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The sluttified sex: Verbal misogyny

reflects and reinforces gender order
in wireless China
Zhuo Jing-Schmidt
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SLURS: SEMANT IC AND PRAGMAT IC T HEORIES OF MEANING

Leopold Hess
Language in Society 47, 385–408.
doi:10.1017/S0047404518000386
The sluttified sex: Verbal misogyny reflects and reinforces gender

order in wireless China
ZHUO JING-SCHMIDTa AND XINJIA PENG b
a
University of Oregon, USA
b
Brigham Young University, USA
ABSTRACT
This article describes emerging misogynistic labels involving the morpheme

biăo ‘slut’ as a gendered personal suffix in the Chinese cyber lexicon. We
analyze the morphological, semantic, and cognitive processes behind their
coinage, and the way they are used across gender lines in Chinese social
media as a community of discourse practice. Our findings show that
women participate in female pejoration as much as men do, and that men
are more inclined than women to use pejorative labels that specifically
attack female empowerment. Additionally, men construct masculinity and
power by using certain misogynistic labels as generics. We argue that
verbal misogyny is part and parcel of a larger gender ideology by illuminating
the mutual constitution of the linguistic pejoration of women and the gender
order in postreform China. This study has implications for research on
women’s conditions in contemporary China, raises awareness of gender in-
equality, and lays the groundwork for social actions toward gender equality.
(Gender, sexism, neologism, social media, Chinese)*
INTRODUCTION
Sexism in language as an index of gender inequality in society has been intensely

debated in the last four decades. Research in the 1970s highlighted differences
between the sexes in speech, language use, and nonverbal communication, and
raised awareness of the political implications of such differences in terms of
female subordination and male dominance (e.g. Lakoff 1973, 1975; Thorne &
Henley 1975). This was followed by inquiries in the 1980s in a wide range of dis-
ciplines into the mutual constitution of gendered language and gendered social
practice and social structure (e.g. Spender 1980; Thorne, Kramarae & Henley
1983; Graddol & Swann 1989). Building on the momentum of the second-wave
feminist movement, research on linguistic sexism galvanized support for language
reform, which gave rise to the institutionalization of nonsexist language use (Frank
1985). Early Anglo-American feminist work on language and gender rippled
through continental Europe, inspiring both research and language activism (Hellin-
ger 1985), and spurring interests in non-European languages (Hellinger &
© Cambridge University Press, 2018 0047-4045/18 $15.00 385
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ZHUO JING-SCHMIDT AND XINJIA PENG
Bußmann 2002, 2003). The 1990s saw increased empirical nuance in investigations
of linguistic sexism in discourse analysis (Goodwin 1990; West 1992), and in ex-
perimental research on the behavioral impact of sexist language use (Hamilton,
Hunter, & Stuart-Smith 1992; LaFrance & Hahn 1993). At the same time, fresh
theoretical perspectives on gender and language were put forth, allowing for the
reconceptualization of theoretical constructs and assumptions that had dominated
previous scholarship (Henley & Kramarae 1991; Gal 1991; Eckert &
McConnell-Ginet 1992; Cameron 1997). In particular, awareness of the nonhomo-
geneity of gender categories and interests in the role of language in the discursive
construction of gender identities ushered in the ‘third wave’ feminist study of lan-
guage and gender (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 2016:41). As Cameron (2006:75)
noted, a ‘binary’ and ‘global’ view of gender gave way to a focus on local commu-
nities of practice.1
Research on language and gender in Chinese has produced abundant data on
gender asymmetry. Specifically, the writing system indicates traces of earlier matri-
archy (T’sou 1981; Ettner 2002), perverse patriarchal imaginations of femininity,
and stereotypes of female vice and virtue (Tan 1990; Ettner 2002). Naming prac-
tices and terms of address suggest gender bias in the lexicon (Tang 1982; Farris
1988; Tan 1990; Blum 1997; Ettner 2002; Zhang 2002). Word order conventions
point to sexism in grammar and formulaic language (Shih 1984; Farris 1988; Moser
1997; Ettner 2002). Discourse studies reveal gender differences in speech acts and
pragmatic strategies (Liao 1994, 1997; Hong 1997). Sociolinguistic inquiries shed
light on sex as a variable in language attitude (Lung 1997a,b), phonetic variation
(Chen 1985; Cao 1986, 1987; Hu 1991), final particle uses in Cantonese (Chan
1998, 2000, 2002) and Mandarin (Shih 1984; Liao 1997), as well as speech style
(Light 1982; Farris 1995; Chuang 2005; Hardeman 2013).2
While gender asymmetry in Chinese has garnered attention in research, that
asymmetry is rarely scrutinized in light of the underlying structural discrimination
in society. With the exception of a few studies that touch upon issues of gender iden-
tity, power, and the political economy of gender in contemporary China (Zhang
2002; Hong Fincher 2014; Jing-Schmidt 2016; Yueh 2017), most studies take an
ahistorical view of the problem and are reluctant to confront the changing socio-
political and socioeconomic context of gender dynamics.
A glimpse at the trajectories of change in the status of Chinese women in the last
100 years shows a history of early progress followed by stagnation and recent
decline. The early twentieth century saw the end of polygyny and foot binding,
two major evils of the Chinese patriarchy. Women stepped out of their domestic
‘seclusion and concealment’ to seek education and employment (S. Mann
2011:12). The communist mass mobilization further pushed for women’s liberation
to promote family-based production and social stability. Because gender equality in
its own right was never intended as part of the socialist agenda, however, the rev-
olution of Chinese women remained ‘unfinished’ or ‘postponed’, to use the respec-
tive title keywords of Andors (1983) and Wolf (1985). The political-ideological
386 Language in Society 47:3 (2018)
THE SLUTTIFIED SEX
‘resolution of the women question in China’, Andors (1983:168) hoped, ‘is to be

