Expletive Deleted by Ruth Wajnryb

Author:Ruth Wajnryb
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2005-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

20 FUCKs (including variations, like “fucking” and “fuck you”)

9 SHITs (including “crap”)

5 ARSEs (including variations, like “pig’s arse”)

plus a few each of PISS, BLOODY, JESUS, BITCH, NUTS, COW, and BASTARD

The small bank of key swear words served a range of speech functions, mostly the expression of irritation and anger. There were a few moments of social swearing, and, in regard to the child, swearing featured as (unsuccessful) attempts at control. One reviewer described the script as “a flavourless diet of four-letter words. It’s as if being poor has starved them of the means to put a sentence together.”

In this sampling of Teesh and Trude, the very noticeable absence of CUNT suggests an inequality of use. Unless it was absented to abide by film classification criteria, it would seem to remain a word that men use mostly to or about women. Anecdotal evidence suggests that women do use it to and about other women, but rarely to or about men. In other words, “feminization of the monstrous” continues to some extent, notwithstanding advances on other fronts—for example, the number of child-care facilities or women on corporate boards.

But Timothy Jay, investigating in America, concludes that men swear more than women, using different and more offensive swear words. They start swearing at a younger age, and the habit persists into old age. They are socially freer to exhibit hostile and aggressive speech habits. Further, the gendered differences in sexual semantics affect every aspect of sexual talk, from banter to joke-telling, to verbal dueling, verbal harassment, and aggression. He writes, “As with the case of love, men and women do [swearing] differently.…They view the world differently.…The language of insults and name calling supports the view that we are operating on different assumptions about what makes our hearts and minds tick.”

In an interesting piece of comparative research, Jay studied swearing in public places over the span of a decade, and he came to the conclusion that patterns of swearing—based on geography, gender, mixed, or nonmixed company—were surprisingly stable, the only change being that women in 1996 were swearing more in public than they did in 1986. Part of his research involved graffiti in male and female bathrooms. He found men’s graffiti more sexually suggestive, less socially acceptable, more racist, more homophobic, and less romantic than women’s. No surprises there. He came to the overall conclusion that “humans come in two sexes, male and female, but gender identity is more elaborate than merely acknowledging genitalia.”

In Australia, Amy Cooper observed male-to-male swearing within earshot of female company and notes that when girls pass young men sitting, for example, on a public bench, “the boys spread their limbs over the widest possible area and insult each other loudly”; while in Britain, Jennifer Coates claims that men in own-sex groups swear three times more than women, but that both groups dramatically lower their swearing in mixed company.

South African findings are closer to the Australian research. Vivian de Klerk finds little to support the widespread assumption that women’s talk differs from men’s, especially in the area of nonstandard speech.

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