You’re Not the Boss of Me: Don’t Ban Bossy
by Benjamin Studebaker
Recently I’ve been seeing a new identity politics argument circulating around the internet that grinds my gears: Ban Bossy. This is not to say that I don’t agree with the movement’s aims–I think it would be wonderful if women had more self-confidence. My problem is that the arguments for banning bossy are spectacularly unconvincing. Here’s why.
There are two big problems with the effort to ban bossy:
- “Bossy” does not mean what these people think it means.
- Even if “bossy” did mean what these people think it means and we could eliminate it from the vocabulary with a snap of our fingers, this would accomplish absolutely nothing.
Let’s take each case in turn.
“Bossy” is an Emancipatory Term
The anti-bossy crowd seems to have a very particular notion of what the word “bossy” means and how it is used. As far as I can tell, they believe it to be a stand-in for “bitchy”. They think it means “uppity woman who doesn’t know her place”. I think this understanding of the term “bossy” completely misses the point of the word.
A bossy person is someone who acts like a boss without holding the title. When you call me “bossy”, you’re saying that I am acting as if I were your boss, that our relationship is not what I seem to think it is, and that I should back off and quit ordering you around as if I were in charge of you. In this context, “bossy” is emancipatory, it is a way to tell someone with pretensions to authority that you see through those pretensions and do not recognize them as legitimate.
Perhaps you remember the American sitcom Malcolm in the Middle. Specifically, do you remember the song that plays in the intro?
The line that sticks with me is:
You’re not the boss of me now, and you’re not so big.
In the family sit-com, the children are challenging the legitimacy of the authority of their parents, they are objecting that the relationship their parents believe they have with them is not the relationship their parents should have with them or will have with them going forward. The claim implied in the intro is that their parents act as if they were bosses when they are not bosses. This is not to say that Malcolm, Reese, Dewey, and company are necessarily right, but it is to say that the idea they are expressing is a valuable one–we should be able to call people out when we believe that they are attempting to dominate us in unacceptable ways, and demand that they offer justification, that they defend the legitimacy of their attempt to rule us. Perhaps the parents in Malcolm in the Middle can legitimize their decisions, but the point is that they should be made to do so, that the children are entitled to understand why they are the subjects of that authority.
The preceding paragraph is long-winded, isn’t it? We shouldn’t have to explain every time we don’t like the way someone is ordering us about that we believe it is an illegitimate domination, particularly given that this phrase is outside the vocabularies of many of the people most in need of it. We should be able to simply call it “bossy”–the word gets the meaning across straightaway.
We have all known bossy people. Some of us (and I would count myself among that number despite my masculinity) have even been bossy people. Being bossy is not cool. Nobody likes to be treated like an underling by someone else without good cause. That’s true whether you’re male, female, or somewhere in between.
Banning Words Doesn’t Work
But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you don’t buy any of that. Let’s say that we think that the entire preceding argument is just a big cover up for what is ultimately a sanitized version of “bitchy”. Let’s presume that “bossy” is like “bitchy”. If you like, let’s even presume it’s like “nigger” but for women. Even if you think that, banning bossy is still a bad idea.
Why? Well to start, why has “bossy” acquired any of the connotations we associate with “bitchy”? Because it’s not okay to use the word “bitchy” in polite company, so some people use “bossy” as a euphemism, as a soft version of the same thing.
But what is the goal of the “ban bossy” movement? To make it not okay to use the word “bossy” in polite company. See the problem here? Getting rid of words does not get rid of ideas. Ideas are like the mythical hydra–if you lop off a head, two more grow back in its place. All word elimination serves to do is to get racists and sexists and other bad-ists to use more insidious language that masks racism, sexism, and other bad-isms in friendlier guise.
They’re not “black teens”, they’re “urban youth”. They’re not “morons”, they’re “retards”. They’re not “retards”, they’re “special”. They’re not “special”, they’re “differently able”. No matter how many times you change the word, the idea does not die, it takes whatever new word you introduce and it bends that word to its purpose. And in the meantime, once we relegate a word to the rubbish pile, it acquires a bizarre Lord Voldemort, “he-who-must-not-be-named” power.
Harry Potter refused to call Voldemort “he-who-must-not-be-named”, because he recognized that this only served to minister to Voldemort’s mystique. Instead, Harry frequently calls him by his given name, “Tom Riddle”. By calling him exactly what he is, Harry diminishes Voldemort and the perception of his invincibility and power. Every time a black rapper claims the word “nigger” as his own and uses it for a purpose that isn’t the one white people came up with, he diminishes the power of that word to hurt people. Every time someone like Kanye West or Jay-Z uses the word “nigger” to just mean “dude” or “buddy”, with no negative connotation, they take the racist legacy that term has head-on and diminish it.