dependent upon the future success of economic modernization’.
Fast forwarding to postreform China, gender inequality continues after three
decades of economic boom. Although education has strengthened female earning
potentials and the ability to be economically independent, the gender wealth gap,
prohibitive real estate prices, and rampant consumerism fuel the chase for economic
security and luxury (Tsai, Yang, & Liu 2013; Li 2014; Yu 2014). Because such re-
sources are controlled by elite men, economic and social autonomy remains elusive
to Chinese women (Hong Fincher 2014). Paradoxically, women as victims of insti-
tutionalized gender parity are the primary target of attack for the perceived moral
decline in society and are ‘subject to greater condemnation’ than men (Osburg
2013:182). More unfortunately, unaware of their common plight and the societal
origin of the injustice, women often join this chorus of condemnation and actively
engage in self-discrimination and mutual sabotage. Sisterhood, self-determination
of goals and strategies for social change, and an alternate vision of the future—
the essential ingredients of a feminist consciousness prescribed by Lerner
(1993:274)—are still out of reach to Chinese women. Without confronting this
reality, and without interrogating the gender order and the political economy of
gender as part of the larger social structure, an explanation of linguistic sexism
remains incomplete.
This study examines emerging verbal misogyny in wireless China against the
background of the larger social dynamic and social structure of postreform
Chinese society. We focus on a category of gendered pejorative personal labels
in the pattern of [X – biăo] where biăo ‘slut’ is a morphologized sexual slur.3
We propose a sociomorphology of [X – biăo], an approach we define as a socially
situated analysis of a morphological phenomenon the explanation of which requires
an examination of the larger social structure and societal dynamics. Based on data
from Weibo, the Chinese microblogging platform, we argue that [X – biăo] con-
structs a misogynistic person category that reflects, reproduces, and reinforces a
gender order characterized by lopsided allocation of power and other social
resources.
DATA AND METHODS
Jing-Schmidt & Hsieh (2018) argue that neologisms, more than any other linguistic
elements, ‘instantly and immediately reflect changes in society and its zeitgeist’.
Chinese cyber neologisms are the products of massive networked communication
and self-communication by grassroots language users and as such capture the pulse
of contemporary Chinese society in its unique social dynamics.
The data used for this study were collected from the online microblogging appli-
cation known as Weibo, the Chinese counterpart of Twitter. Weibo provides large
records of collective language and discourse organically occurring in the Chinese
online network community. The data are publicly available. We used a third-party
Language in Society 47:3 (2018) 387
microblog search engine, Zhongsou4 to collect Weibo blogposts that included the
character 婊 biăo ‘female prostitute’ as the keyword. Data retrieval was conducted
on July 4, 2016 through a keyword search using the online search engine. To avoid
retrieval of duplicate items, we refined the search to ‘original’ (原创) blogposts so
all reposts (blogposts that include and comment on an original blogpost) would be
automatically removed. The search returned blogposts in reverse chronological
order from the most recent posts to older ones. We collected the first 1,000 blog-
posts, which were posted between the time period of May 25 and July 4, 2016.
The texts of the blogposts, along with the links to the original Weibo blogposts
and the timestamps of those blogposts were gathered. To analyze the usage
pattern of the neologisms along gender lines, we conducted an automatic mass
retrieval of the gender information on the authors of the 1,000 blogposts via the Ap-
plication Programming Interface (API) of Weibo. Of the 1,000 retrieved blogposts,
eight items contained no gender information and were eliminated from the analysis.
The remaining blogposts were then manually inspected and annotated, whereby a
total of 426 tokens that did not match the pattern [X – biăo] were eliminated.
The remaining 575 tokens made up the dataset for the analysis.
The sociomorpological analysis draws on two types of frequency data. The type
frequency of the category [X – biăo], namely the number of different tokens ob-
served in the X slot, determines the productivity of the category, that is, its
ability to admit new members, and informs us of the strength of the category as a
schematic pattern (Bybee 1995, 2006, 2010). The token frequency, namely the
total number of times a given type is observed in the data, indicates the level of
entrenchment of that individual type in the category (Bybee 2007). The analysis
of the role of gender in the usage of the category [X – biăo] is based on descriptive
statistics of gender ratios, including the ratio of total female-produced items to total
male-produced items, and the ratio of unique female users to unique male users in
the data. The overall gender ratio in the general population of active users of Weibo,
reported in the 2016 Weibo Users Report,5 was used as baseline data.
As noted previously, data from Weibo are publicly available. Nevertheless, pre-
senting such data in an academic publication may make it ‘accessible to a wider
public than what might have been originally intended’ (Markham & Buchanan
2012:6). Thus, care must be taken to protect user privacy in publication. We
adopted a process-based ethical practice that recognizes the ambiguity of ex-
pectations of privacy in the digital age and makes situated ethical decisions on a
case-by-case basis (McKee & Porter 2009). In this study, we focused on word-
level frequency distributions and general gender ratios of usage, which are measure-
ments of ‘aggregated and de-identified data’ (Markham & Buchanan 2012:9).
When presenting specific blogposts as examples in the analysis, ensuring anonym-
ity was our priority. Due to the online searchability of direct quotes, publishing such
quotes could make users easily identifiable (Markham 2012). To safeguard user
privacy, we prepared our examples as follows. We determined the online availabil-
ity of blogposts we intended to quote by searching for them in Weibo. The search
THE SLUTTIFIED SEX
was conducted in July 2017 and repeated in January 2018. An exact return indicated
availability, and failure to obtain an exact return indicated unavailability, which in
Weibo can occur for reasons related to deletion, censorship, or account deactiva-
tion. Blogposts confirmed as unavailable were presented as direct quotes in
Chinese characters, with pinyin and translations provided; those confirmed as avail-
able were paraphrased in translations.
THE SLUTTIFICATION OF WOMEN: A

