Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language

        Wordslut is such a fun book. Despite this being my first exposure to Amanda Montell, I can’t help but feel that her voice shines beautifully throughout the work. Her writing is lively, conversational, both-serious-and-not. There’s a real levity to her analysis that makes the book a truly entertaining read. It probably helps that she herself reads the audiobook and is really able to sell the tone.

At a glance, a number of the chapters come across as being silly. Consider, for example, the first chapter: “Slutty Skank Hoes and Nasty Dykes: A Comprehensive List of Gendered Insults I Hate (But Also Kind of Love?)”. Another chapter is “Cyclops, Panty Puppet, Bald-Headed Bastard (And 100+ Other Things to Call Your Genitalia)” and another is called “Fuck it: An Ode to Cursing While Female”. While these chapter titles give the impression of a crass-for-fun approach, there’s something more powerful happening throughout Wordslut.

The book is a sociolinguistic exploration of sex and gender. It’s told in such an approachable, personal way that it is a beautiful entry point for people thinking about language or gender studies. It’s corrective without being accusatory. It’s informative without being pedantic. One example is when Montell breaks down the class and race-based use of “y’all” and critiques the haters of this second person plural that makes language more clear than saying “you” to multiple people or “you guys” to people that don’t all identify as boys and men.

The book touches on a number of ideas around the misogyny embedded in language. Some of the ground has been covered before (for instance, doing a statistical analysis of how many derogatory words there are for women as opposed to men), but it is always done with a fresh set of eyes and empathy for the language users most often criticized (i.e. women, people of colour, and 2SLGBTQ+ folks).

To give a few examples, Montell discusses differences in communication between socialized women and men. She discusses phenomena like hedging the conversation, affirming comments, and so on, among women. Even the phrase “like,” disproportionately (and erroneously) attributed to valley girls, serves a valuable linguistic function. Montell even goes into detail on why “the gay voice” is a phenomenon. The book is progressive and, at every turn, Montell makes a case against prescriptive linguistics and for embracing the linguistic shifts that happen naturally as the English language develops.

A number of the specifics are fascinating, but it’s a little beyond my capacity to summarize all of the specific details. All I can really do is encourage you to read the book—and better yet, listen to the audiobook so that you can hear all the fun percussive curses that come from Montell’s mouth.

Happy reading!

Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America by Ijeoma Oluo

It’s a little ironic that I’m here as a mediocre White man commenting on a book about the failings of the group of which I’m a part. Consider it an exercise in self-identification through reading. Ijeoma Oluo’s book Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America essentially offers an overview how catering to the mediocrity of White men in America has led to disastrous consequences for everyone else and that all of the problems we face are actually the system working according to design.

The book starts off with an engaging, and somewhat surprising description of cowboys in early America. The discourse is rooted firmly in a critique of colonialism that walks through the way that American men took charge through violence, though not through any superiority in ideas of governance. There’s a compelling account of how White men failed to engage in authentic understanding with America’s Indigenous people and Black populations, which led to offensive, reductive depictions of these cultural “Others”, which then justified widespread genocidal practices (like killing off the buffalo to ensure that food sources for Indigenous people dried up). It isn’t where I expected the book to start, and giving that angle was a refreshing way of setting the groundwork for a work of cultural studies.

The second chapter also offers a really interesting perspective about the way White men co-opt social justice movements and take the glory for themselves and the third chapter depicts how White men systematically discredit and dismantle the education system because it benefits the population that is not White men. Incidentally, Oluo points out how even the Republicans who talk about how “woke” colleges are ruining America still send their children to the most prestigious schools they can. Oluo, though, also dismantles the notion that Leftists and Liberals are smarter than their right-wing counterparts and how that mindset is demeaning, replicating our existing biases rather than moving us forward. It’s not a matter of intelligence or education. It’s a matter of empathy.

In this regard, it’s pretty interesting and controversial to take a look at one of Oluo’s key case studies. Donald Trump is an easy target. He’s mediocre in every sense. What’s most interesting to me, though, is the way that people who otherwise would have been Bernie Sanders voters moved over to Trump out of spite. They were people who wanted somebody—anybody—to shake things up, regardless of politics. At the same time, White men were still not willing to vote for a “shrill” woman (Hillary Clinton) or a woman of colour (claiming that Democrats make “too much” of race—and therefore lose). Oluo points out that Sanders’ accomplishments in the realm of social justice are still not truly representative of constituents and that he, along with other politicians, get credit for socially progressive stances while people of colour who offer the same policies are criticized for them. It’s a complex issue to navigate.

