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Categories of Sexist Language: Female

DarkSkyLady
6 min readDec 2, 2018

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Photo by Katherine Hanlon on Unsplash

Language is powerful. The use of language can: slant an individual’s viewpoint, mold a belief, alter how a person sees a group or even themselves. There’s a reason people rail when a news piece stating “Loving Father Kills Family” depicts a caring white father who, for some mythical reason, snaps while alternately painting a black man as an “angry man”; a man whose violence hides, seething, beneath the surface.

It’s not just race where language performs in this capacity, but gender-biased or sexist language, especially against women, is just as widespread. Language is unable to be taken on its own because it effects behaviors, both on an individual and societal/governmental level.

While not a complete list of words, here is a collection of words broken down into some categories. Some may fit into more than one, but will only be found in one category. This may be updated in future but here’s an overview of the words and categories.

Typical Positive (Supposedly)

In this category we have words like: nurturing, warm, girly, feminine just to name a few. These are believed to be words we, as women, always long to hear. They are the epitome of womanhood and we are meant to strive our entire lives to be considered worthy of it and to maintain it.

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DarkSkyLady
DarkSkyLady

Written by DarkSkyLady

Black/Puerto Rican creative non-binary. Spouts nonsense that occasionally makes sense. they/them

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