SOCIOMORPHOLOGY
The morpheme biăo in [X – biăo] is originally the noun stem of the word biăo-zi,
which the Xinhua dictionary with English translation (2000:42) defines as a ‘de-
rogatory name for jìnǚ “female prostitute”’.6 This definition indicates that the
‘lexical gender’ of biăo is female in the sense that it has a ‘lexical specification’
of female as ‘referential gender’ (Hellinger & Bußman 2002:7). Its written charac-
ter 婊 combines the female radical 女 nǚ ‘female’ and the phonetic part 表 biăo
‘outside’. This orthographic form makes explicit the lexical gender of the mor-
pheme, which has no male counterpart. The debut of biăo as a part of [X – biăo]
occurred with the incidental coinage of the concept of lǜchá-biăo ‘green-tea
slut’. According to baidu.baike.com, this neologism popped up in 2013 and imme-
diately went viral on the internet following salacious reports of a high-end lifestyle
festival for the Chinese new rich where female models reportedly exchanged sex for
money. Given this context, the neologism is a spontaneous compound of two noun
stems: lǜchá ‘green tea’ is a metaphor of the virginal appearance of the young
models and biăo refers to their sexual behavior. The neologism is an ‘ad hoc
concept’ in the sense that it is ‘created spontaneously for use in specialized con-
texts’ (Barsalou 1983:211). However, its creation unleashed the linguistic produc-
tivity of biăo ‘slut’, leading to its morphologization and the creation of a
misogynistic person category.
The morphologization of biăo

