muzhjasnennia”) = муж (man) + пояснення(explanation, literally, “throwing light on something”)

Vietnamese

Our correspondent says, “‘Lấn chiếm’ is Vietnamese for aggressively expanding [as in taking up too much space], used both literally and figuratively. Probably a good phrase to popularize, as there is a limited concept of mansplaining in Vietnamese.”

Welsh

gwrsbonio = gwr (man) + esbonio (to explain)

The possibilities of “man + explaining” in Welsh include gwrywgluro and dynsbonio, but our correspondent says, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, “I would tend to favor gwrsbonio, as it trips off the tongue a bit.”

Yiddish

herklern = her (mister) + klern (think/opine)

Variants include zokherklern (from zokher, male) and bokherklern (from bokher, young man)

Thanks to everybody who contributed to the crowdsourcing for this piece. The fee for this story has been donated to the Social Justice Dictionary.

Rudy Giuliani: “Hillary, we don’t want your socialized medicine. Take it and stuff it up your… I didn’t say it!” https://t.co/oyjY1zuxa2???@politico

ATTENTION RUDY GIULIANI: NOT EVERYTHING IS A FUCKING JOKE.

ICYMI “America’s Mayor” is one of three remaining Donald Trump surrogates. Everyone actually in elected office or running for elected office, from Speaker Paul Ryan on down, is scampering quickly away so they don’t get any of the shit in the “Trump tapes” on their shoes.

“When you’re a star they let you do it,” Trump said on the tape leaked last week. “Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”

Then, yesterday, in case you didn’t yet feel like you were living in a reality show called “American Democracy on Fire,” Giuliani ratcheted up his support of Trump’s “locker room talk” with some of his own.

“We don’t want your socialized medicine! Take it and stuff it, up, ummb buh,” [trails off]. HUGE cheers from the crowd. “I didn’t say it!!” [hands up] “I didn’t say it; I suggested it, but I didn’t say it!”

While I contend that you can make jokes about anything (seriously, even rape — Dane Cook, who is awful, has a funny rape joke), not everything is a joke. Part of what makes Cook’s joke work is that he’s openly mocking how we have essentially casualized the word “rape” in a way that completely desensitizes us to sexual violence and gaslights victims.

Considering Giuliani’s public divorces (he notified his second wife of their divorce via press conference) and fighting with his ex-wives, it wasn’t necessarily inconceivable (if it ever is) that he was misogynistic enough to utter distasteful things about a female political opponent. And then there was his whole “men, at times, talk like that” shrug defense of Trump’s “locker room” talk tape.

“First of all, I don’t know that he did it to anyone,” Giuliani said on CNN. “This is talk, and gosh almighty, he who hasn’t sinned, throw the first stone here.”

When I accidentally heard the audio from yesterday, I was initially stunned. Like all of the women/femme people in my circle, I am worn down because — SORRY, BRO — words matter.

When “suggesting” that someone(s) shove ANYTHING up anywhere on the first woman candidate for president elicits laugh breaks in a speech, violent language against women has again been normalized. And this normalization actively perpetuates assault.

Studies show that shrugging off statements about sexual assault helps cultivate a sense that this violence is normal and to be expected; as a result, women are more likely to question other survivors, and even to refrain from reporting their own assault. I have questioned my own assaults in part because of this normalization.

Moreover, these statements are damaging because, for so many women, they are triggering, bringing to the surface traumatic memories that have been painfully downplayed as no big deal. As writer Kelly Oxford proved on Twitter, this affects basically everyone, to some degree.

Women: tweet me your first assaults. they aren't just stats. I'll go first: Old man on city bus grabs my "pussy" and smiles at me, I'm 12.

???@kellyoxford

Not even 30 minutes later, she followed up her original tweet by tweeting: “I am currently receiving 2 sex assault stories per second. Anyone denying rape culture, please look at my timeline now.”

Oxford was just asking for people’s first sexual assault. (For the record, I was 8 or 9; Kevin, on the playground as we were lining up after recess, walked up and performed the action Trump bragged about in front of the teacher. No action was taken.) Millions of people have seen it, tens of thousands directly retweeted it, and more than can be accurately counted shared their stories.