We can make it unacceptable to say “bossy” the same way we made it unacceptable to say “bitchy”, but at the end of the day, we’re just playing the word game. We have to confront ideas, not words, and we do that not by saying “that’s bad, don’t say that” but by instead making our own voices heard and by acting in accordance with our beliefs. If you want to break down the gender norms that push boys and girls into performing gender roles rather than being themselves, don’t pat yourself on the back for trying to ban a word. Hire a qualified woman. Try to raise your sons and daughters without imposing your conception of what a son or a daughter should be onto them. Encourage the boys and girls you meet to think for themselves.
There’s no evidence, no reason to believe that by not using the word bossy we would help women to be more confident or to enjoy more life opportunities. The claim that we should ban the word bossy nonetheless is an attempt by a minority to impose unsubstantiated beliefs about how language works on the rest of us. It is an attempt at illegitimately exercise domination where no such domination is called for, an attempt to boss us around. And to those seeking to boss the rest of us around with no good cause for doing so, I say this:
You’re not the boss of me now, and you’re not so big.
So, to start with, you’re not engaging Sandberg and Chavez’s actual argument (http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304360704579419150649284412). Namely, they argue that bossy as denoted in the dictionary does actually focus on women, and that it’s statistical use connotes that bossy women are a bad thing. Whatever you think “bossy” means, the Ngram corpus does not empirically agree.
Second, it’s clear from Sandberg and Chavez’s wording that they’re not trying to literally “ban” bossy, but just exploiting some alliteration for a catchy slogan. (This was clearly ill-advised since it has invited a non-sequitor argument, but alas.) They’re asking people, pointedly, to stop enforcing the idea that girls who voice decisive opinions are “bossy” and boys who do the same are “leaders”.
It’s clear that they want to address the deeper ideas the language conveys, as you propose. But this language/idea dichotomy you set up isn’t so clear in practice. Words are ideas. By “banning” (read: changing) bossy, we change the mental landscape we place girls and women on.
That landscape, by the way, currently looks like this: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=bossy+girl%2Cbossy+boy%2C+bossy+man%2C+bossy+woman&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cbossy%20girl%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cbossy%20boy%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cbossy%20man%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cbossy%20woman%3B%2Cc0
There’s precious little statistical evidence to engage with in the WSJ piece, it’s mostly a slew of anecdotes that are not persuasive. All I see is a survey of girl scouts, with the precise wording of the question and answers not given, along with some sourced claims that the word is more often attached to women than men. This doesn’t establish that reduced use of the word would achieve anything, and it doesn’t diminish or deny the word’s emancipatory value. To some extent, it may have acquired a use as a stand-in for “bitchy”, but that is only because the word “bitchy” has itself been made taboo for the same reasons the Ban Bossy people want to make “bossy” taboo.
No one is arguing that they’re trying to get a law passed banning the word–they’re using the same tactics that are used by Spread the Word to End the Word, with the goal being the imposition of social stigma to achieve soft coercion.
I know of no such case in which anyone has ever eliminated an idea by making a word taboo. I know of many cases in which words have been replaced, only to come to have the same connotations their predecessors had (as with “moron” and “retard” and even “special”).
Check out the article more closely. WSJ, for some unfathomable reason, has its graphics on a separate page. (http://online.wsj.com/news/interactive/BOSSY0307?ref=SB10001424052702304360704579419150649284412) I provided a similar chart from Google, produced using analogous searches. The statistics are there.
What about their analysis do you actually disagree with? They don’t limit it to just bossy (headline notwithstanding), and engage with the ideas and attitudes underpinning int—insofar as it even makes sense to separate words from ideas. Sandburg and Chavez are clearly anticipating these objections, and spend a large chunk of the article on the very things you say they should.
Finally, put in most any slur into Ngram and you’ll find, accounting for historical proclivity for certain terms, most of them have fallen recent years. Even if you want to take the stance it’s because we’re articulating fewer prejudiced ideas, that’s exactly the point. The way to stop articulating prejudiced ideas is to stop using words that articulate them.
Also, The Onion continues to impress: http://www.theonion.com/articles/racial-slur-development-not-keeping-pace-with-mixe,17027/
I don’t think the use of the word “bossy” to describe women more often than men has any more pernicious affects on women than does the use of the word “mean” to describe men more often than women, and even were it the case that it did, I don’t think an organized effort to create a taboo will diminish the strength of the idea expressed.
While it’s true that usage of slurs and the general prejudice within our society correlate, I do not think the causal relationship runs in this direction, I don’t think you can reduce the incidence of racist/sexist thoughts by reducing the incidence of the use of slurs. Rather, a reduced incidence of slurs is indicative either of declining prejudice or of this kind of synthetic taboo-making.