As is well known in cognitive psychology, frequency as a structural property of a
category has effects on the learning and cognitive representation of that category
(Rosch & Mervis 1975; Harris, Murphy, & Rehder 2008). Table 1 shows a total
of seventy-eight distinct types of [X – biăo] in the data.
The seventy-eight types are not equally frequent. A closer examination shows a
highly skewed distribution. Five high-frequency items, bolded in Table 1, though
only 6% of the seventy-eight types, have a total of 451 tokens and account for
78% of the entire dataset. By contrast, a large number of items, sixty-two (78%)
out of seventy-eight, occur only once in the data, making up only 11% of the
dataset. This skewed frequency distribution approximates Zipf’s Law, a power
law that captures a basic fact of natural language: A small number of high-frequency
TABLE 1. Types of [X – biăo] ranked by token frequency.
Rank Type Freq. Rank Type Freq.
1 xīnjī-biăo ‘cunning slut’ 158 12 wúliáo-biăo ‘boredom slut’ 1

2 nǔ̈ shén-biăo ‘goddess slut’ 113 12 báilián-biăo ‘white-lotus slut’ 1
3 lü ̀ chá-biăo ‘green-tea slut’ 79 12 lǚxíng-biăo ‘travel slut’ 1
4 guīmì-biăo ‘best-girlfriend 56 12 quànshān-biăo ‘advise-to-delete 1
slut’ slut’
5 shèngmŭ-biăo ‘holy-mother 45 12 wényì-biăo ‘literature-art slut’ 1
slut’
6 qiángtóu-biăo ‘wall-top slut’ 13 12 mìkŏng-biăo ‘trypophobia slut’ 1
7 [PN]biăo ‘[PN] slut’ 10 12 lĭxìng-biăo ‘rationality slut’ 1
8 kă-biăo ‘credit-card slut’ 8 12 wúgū-biăo ‘innocence slut’ 1
9 shèngrén-biăo ‘sage slut’ 7 12 bìngjiāo-biăo ‘sickly-coquette slut’ 1
9 dàodé-biăo ‘morality slut’ 7 12 chŏu-b-biăo ‘ugly-cunt slut’ 1
10 xué-biăo ‘study slut’ 3 12 xiăozī-biăo ‘bourgeois slut’ 1
10 nuăn-biăo ‘warmth slut’ 3 12 míngyuán-biăo ‘famous-dame slut’ 1
11 qínghuái-biăo ‘sentiment slut’ 2 12 chòuliăn-biăo ‘stinky-face slut’ 1
11 huícăi-biăo ‘trample-back 2 12 wéiquán-biăo ‘rights-advocacy slut’ 1
slut’
11 suìyuèjìnghăo-biăo ‘peaceful- 2 12 diă-biăo ‘cute-voice slut’ 1
time slut’
11 jìnéng-biăo ‘skill-and-ability 2 12 shàngfēn-biăo ‘record-score slut’ 1
slut’
11 XX biăo ‘XX slut’ 2 12 zhēnjié-biăo ‘chastity slut’ 1
11 shuāngbiāo-biăo ‘double- 2 12 tŭ-biăo ‘dirt slut’ 1
standard slut’
11 fàngshēng-biăo ‘release-life 2 12 pàng-biăo ‘fat slut’ 1
slut’
12 nǚquán-biăo ‘women’s-rights 1 12 nuănnán-biăo ‘warm-guy slut’ 1
slut’
12 fēncùngăn-biăo ‘sense-of- 1 12 báiliánhuā-biăo ‘white-lotus-flower 1
propriety slut’ slut’
12 mièhài-biăo ‘extinguish-fun 1 12 bàijīn-biăo ‘money-worship slut’ 1
slut’
12 liángxīn-biăo ‘conscience 1 12 jièhuāxiànfó-biăo ‘borrow-flower- 1
slut’ for-Buddha slut’
12 tàolù-biăo ‘scheme slut’ 1 12 zhā-biăo ‘dreg slut’ 1
12 dăléi-biăo ‘thunder slut’ 1 12 zhíchăng-biăo ‘workplace slut’ 1
12 gāojí-biăo ‘high-class slut’ 1 12 xīng-biăo ‘fishy-odor slut’ 1
12 tòngjīng-biăo ‘menstruation- 1 12 niăo-biăo ‘bird slut’ 1
pain slut’
12 táobăo-biăo ‘Taobao slut’ 1 12 chăozuò-biăo ‘publicity slut’ 1
12 mĕiguó-biăo ‘USA slut’ 1 12 zìpāi-biăo ‘selfie slut’ 1
12 qīngchún-biăo ‘purity slut’ 1 12 xīnjù-biăo ‘new-theater slut’ 1
12 shèngnǚ-biăo ‘holy-woman 1 12 Fĕijì-biăo ‘Fiji slut’ 1
slut’
12 jiùyuán-biăo ‘rescue slut’ 1 12 ànhēi-biăo ‘dark-black slut’ 1
Continued
THE SLUTTIFIED SEX
TABLE 1. Continued
Rank Type Freq. Rank Type Freq.
12 hànzi-biăo ‘dude slut’ 1 12 zhèngyì-biăo ‘justice slut’ 1