A more straightforward example of White male mediocrity crushing social justice movements is in the case of Colin Kaepernick and other football players who knelt during the national anthem. The White owners of football teams—including college teams—took measures to ensure that protest was not possible without repercussion. For instance, at the college football level, students could be removed from the team and school for one instance of protest and the inordinate fines on players and teams offered financial disincentives to speaking truth to power. I found the entire chapter really compelling in its account of injustice. 

Perhaps of all the specific examples, what stands out most to me is actually something from an early chapter. Oluo writes about how White men are allowed to be mediocre because their actions require no risk. Myself included: I could, theoretically, write something passable and get attention. Meanwhile, poc and women have to “take bigger swings” in order to make an impact. I find that idea so interesting: the idea of lack of risk leading to mediocrity could be productively explored in so many realms. 

Oluo’s text is a clear, informed argument against the continued leadership of mediocre White men. I suspect that it will ruffle a number of feathers (in the same way her book So You Want To Talk About Race? would ruffle some feathers). For that reason alone it’s worth reading. It’s challenging. It will force you to confront some difficult truths in American history and contemporary society—or, if you’re not a White man, it will affirm what you already know and provide you with the language to confront the institutions that are harming you. 

This review might not be that great. It is an act of generosity to have sticking with me so long.

Happy reading!

Two Bowls of Milk by Stephanie Bolster

  I invite you to share in a memory of mine from my younger years. I’m in Verona at an art gallery, carrying a notebook in which I write fragments of poems and miscellany thoughts. After milling about for a few hours, I find my way into the modern art section, and come across a striking painting of a man with what I remember as a bloodied eye, looking anguished. The painting arrests me. When I look at the title, it is Waiting for Godot—a play with a similarly arresting power. I sit down on the floor of the gallery, examining the painting from a safe distance and writing in my notebook while Italian security guards snicker at this strange, floored, Canadian. There’s me: writing a poem in response to a painting in response to a play.

I mention the anecdote because poetry-ifying visual arts was one of my main tactics as a budding writer and in Stephanie Bolster’s Two Bowls of Milk, we see the practice playing out by a similar, albeit more capable hand. Two Bowls of Milk is a collection of poetry that, like many collections, comes in multiple parts. The first section of the collection is more rooted in experience, particularly rural experiences, while the back half of the collection is in direct response to artworks, which are cited under the titles of poems. 

Bolster maintains a lush descriptiveness that feels philosophically resonant, exploring the idea of perspective. She starts early with untitled the poem opening the section “Come to the Edge”, in which she invites the reader: “Come to the edge of the barn the property really begins there, / you see things defining themselves, the hoofprints left by sheep, / the slope of the roof, each feather against each feather on each goose. / You see the stake with the flap of orange plastic that marks // the beginning of real” (3). I appreciate this early invitation from the haze into something more defined, and the positioning of realness as the precise details. Important to note is that the things define “themselves,” giving agency to the inanimate. The poem continues with a rationale for the reality”: “I’m showing you this because / I’m suck of the way you clutch the darkness with your hands, / seek invisible fenceposts for guidance, accost spectres” (3). The poem has a grounding effect in the material rather than the abstract, while still providing that hint of a sort of “great beyond” of inspiration. It makes me think of an engraving I once saw of someone, bent over, looking “beyond the veil,” which to me looked like someone awaiting the sting of the guillotine. This trip into the real is not without its need for caution, as the poem’s speaker notes: “I’m coming with you because I fear you’ll trip // over the string that marks the beginning, you’ll lie across the border / and with that view — fields of intricate grain and chiselled mountains, / cold winds already lifting the hairs of your arm—you’ll forget your feet, / numb in straw and indefinite dung, and be unable to rise, to walk farther” (3). There guide has a gentleness that I quite appreciate, noting the danger but offering the guidance to avoid it. The poem weaves together the philosophical project: bringing the abstract into realness while also maintaining the allusiveness to something more significant and resonant. The poem ends with the following stanzas:

My fingers weave so close between yours because I’ve been there
before, I know the relief of everything, how it eases the mind to learn
shapes it hasn’t made, how it eases the feet to know the ground
will persist. See those two bowls of milk, just there,

on the other side of the property line, they’re for the cats
that sometimes cross over and are seized by a thirst, they’re
to wash your hands in. Lick each finger afterwards. That will be
your first taste, and my finger tracing your lips will be the second. (3)

There’s a suggestiveness in the final lines, pairing this idea of revealing the real with a charged intimacy. What I like best, though, is the line about “how it eases the mind to learn / shapes it hasn’t made” (3). I feel as though that’s critical to Bolster’s project here. There’s an attentiveness to the details, a commitment to learning things that did not originate with us. I once wrote an essay about the ethics of attention posited in the short works of Samuel Beckett—funny how that motif returns to me again.

