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Amanda Montell Books

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“The on-screen depiction of oral sex performed on women has consistently earned movies an NC-17 rating – Blue Valentine, Boys Don’t Cry, and Charlie Countryman are a few that come to mind. The same standard has certainly not been applied to on-screen blow jobs. I often think of 2013s Lovelace, a biopic about the star of the 1972 porn film Deep Throat. This was an entire movie dedicated to fellatio, and to extreme sexual violence, and even that was given a mild R. Sure, let the kids watch a porn star get repeatedly raped, but female desire? No, no, no.”

FeminismPornographyRapeSexual ViolenceFemale SexualityCunnilingusOral SexFellatioRatings
Book:Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language
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“At the time I am writing this, one of the definitions of vagina from TheFreeDictionary.com’s medical glossary reads, “An organ of copulation that receives the penis during sexual intercourse.” This is not a political view of the vagina, it’s a medical one. And yet, I would invite a doctor to try telling a lesbian that her vagina is “an organ that receives the penis.” See how well that goes. (258)”

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Book:Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language
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“Perhaps you’ve heard this feminist riddle: “A young boy was rushed to the hospital from the scene of an accident, where his father was killed, and prepped for emergency surgery. The surgeon walked in, took one look, and said, ‘I can’t operate on him – he’s my son.’ How is this possible?” This scenario trips people up because if the boy’s father is dead, how could he be operating on him? Few come to the conclusion that surgeon was in fact his mother. The rare and exotic lady surgeon.”

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Book:Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language
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“[Janet] Holmes’s numbers demonstrated that the total number of you knows collected were almost identical between genders, but women used the phrase with a flat pitch, communicating confidence, over 20 percent more than men. And yet, most people don’t hear it that way – at the first sign of a woman hedging, they automatically assume insecurity.”

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Book:Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language
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“…what these metaphors of women as nature, territories, and technologies do is place feminine gender in that same distant category of “other.” According to [Suzanne] Romaine, by comparing her to things like storms and seas, “woman is symbolic of the conflict between nature and civilization, tempting men with her beauty, attracting men with her charms, but dangerous and therefore in need of conquest.” Woman is a continent to colonize, a fortress to siege. These sentiments are reflected not only in English; in languages all over the world, from Italian to Thai, a nation’s government is labelled as having “founding fathers,” while the land itself (“Mother Nature,” “virgin territory”) is perceived as a feminine entity. In grammar as in allegory as in life, women are considered reckless places outside the civilized male world – wild things meant to be tamed into the weak, delicate flowers we’ve traditionally wanted women to be.”

LanguageFeminismGrammarSociolinguistics
Book:Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language
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“Just think of some of the most common verbs used to illustrate sex: bone, drill, screw. In the world of these words, the person with the erection is both the star and the narrator. If one were to describe sex from the vagina’s standpoint – to say something like, “We enveloped all night,” or “I sheathed the living daylights out of him,” or “we clitsmashed” – it would be such an exceptional rebellion against mainstream sex talk that to many listeners, it would be a real head-scratcher.”

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Book:Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language
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“Perhaps the most conspicuous one [pattern] he [Jonathon Green] found was how consistent, and how unsettling, the themes of our genitalia words have remained over time. As green told reporters shortly after his study was published, “The penis is often going to be some kid of weapon, the vagina some kind of narrow passage, intercourse some way of saying ‘man hits woman.”

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Book:Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language
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“Overall it’s really clear that the way we talk about genitals is a super concentrated representation of how we thing about sex and gender,” he [Lal Zimman] tells me. “The research that people have done on heteronormative gender naming really shows that our worst cultural values are reflected in the ways we talk about genitals. Like penises are always weapons that exist for penetrating, sex is always violence, and women and vaginas are passive and absence, just a place to put a penis.”

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Book:Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language
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“I am not the first person to point out the similarities between Jones and Trump, but I highlight their overlapping oratories more as an invitation to consider the precise language forms that contributed to Trump's deceptive and violent charisma. Not to drum up fear that the man is capable of orchestrating a mass poisoning in Guiana. I doubt Trump could even name which continent Guiana is on.”

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Book:Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism
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