12 ruòzhĕ-biăo ‘weak-person 1 12 shăbī-biăo ‘stupid-cunt slut’ 1
slut’
12 guòláirén-biăo ‘old-hand slut’ 1 12 xiăsān-biăo ‘little-third (mistress) 1
slut’
12 értóng-biăo ‘child slut’ 1 12 xīngzuò-biăo ‘horoscope slut’ 1
12 shēnyè-biăo ‘late-night slut’ 1 12 shēnshì-biăo ‘gentlemen slut’ 1
12 xiāo-biăo ‘marketing slut’ 1 12 tı̌zhì-biăo ‘system slut’ 1
12 méitı̌-biăo ‘media slut’ 1 12 pàngdàhăi-biăo ‘fat-ocean (malva- 1
nut) slut’
items account for most tokens in a corpus while a large number of items are very low
in frequency (Zipf 1936).7 Figure 1 offers a log-log plot that visualizes this skew-
ness toward the high-frequency items of high rank in the upper left space, and a
massive aggregation of one-off coinages in the bottom right, visualized as a dark
shadow surrounding the diamond-shaped marker of the twelfth rank.
This distribution indicates two things. First, the top five items are very popular in
Weibo. Second, there is a high spontaneity with which bloggers coin diverse new
items in the [X – biăo] pattern. These are rarely re-used and are marginal in the cat-
egory. How do we understand this distribution in terms of the cognitive represen-
tation and morphological status of [X – biăo] as a conceptual category? The
entrenchment of the high-frequency items makes these items likely models on
which new items are created by analogy (Bybee 2006, 2007). The overall high
type frequency of the category as well as the diversity of the marginal members
point to the morphological productivity of the category as a strengthened schematic
pattern with increased generalizability (Bybee 1995, 2006, 2007). What this means
with regard to the morphological status of biăo is its change from a noun stem to a
productive derivational suffix. Such a categorial shift is known as morphologization
(Hopper & Traugott 1993).
Morphologization comes with the semantic abstraction of referential meaning
(Heine, Claudi, & Hünnemeyer 1991). In the case of biăo, this can be seen in the
loss of the literal reference to prostitution, which is available in the initial com-
pounding of lǜchá-biăo ‘green-tea slut’. As a result of this semantic abstraction,
only the lexical gender of biăo is retained in the suffixal form. With the meaning
of biăo broadened, lǜchá-biăo ‘green-tea slut’ has come to refer to a woman per-
ceived as a seductress under the disguise of sexual purity. The semantic abstraction
of biăo is more evident in subsequent coinages. For example, xīngzuò-biăo ‘horo-
scope slut’ labels a woman who is interested in horoscopes, nǚquán-biăo
‘women’s-rights slut’ labels a woman who advocates for women’s rights, lǚxíng-
biăo ‘travel slut’ labels a woman who enjoys traveling, zìpāi-biăo ‘selfie slut’
FIGURE 1. Rank vs. frequency distribution of distinct types in the [X – biăo] category.
labels a woman who has a penchant for taking selfies, and kă-biăo ‘credit-card slut’
is tagged onto a woman who uses a credit card. In these examples, biăo performs no
literal denotation of sexual behavior. Rather, it serves as a personizer that labels the
person category of women.
Ungerer (2002) describes suffixation as conceptual recategorization whereby the
categories being constructed obtain conceptual stability from derivation based on
personizers. With the morphologization of biăo as a female personizer, the category
[X – biăo] stabilizes a gender bias. But there is more to this category than its gender
bias: The gendered labels carry the stigma of female sexuality as their connotation.
The pejorative connotation of the category [X – biăo]