For most of us, our first assault was done rather casually, and for many it was brushed off by authority figures. So, listening to a high-level campaign surrogate — an authority figure — smile and laugh while describing a violation similar to what we have experienced is FUCKING TRAUMATIC.

It gets worse.

Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway was on ABC’s Good Morning America Wednesday morning; Politico reports she had this to say about Trump’s dwindling support and surrogate count:

“Well we want the support of anybody who’s going to publicly endorse us. But enough of the pussyfooting around in terms of, you know, do you support us or do you not support us? The fact is that some of these leaders have been wishy-washy.”

I get that “pussyfooting around” is a colloquialism. I’ve heard my mom say it in polite company, so I’m going to assume most people aren’t particularly offended by the phrase on its own.

But for the campaign manager of the Republican party’s presidential candidate to NOT GET THE OPTICS of using anything with “pussy” in it right now — WHILE their most active defender and surrogate is at a rally joking about shoving something up an orifice of the opposing candidate — is the death knell of satire.

This is not just — as has been repeatedly suggested to me on Twitter — me being “oversensitive” or demanding everyone be (GASP, THE HORROR!) “politically correct.” It’s not even just me giving a fuck or two about the psyche of more than 50% of our population.

This matters because words become action when they’re legitimized.

And this is hardly limited to words about sexual assault.

America’s Voice updated their “Trump Hate Map” today with a story from Talking Points Memo: “A Donald Trump supporter was arrested Monday night after allegedly threatening to beat a black woman outside a ShopRite in upstate New York.”

According to the responding officer, 55-year-old Todd Warnken yelled: “Trump is going to win & if you don’t like it I’m going to beat your ass.”

Trump’s encouragement of Islamophobia has also led to such pervasive violence, families are being driven out of our country.

To keep from pulling my hair entirely out, I’m going to rest in the optimistic rhetoric of Rebecca Traister, who wrote Monday that “Trump’s One Public Service Was Exposing the Misogyny of the GOP.”

Great, it’s exposed. The question we’re left with, then, is now what? Other than shoveling Skittles into our face holes, how do we use this moment and all this misogyny exposure?

We know how the far-right patriarchy fuckos are using it:

Trump backers tweet #repealthe19th as polls show he'd win if only men voted https://t.co/K4vd5JClE2

???@latimes

I have to hope we can do better — eventually. But much like overt racism spiked during the administration of the first Black president, I’m anticipating even more of this when we inaugurate a woman in January. If that proves to be true, it’s men that will need to handle themselves and their boys — and do a better job of that than us white folks did for our friends of color the past eight years.

You shouldn’t need to be anyone’s father or brother or son to not want to hear men in positions of power talk about grabbing, shoving, poking, sticking, etc. women against their will. Sexual violence is pervasive and destructive; that should be enough to condemn it. Just as language like that used by Giuliani and Trump can give others permission to speak and act in abusive ways, challenging the words that our friends, family, and co-workers use can work to reverse rape culture.

It’s not enough to ignore your buddy’s distasteful rape joke or not participate in egging him on while he plies the girl at the bar to soften her judgement. If we want the violence to stop, we must actively condemn the words and behavior that write the permission slip.

***

Lead image: flickr/PBS NewsHour

We were waiting to see an apartment in Queens in grueling summer heat when the cool-guy broker showed up, sweaty and texting. We all wiped our hands on our pants before introducing ourselves. Kaitlyn had set up the viewing, so she went first.

“I’m Kaitlyn, and this is my fiancée, Camille.”

“Oh, I was expecting a couple,” he said, shaking my hand.

“We are a couple,” Kaitlyn responded. I stood by, befuddled, and the broker shook it off before showing us a two-bedroom that we did not take.

Surely, this was a fluke. One presumably straight dude got a little heat-weary, or maybe he didn’t hear her introduce me. But it’s also a reminder of the worst thing about being engaged: The word “fiancée” is so banally un-queer when you say it out loud.

Kaitlyn and I met in journalism school, so we’re both geeks about words. In some ways, our relationship has been one big experiment in linguistics. When we started dating years ago, “girlfriend” felt like the appropriate term. It was casual, fun, and inherently gendered. When we moved in together, I still called her my girlfriend with my friends, but I’d introduce her as my “partner” to strangers to convey that we were serious. And once we sign the papers and make it official, I will call her my “wife” at every chance I get.