Also, if we’re going to play the google trends game, we’re going to be banning lots of words for gender reasons:
There’s an “asshole” gap:
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=asshole%20man%2C%20asshole%20woman
There’s a “jackass” gap:
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=jackass%20man%2C%20jackass%20woman
There’s a “jerk” gap:
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=jerk%20man%2C%20jerk%20woman
There’s a “mean” gap:
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Mean%20man%2C%20mean%20woman
And on it goes–we ought not to attach taboos to any of these words.
Yep. Let’s pick a random pair of feminists—Sandberg and Chavez—on the subject:
“Boys are expected to be assertive, confident and opinionated, while girls should be kind, nurturing and compassionate.”
This is exactly why they are correct to do as they do and take on more than just the literal use of the word “bossy” in their piece. That their slogan doesn’t do everything is a watery critique at best.
I don’t think the word “bossy” has any causal affect on that. I don’t think reducing the incidence with which it is used will solve that problem.
I, on the other hand, think telling little girls that no one will like them if they speak up has a deleterious effect on those girls.
I don’t think that’s the reason people call other people “bossy”. I think people call other people bossy when they’re trying to challenge what they perceive to be illegitimate domination.
Have you considered that perhaps what the gender disparity in the use of the word “bossy” might really reveal is that we’re too accepting of male authority, that the word “bossy” should be used more to describe men?
[…] You’re Not the Boss of Me: Don’t Ban Bossy (benjaminstudebaker.com) […]
Thanks for sharing!
Ben, I think you fail to appreciate the power of the word ‘bossy’ because you have not noticed how it affects women. The word is not only used when girls ‘illegitimately’ overpower others. In my own experience, any time I came up with a new idea and tried to persuade others to adopt it they called me “bossy” and I soon saw that I would never be popular with boys or girls if I continued to lead conversations or projects. The campaign we are taking about actually just raises awareness about this and I think it’s great. I wish they had started when I was in Middle School!
I was accused of being “bossy” or “aggressive” or overly “assertive” lots of times growing up, usually when I was being a bit of a cad. There was a fundamental distinction between offering input and acting like I was in charge when I wasn’t that I needed to learn.
Part of the trouble is that those of us who say that we were called “bossy” for no good reason have a bias–we would like to think that when other people called us bossy, it was because they were being sexist or unreasonable, not because we were presenting our ideas in a way that diminished them or made them feel subjugated. We have to question what it was about the way we presented our ideas that made people feel like we were ordering them around when we didn’t mean to.
And I think you are clearly confusing your own personal experiences with the experiences of the average girl in Middle School. I understand that you had to go through a personal transformation when you were accused of being ‘bossy’ but in the end your experience was positive, you came out even more confident than before because the feedback you received actually made you more efficient. On the other hand, girls who are called ‘bossy’ are discouraged from offering their ideas and their personal transformation is actually resulting in less efficiency and confidence. You are confusing the two.
So when I was called “bossy”, I wasn’t being discouraged from offering my ideas? Unless we’re going to presume going in that the people who call us “bossy” are doing so because they’re sexist, there’s a very real chance when we are being accused of being bossy that we’re actually doing something wrong, and I think we should take that possibility seriously rather than presuming our own blamelessness. How we ultimately decide to handle the criticism is going to vary from person to person, but the fact that some people take criticism the wrong way does not in and of itself necessarily invalidate the criticism. When someone says my contribution is “stupid” or that I’m being “weird”, those words also discourage me from contributing, but there’s a possibility that my contribution really was stupid or weird, and even if it wasn’t, I am capable of handling that criticism in a variety of different ways.
But all the statistics are showing that women are indeed called ‘bossy’ because of their gender. Do you genuinely believe that the word is used overwhelmingly against women because it is constructive criticism? So what you are saying is that the average Middle School girl is actually offering her ideas in a more authoritative way than the average Middle School boy…
The statistics are showing no such thing–women are called “bossy” more often than men, and men are called “mean” more often than women, but we do not presume that men have a complex about the word “mean”, and it’s unreasonable to presume that women are so weak and feeble that they should develop such a complex.
I’m not saying that the average girl is bossier than the average boy, but oftentimes we use different words to describe bossy boys–we call them “mean”, “jerks”, “dicks”, “assholes”, any number of terms that women hear less often.
[…] friend Ben has written an interesting response to the campaign to “Ban Bossy” over at his blog. I […]
Thanks for the interesting response, Luke! I left you a comment or two on your blog.
On the other hand perhaps it would be even more empowering if these women just stepped up and said, “yes I am bossy” and “Yes I was called bossy too”, because when I found this out about Sandberg I felt relieved and encouraged.
http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=pussy%20ass%20bitch%2C%20pussy%20ass%20bitch%20woman&cmpt=q
Just to be egalitarian, we should also ban pussy ass bitch.
You might put it more succinctly: the problem with banning bossy is that it implies being a boss is a good thing, and it is not surprising that the person who wants to ban bossy is…a boss. Bosses are not an unproblematic feature of society.
Well put!