With this kind of care and attention, Bolster offers some short reflections on “Assorted Flora” and about the “Iris,” she writes,

Your spine is a secret grief.

Rooted in inconstant mud,
you managed to stand, proud

though purple marks the perfect
white of your throat.

But cut, left
alone in a vase, you will lean

away from light, shrink
into your crippled shadow. (8)

The imagistic nature of the work draws on the specific details of the flower and elevates it, though I’m not sure elevates is the right word—humanizes might be more a propos. The personification of the iris with “the perfect / white of [its] throat” and the idea of shrinking away into a shadow, away from the light, gives the flower a human quality. It’s a charming observational moment of identification.

The imagistic nature of the poems reminds me of William Carlos Williams, particularly in this section of “Poems For the Flood,” a poem that is comprised of several vignettes:

Watering the garden, I call the earth thirsty
and then cringe at what I’ve said. The way things are

is simpler and more difficult to understand. My throat
and the columbines open for the same water differently.

Closed rose petals, a sky not scrawled with cloud,
the small of the back, these are lesser. Beauty is the red

rectangle of a barn surrounded by flood.
The white chicken on the rooftop testing its wings. (17)

Maybe it’s the white chickens and the redness of the barn. I appreciate what Bolster adds to the imagery by having the connections between humans and plants: “My throat / and the columbines open for the same water differently.” 

The back half of the collection is focused on responding to artworks. One poem that stands out to me in that regard is “Still Life With Braid,” which is given the subtitle for the artwork “Female Dissected Body, Seen From the Back, Gerard de Lairess, 1685. Engraving with etching.” The poem has a more narrative-driven impulse, introducing a kind of relationship between two characters: “I loved her when we washed our hands / in matching sinks at school” (55). The specificity of the moment stands out to me and then it continues with an excellent set of lines: “She feared the cubicles / where a raincoat with a man in it might stand / on a toilet’s rim awaiting us, pocket knife // tight in his fist” (55). The ominousness of the moment is finely delivered. I think what I like best is the way the line “She feared the cubicles” is given a line break that creates meaning on its own but then is doubled up with the lines which follow. The poem continues with the disappearance of the girl with the teacher reassuring the speaker that she’s just camping. Finally, the central character’s “letter slot released / a drawing of an iris, pencilled throat open, bulb / engorged beneath” (55). She continues, “Veins so intricately etched / they stung the purple in my wrists. No hand but hers // had done it” (55). The narrator flashes forward where “Time passed / until [she] visited a gallery and ticking stopped / before her adult portrait: wrists resplendent, raw / in bracelets of taut rope” (55). The narrator sees her childhood friend’s gestures replicated in the image where her posture “peeled to reveal her braided spine” (55). The final description is such a haunting one that reminds me of a philosophy book I read about the female form last year:

skin draped

her waist, was pinned aside like coy sleeves fitted
to her upper arms. The alphabet named her

crucial points but not that curl she’d tucked
behind her ear at eight. Her face averted, ashamed
at believing its body worth this spectacle of death.
Why did I not tell her she was more than this? I am

no more myself: bones pitched inside a tent of skin;
fear; one bound hand and the other binding. (55-56)

The description is so rich and evocative of their bond and seems to tell a story in just a few short, rich sentences. There’s a notion of what is invisible to others re-emerging, or at least being perceived, seemingly by nobody else. It’s a fantastic conclusion to an entire story, told within two pages.

Of course, the challenge of a collection like this is that, sometimes, without the reference images, the poems don’t really land in the same way. The challenge of responding to art with another art form is that you’re both adding and subtracting at once. You’re adding a layer of interpretation, but potentially subtracting from your own work by relying on your references. It’s a fine line to walk that has the potential to make your work shine but also to limit your audience. At the very least it places some demands on the reader to conduct additional research.

Overall, I quite liked Two Bowls of Milk. It had a lot of great poetry in it, which sounds like an odd thing to say, although I do think it encapsulates the spirit of perception that gives poetry its ethical and aesthetic force.

Happy reading!