I’m proud to have built a relationship with another woman, something I never thought I could do confidently, let alone with the approval of the federal government. After a tumultuous closeted adolescence, I’m loudly out in every aspect of my life, including my pride in my Big Gay Relationship. But before Kaitlyn and I were fiancées, when we were still calling each other girlfriend, it wasn’t easy to convey the queerness of our relationship to strangers.

Some older people still take girlfriend for its original definition, a synonym for a friend who’s a girl. Some people judge my fairly feminine presentation to mean they must be hearing me wrong. And apparently, even being told the women standing in front of you are fiancées is hard to grasp if it’s hot enough outside.

Hopefully, none of that will be a problem when we’re married. There’s nothing ambiguous about the word “wife.” Nobody will wonder if they misheard me, or discount my word choice because I’m wearing a dress that day. But in the meantime, we’re improvising, reading the room to choose our words and affirming our relationship over and over in the process.

I came out quietly as bisexual toward the end of high school. It took a long time to choose between the identifiers bisexual and gay — I’m still struggling with it today — but one reason I couldn’t imagine being a lesbian is that I wanted to get married one day, and I just didn’t see that happening with another woman. It’s not that my attraction to women couldn’t reach far enough to lead me to a committed relationship — it can and it has — but I couldn’t bear to be so markedly othered for the rest of my life.

Being bisexual gave me the option, or so I thought, of flying under the radar. And for a while, I was certain I’d end up with a man. But you don’t choose who you love, and here I am, proudly preparing to marry the woman of my dreams.

The first queer, married woman I ever met was the director of the choir I joined my freshman year of college. When I was considering signing up, someone described her to me as a “really cool lesbian who talks about her wife a lot.” That tipped me over. And she did talk about her, all the time, using that exact word — wife.

At the time, only five states had legalized marriage equality, not including Illinois, where she lived. She told us that her officiant had declared “by the power not yet vested in me” before pronouncing them married, if not legally, then emblematically, emotionally, socially. I knew then that there was something radical about loving a person when all the structures around you exist to keep that from happening.

Aubrey Blanche, 27, is the Global Head of Diversity and Inclusion at a global software company, so she says she’s always thinking about the norms and institutions that privilege some people over others. She got engaged about three months ago and says she’s adamant about asserting her queerness when talking about her relationship.

“I used to say ‘partner’ just to avoid discussions [about my identity],” says Blanche, who’s based in San Francisco. “[And then] I realized . . . I’m remarkably safe. I’m upper-middle-class and white and have a nice corporate job. Me not coming out constantly was doing an incredible disservice to people who actually don’t have the safety to do it. You can’t normalize something that you pretend doesn’t exist.”

She’s getting married in September of next year, when she says she’ll embrace the w-word in all its queer glory.

“Oh yeah, I’m totally going to say ‘wife,’ like I’m going to make it a thing. Because if you’re uncomfortable, I want you to be uncomfortable about it,” Blanche says. “No one has an obligation to advocate for their own group, but given that I’m in a position of such relative privilege, it’s important that I do it.”

Before getting married, a former colleague of mine used to refer to her then-fiancée as her pre-wife, which I love and use whenever I remember it. For all of five minutes I called Kaitlyn my sheancée, but we vetoed that. Truth be told, I’m still not used to our new relationship status, so I often still refer to her as my girlfriend.

In any case, my use of gendered words is always deliberate. After years of thinking I’d never get here, I don’t want anyone to confuse that she’s a she, and so am I.

At the same time, we’re in the midst of a gender-neutral revolution, from bathrooms to pronouns to legal gender markers. That includes language. Queer and straight people alike can invoke neutral words like partner, spouse, or even internet-hatched terms like datemate to purposefully un-gender their relationships.

“People don’t assume the gender of your partner and it further normalizes queer relationships,” says Max Rapaport, 26, who is genderfluid. “And then using neutral pronouns upon being asked the gender of your partner normalizes nonbinary genders as well.”

Kimmie and Sandra were married earlier this year in New York. Kimmie is nonbinary and genderqueer, and Sandra isn’t. For both of them, they said, the words “partner” and “spouse” are more affirming, more equitable, and more reflective of their relationship.