In addition to semantic abstraction, morphologization is often accompanied by a
persistence of the inferential association or connotation of the original meaning
(Hopper 1991; Hopper & Traugott 1993). Hopper & Traugott (1993) show that
the persisting association constrains the abstract meaning resulting from morpho-
logization. In fact, there is evidence of such constraints in grammaticalization in
general, that is, in the change from content to functional words, especially when
the change is pragmatic in nature (Sweetser 1990; Traugott & Dasher 2002; Jing-
Schmidt 2010; Jing-Schmidt & Kapatsinski 2012).
With regard to biăo, the negative perception and evaluation associated with its
original referential meaning persists in its suffixal form as pejoration with an
THE SLUTTIFIED SEX
allusion to sexuality, which renders the entire category [X – biăo] pejorative. That is
to say, the category [X – biăo] not only constructs a gendered person category, but
also disparages the totality of its membership. This pejorative connotation is most
evident in the five top-ranked items. Xīnjī-biăo ‘cunning slut’ is used to label a
woman perceived as someone who deploys the art of calculation and cunning to
gain a competitive edge against her female rivals. Nǚshén-biăo ‘goddess slut’
labels a classy and beautiful woman perceived as potentially culpable of monopo-
lizing male attention. As noted previously, lǜchá-biăo ‘green-tea slut’ labels a
woman perceived to be a manipulative temptress under the disguise of sexual
purity. Guīmì-biăo ‘best-girlfriend slut’ essentializes the perception of some
women as boyfriend-stealing backstabbers under the disguise of intimate friend-
ship. Shèngmŭ-biăo ‘holy-mother slut’ reviles a woman perceived as a moral
hypocrite. Note the emphasis we place on the perceived qualities of the percepts
being labelled to underscore the subjective nature of the labeling practice and the
disdain it conveys. Consider the following blogposts, paraphrased in (1) and (2).
(1) ‘I am honestly disgusted to be categorized as green-tea slut! But men just adore
green-tea sluts, what can I do!’
(2) ‘First let me clarify that I am no holy-mother slut! I just want to say that cats and
dogs have always been our pets and companions, they are not domestic fowls in-
tended for consumption!’
In (1) the blogger’s contempt for green-tea sluts is clear from the conveyance of
disgust about being called one. This negative emotion conflicts with the recognition
that the object of disdain enjoys romantic advantages on the heterosexual market. In
(2) the blogger makes a statement against cruelty towards pets, and prefaces the
statement with a disclaimer that preempts the accusation of being a holy-mother
slut, for fear of being perceived as sanctimonious. Such a disclaimer is unnecessary
unless the label has a pejorative connotation and inspires negative perception.
The semantics of the root X