“I feel like if I were to [say] ‘wife,’ it has connotations to me of binary relationships, whether it’s male/female or female/female or male/male,” says Kimmie, 28. “Which I don’t feel like I’m in. Even if she’s my wife, it implies that I might be a wife or a husband, and I don’t like either term for myself.”

“I don’t really like to be called ‘wife’ in public for official settings,” adds Sandra, 28. “It’s like belonging to someone, [it’s] patriarchal.”

This evokes one opinion on marriage equality from within the queer community itself. Having equal marriage rights certainly normalizes queer relationships, but to some, it’s a form of unwanted assimilation. Marriage, after all, is a historically oppressive institution, and so is the language that’s been used to describe it.

In her 2013 book, Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution, Shiri Eisner writes:

“At its very base, marriage is a patriarchal institution. Its goal is to decide and maintain male ownership and control of women, transferring the woman from her father to her husband. A dash of linguistics might be enlightening here, as the original meaning of the word husband relates to husbandry — ownership of land and animals, while one of original meanings of wife is ‘bitch’ and contains a root indicating shame.”

Points like Eisner’s are among the reasons some queer people opt out of legal relationship recognition, and its terminology, altogether. That leaves gendered words like “girlfriend” and “boyfriend,” which Rapaport says can be read as juvenile, or a host of nongendered alternatives. Words like “partner” and “spouse,” therefore, are mature, accurate, and even political descriptors in queer relationships, state-recognized or not.

For Kimmie and Sandra, entering into a loving marriage while actively challenging the institution’s prescriptive language is a happy medium.

“The fact that we got married is a manifestation of our love and a decision that we made, but it’s not the only way to be in a relationship,” Kimmie says to Sandra. “We were partners before, we’re still partners, and we will [always] be partners, and being married is a part of that, but it’s not the only part.”

One of my all-time favorite responses to the marriage equality movement, written by Carina Kolodny back in 2014, is an examination of what it truly means to be a partner in a marriage. In an open letter on the Huffington Post to the conservative “enemies of marriage equality,” Kolodny wrote:

“Marriage equality will, in time, fundamentally destroy ‘traditional marriage,’ and I, for one, will dance on its grave. It’s not a terribly difficult conclusion to draw. As same-sex couples marry, they will be forced to re-imagine many tenets of your ‘traditional marriage.’ [ . . . ] How do we assign these roles equitably? How do we cultivate a partnership that honors each of our professional and personal ambitions? As questions continually arise, heterosexual couples will take notice — and be forced to address how much ‘traditional marriage’ is built on gender roles and perpetuates a nauseating inequality that has no place in 2014.”

By playing with the language we use to talk about our partners, whether in the context of marriage or not, we’re doing the same thing. There’s a set of cultural codes that accompany the word “wife”: child-rearing, homemaking, financial dependence, and, of course, the assumption of heterosexuality. Likewise, the traditional husband archetype is financially supportive but emotionally absent, the family figurehead who doesn’t pull his weight and treats his wife like a plaything. But for queer people — especially women, who have historically gotten the short end of the marriage stick — reclaiming words like “husband” and “wife” gives us the power to redefine what they mean, personally and politically.

Similarly, the words “partner” and “spouse” abolish gendered assumptions altogether. They show that love exists outside of the terms and conditions that were used to establish relationships centuries ago, getting to the core of what modern relationships are all about: partnership. They allow for fluidity and flexibility in identity, and they acknowledge that a relationship isn’t defined by the confines of a marriage certificate.

Both these approaches are valid, both are intentional, and both challenge the world to rethink what we’ve all been taught about relationships.

Perhaps most important, though, is the message that our word choice sends to those who we don’t know are listening. When my choir director spoke candidly about her wife more than seven years ago, it flipped a switch that told me I could do that, one day, and be accepted. As Blanche said, queer people are not responsible for educating others about queer lives, but for those who can do so safely, it can be transformative to show others they aren’t alone.

It’s taken years for me to feel comfortable being gay in public, and that includes being queerly partnered. But now that I’ve found my forever-person, I realize how important it is to me to honor that we’re both women, despite countless forces telling us we’re wrong. And if mentioning my wife to a stranger one day helps to validate that love, maybe for an eavesdropping closeted teenager, I can’t wait to do it.

What does harmlessness mean? I believe it means more about answering a question I haven’t explicitly asked.

Unsplash

By July Westhale

When I was in the third grade, I got stabbed in the forehead with a pencil.

I was recently recounting this story to a group of coworkers while we were on a work trip to Vegas, since the last time I’d been in Vegas in any real and exciting way was when I was 7. The details of that trip are blurry — though I remember we stayed at that castle place, I thought Merlin was a sham, and I electrocuted myself on an outlet by trying to show off my resilience to a disinterested cousin — but the clearest memory was this: Vegas, in 1993, still had coins for the slot machines. They were thick, and hefty. They had slightly ridged edges. They probably felt, to adults, much more like money and promise than the slide cards of today (though the slide cards of today require less cognitive activity, and therefore, make the process of gambling effortless).

But for me, the slot machine coins were currency of another kind: status.

Remember 1993? Fresh Prince, Walkmans, the Barbie Liberation Organization, Steely Dan, the “What is Love” Jim Carrey remix (also, Jim Carrey), Groundhog Day, and, of course, pogs.

Pogs were hot shit at my elementary school, and maybe yours, too, if you are a peer of mine or just a hella cool retro-loving elementary-school kid. And slot machine coins? These were the most perfect goddamn slammers.

The Troubling Trendiness Of Poverty Appropriation

So when I returned from Vegas, I was a puffed-up peacock with my pog collection, which had risen in stock dramatically from its pre-coin glory. And my first day back, I’d carefully set it in the basket under my desk next to my lunchbox — only to discover it was gone by the time recess rolled around.

It was this asshole, Sam. He sat behind me, and regularly wrote “July sucks pickles” in pencil on his desk in the thick graphite of repetition. When I confronted him about the pogs thievery, he immediately picked up his pencil (the same pencil of pickle infamy) and stabbed me in the forehead with it.

I don’t much remember the aftermath. What I do remember is that it was the first time I’d learned to be afraid of the unpredictability of boys who’d had their power challenged. I still have a small scar on my forehead, a little space where forehead used to be. It’s nearly imperceptible, but still there.

On the more recent Vegas trip, the one I went on for work, I’d been eating alone at a place on the Strip I’d always wanted to try. Three men at the bar were cruising me, a fact I’d noticed the moment they’d walked in. I had chosen to ignore them. However, as I was finishing my meal, one of them approached me.

It was the first time I’d learned to be afraid of the unpredictability of boys who’d had their power challenged.

“Hey there,” he said. I straightened my back and positioned my body into a diplomatic brick wall. “My buddies and I noticed you’re dining alone, such a pretty girl.” He motioned toward his friends who were smiling from the bar. They raised their martinis. “We are just so bored, and it’s my birthday” — I rolled my eyes internally — “and, well, we are harmless. Let us buy you dessert.”

I didn’t. A few days later, while back home in Oakland, I got a message from an old coworker, a man who’d hired me to work as a ghostwriter for a publishing company, then had been subsequently laid off from his job. I still work there; he doesn’t. It’s awkward. He sent me a message saying that he was moving back East — he and his wife were splitting up, and he was really a mess. Could I meet up for a drink before he left town?

I was ready to immediately respond with a soothing “yes” — after all, I’ve been there, and man, does a drink with an understanding friend help — when his next message came through:

“BTW, I’m planning on flirting with you shamelessly. But don’t worry, I’m harmless.”

Support Diverse Journalism — Become A Member Of The Establishment

A few days later, my partner and I were on our way to see Maya Rudolph and her Prince cover band, Princess. Starving and hungover from a party we’d been to the night before, we stopped at a mediocre pizza place in the Mission district of San Francisco for a slice. The lights were too bright, and the smell of grease made me feel caged-in and ill, so I sat down at a spacious booth while my partner ordered. Almost immediately, a man came into the pizzeria and sat down next to me in the booth, forcing me to move quickly around the rest of the horseshoe to scramble out of it.