To the extent that the top-ranked items are most representative of the pejorative con-
notation of the [X – biăo] category, they are the semantic prototypes or best exem-
plars of the category. As such they are more entrenched, easier to remember, and
can facilitate the learning of similar items in the category (Rosch & Mervis
1975; Hintzman 1988; Nosofsky 1988; Bybee 2007). As shown earlier, these pro-
totypes are the most frequently used members of the category. There is cross-
linguistic evidence that word frequency is determined by semantics (Calude &
Pagel 2011). If this is true, the greater popularity of the prototypes should be inter-
preted as their greater meaning potentials. As is clear from the discussion earlier,
each of the prototypical items essentializes a negative stereotype and carries a ‘con-
demnatory moral overtone’, to use Wajnryb’s (2005:133) characterization of slut as
a sexual slur. An important aspect of the negative stereotype is perceived deceit and
calculation. While xīnjī-biăo ‘cunning slut’ explicitly encodes calculation, the other
items display a semantic tension between X and biăo. The loftiness of nǚshén
‘goddess’, the purity of lǜchá ‘green tea’, the sisterliness of guīmì ‘best girlfriend’,
and the sacredness of shèngmŭ ‘holy mother’ stand in contradiction to the allusion
to sexuality latent in biăo and its negative connotation. This semantic tension
invites the inference of ‘fakeness’ in the sense that a woman thus labeled is deceitful
or hypocritical, an inference that matches the age-old and perhaps universal stereo-
type that women exercise their ‘natural cunning’ to obtain male adoration, in the
words of Wollstonecraft (1792/1996:25). In this light, the popularity of the proto-
types in Weibo can be understood as their potential to sluttify women with negative
stereotypes and in terms of the consensual nature of those stereotypes in Weibo, an
important point to which I return in a later section.
A prototype category is a fuzzy category in which members more or less share
family resemblance in the sense of Wittgenstein (1953) (Rosch & Mervis 1975).
There is a cluster of items in the data that share the inference of perceived hypocrisy
and resemble one another in that morphemes in the X slot refer to a worthy cause or
an endeavor that empowers women. These items sluttify women for their pursuit of
positive values and their effort toward self-empowerment, for example, dàodé-biăo
‘morality slut’, liángxīn-biăo ‘conscience slut’, zhèngyì-biăo ‘justice slut’, nǚquán-
biăo ‘women’s-rights slut’, wéiquán-biăo ‘rights-advocacy slut’, and jìnéng-biăo
‘skill-and-ability slut’.
As noted previously, the bulk of the [X – biăo] category are one-off coinages.
These low-frequency items fall into a mixed bag, both formal and semantic,
whereby the linguistic materials in the slot X come in all sizes, structures, and
parts of speech, and refer to any number of qualities, activities, situations,
persons, and objects, and so on. Nevertheless, they are related to the prototypes
and to one another by family resemblance and share a morphological schema as
well as a general pejorative sense. A girl busy with digital-age activities may be slut-
tified as a zìpāi-biăo ‘selfie slut’, quànshān-biăo ‘advise-(someone)-to-delete-
(blogposts) slut’, and shàngfēn-biăo ‘record-(game)-score slut’, and one who is in
favor of a certain lifestyle may be branded as a lǚxíng-biăo ‘travel slut’, xīnjù-
biăo ‘new-theater slut’, or kă-biăo ‘credit-card slut’. If she does not engage in inter-
esting activities, a woman still risks being sluttified, as a wúliáo-biăo ‘boredom slut’.
The incoherence goes on: She who appears strong and forthright is called a hànzi-
biăo ‘dude slut’ while she who looks gentle and coy is tagged with bìngjiāo-biăo
‘sickly-coquette slut’. She who is free of experience is labeled értóng-biăo ‘child
slut’ and she who is experienced is called guòláirén-biăo ‘old-hand slut’. Even as
a passive experiencer of things that happen to her, such as physiological or psycho-
logical conditions, a woman can get sluttified, for example, as a tòngjīng-biăo
‘menstruation-pain slut’ and mìkŏng-biăo ‘trypophobia slut’. So, what makes a
slut? The columnist Jessica Valenti replies, ‘the only rule, it seems, is being
female’.8 Indeed, the above semantic analysis confirms the ‘sluts = female’ bias.
THE SLUTTIFIED SEX
The representation of morphology reflects basic cognitive organizational princi-