I was thinking, “Why do men always think it’s cool to sit so goddamn close to me,” when he simultaneously hissed out a “I just need pussy. I swear to god if bitches keep treating me like this I’m going to fucking kill someone.”

It was audible throughout the whole shop. My partner, whom I’d found a way to hide behind at this point, heard it. The line cook heard it. And the man ringing up our order heard it. The man looking for pussy slunk out the door, glaring at me the whole time. As soon as he was gone, the cashier laughed.

“You have to know how to handle these crazy motherfuckers. Don’t act so scared. He was harmless.”

Why do men always think it’s cool to sit so goddamn close to me?

I live in a part of Oakland where I have been sexually harassed every single one of the 761 days I’ve lived there. I know this isn’t the case with many people, as was pointed out to me in a piece The Establishment recently published about the de-sexualization of disabled bodies. But men always have things to say to me, about my hips, my smile, what I should and shouldn’t be doing. And very often, they counter with “I’m harmless” as they move closer into my space, as if that is the magic word that lowers the drawbridge across the moat.

My partner, a communications professor (on the humanitarian/conflict resolution side, not media), plays devil’s advocate. “I think it’s in part that men are on edge about always being perceived as predatory.”

Rebecca Solnit’s book, Men Explain Things to Me, holds the theory that such interactions assume that women don’t know any better than what they are told by men — and I liberally take her theories here to say that men believe that their authority means more than a woman’s feelings of safety. Saying “harmless” makes it true — and so it was decreed. Or something.

The Shocking Connection Between Street Harassment And Street Lighting

But in The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker, there’s a theory that predators are continuously stating truths in the form of non-truths — “I’m harmless” falling under that category. It’s a little bit like how you can learn a lot about red flags on a first date by really listening to the ways people talk about their past relationships (not to parallel these experiences, because different systems of social hierarchy and oppression are obviously at play).

So what does harmlessness mean? I believe it means more about answering a question I haven’t explicitly asked, except through body language, through primal fear, through the ways the world has taught me to be afraid of spontaneous violence against my person. I am never asking, I am never, ever asking for it.

I think my partner is talking about how current discourse around the predatory nature of men is presented in the media as an absolute — and for good reason, of course, because of rape culture and the systemic oppression of fetishized bodies. But I do believe that there is clearly more nuance. There are men who possess self-awareness enough to know that they’ve been told their whole lives that they are predators, and they perhaps have no idea how to navigate that (or don’t have the skill set to navigate that), except to preface every come-on with the statement that they are the exact opposite.

There’s a theory that predators are continuously stating truths in the form of non-truths.

What is missing, in these interactions, is this: When we talk about rape culture, or the sexualization of women/feminine bodies, we are talking about a problem that is systemic, not anecdotal. Recently, I was in a bar with a group of men who bristled visibly when I brought up street harassment, and how there was no such thing as a society that was inherently safe for women. As accustomed as I am to always being the “feminist killjoy” at the table/party/event, I’m constantly learning how to broach these subjects with grace and empathy, to try to take into consideration that the majority of those with privilege (including myself, in the arenas where I hold privilege) aren’t entirely aware that they possess it, nor how to be a proper ally.

The men I was in conversation with at the bar continued to bring the conversation back around to the fact (which I didn’t doubt even a little) that they, themselves, were good men. Harmless. This is another kind of harmless, of course, because these men were not using the word to preface a sexual advance towards me, only to try to show that their anecdotal experience meant that we were living in an era beyond sexism and rape culture. That women were, essentially, safe with them.

Because we could not seem to get the conversation back on track to a global perspective on systemic issues, I pounced on the opportunity to frame it in a way they could understand. One of the men had once shaved his head — an uncommon thing for him at the time and place when he’d done it. He talked about the ways in which people moved differently around him, how he had to think carefully about routes he walked home, places he frequented, people he talked to. Not only because he could be perceived as a threat, but also that he could be threatened for being different.

Love Poems To My Catcallers

“This isn’t exactly the same,” I said, “But try to channel your lived experience into empathizing with the concept that women face these kinds of decisions every single day.”

This seemed to work. Their task, we discussed, was to use their empathetic understanding to become better allies, and to open themselves up to being educated about fighting predatory behavior — which included participating in a kind of knowing that may be uncomfortable for them.

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