ples (Bybee 1995). The diversity of X means that the paradigmatic link between
items in the category gets repeated and gains strength in cognitive representation,
which increases categorical robustness and facilitates the creation of still more new
items (Nosofsky 1988; Lavie 2005; Bybee 2007). This is exactly what led to the mor-
phologization of biăo. Recall that the process started with the emergence of the ad hoc
concept of lüc̀ há-biăo ‘green-tea slut’. Once created to describe a person or a phe-
nomenon, a noun essentializes what it describes, thereby constructing a substantive
entity or a trait that exists beyond its referent (Gelman 2003). The specific represen-
tation of this trait is stored in memory and can have a long-term effect on social judg-
ment (Rothbart & Lewis 1988; Smith & Branscombe 1988; Smith 1991; Smith,
Stewart, Buttram, & Tesser 1992). Specifically, when encountering a new target
person, ‘information from stored representations that are similar to the target will
be used to make judgments and inferences about the target’ (Smith & Zarate 1992:4).
This process illustrates the exemplar model of social categorization, whereby an
exemplar is defined as ‘a cognitive representation of an object of the same type as
the current target of judgment’ (Smith & Zarate 1992:4). The exemplar model
maintains that people store individual exemplars in memory as social judgments,
and make subsequent categorization and evaluation decisions based on similarity
comparisons with stored exemplars. Importantly, the categorization and evaluation
of new exemplars are not based on their own attributes, but on the reminiscence of a
stored exemplar. Furthermore, the retrieval of stored information is determined by a
range of social and motivational factors related to the perceiver’s own experience,
prejudice, social context, and intergroup dynamics. The rapid morphologization of
biăo as a pejorative personizer and the proliferation of the category [X – biăo] based
on an incidental coinage instantiate the process of exemplar replication, expansion,
and diffusion.
Having shown that [X – biăo] is a morphologically productive category that
churns out a variety of ‘badge[s] of degradation’ (Tirrell 1999:52) for women, let
us now investigate how these pejorative badges are used in Weibo.
USAGE PATTERNS IN WEIBO AS A COMMUNITY

OF DISCOURSE PRACTICE
Wenger (1998:139–40) proposes the notion of a community of practice, treating it

as a social space in which knowledge is ‘discursively constructed, organized and
negotiated through mutual engagement’. Similarly, Eckert & McConnell-Ginet
(1992:464) define a community of practice as ‘an aggregate of the people who
come together around mutual engagement in an endeavor’, which produces
‘beliefs, values, power relations—in short practices’. Weibo can be considered a
community of discourse practice in the sense that bloggers engage in discourse
around shared topics and concerns and in this process construct and negotiate
meaning and knowledge.
Usage patterns of the gendered pejorative labels

Sexism is often taken to be an ‘index of the ongoing conflict between men and
women, particularly in the public sphere’ (Mills 2008:2). However, little has
been said about the part that women play in sexist discourse and its public reproduc-
tion. The quantified Weibo data shows both similarities and differences in the way
women and men use the pejorative labels.
A comparison of the gender ratio of the total tokens in the dataset and the general
gender ratio in the Weibo population of active users showed no significant difference
(X2 = 0.183, df = 1, p = 0.669). Similarly, there was no significant difference
between the gender ratio among the unique users in the dataset and the general
gender ratio in the Weibo population of active users (X2 = 0.02, df = 1, p = 0.887).
A closer examination of the gender ratio in the use of the five prototypes also
showed no significant difference (X2 = 0.000, df = 1, p = 1.000). However, the
same test in the cluster of [X – biăo] items with a root denoting worthy cause and
female empowerment, such as nǚquán-biăo ‘women’s rights slut’ and zhèngyì-
biăo ‘justice slut’, yielded a statistically significant difference (X2 = 30.721, df = 1,
p , 0.000), suggesting that men and women used items in this category differently.
Specifically, men are nine times as likely to use items in this category as women.
These results suggest two important patterns. First, both women and men partic-
ipate in the pejoration of women in the Weibo community. Critically, women are
just as likely as men to use the gendered labels including the highly pejorative pro-
totypes, and therefore are complicit in the misogynistic practice of verbal pejoration
of women. Second, gender plays a prominent role in the attitude toward female
empowerment and the pursuit of worthy cause: Men are the primary attackers of
women who strive for values of goodness, dignity, and empowerment.
In addition to the above patterns, we found instances of pragmatic expansion in
the use of the gendered pejorative labels. Specifically, some labels are used for men
or gender-unspecified entities, as in (3) and (4).
(3) 男主说白了就是个圣母婊, 这种人在乱世竟然能活下来才是奇迹

Nánzhŭ shuō-bái-le jiù shì ge shèngmŭ-biăo, zhè zhŏng rén zài luànshì jìngrán
néng huó-xiàlái cái shì qíjì
‘The male protagonist is honestly a holy-mother slut, that this kind of people
could even survive the troubled times is a real miracle.’
(4) ‘The Japanese invite Obama to Hiroshima, the Americans invite Abe to Pearl
Harbor… such a pair of cunning sluts; is it even possible anymore to be pleasant
friends?’
In (3) the blogger criticizes the self-righteousness of the male protagonist of a

TV show, calling him ‘holy-mother slut’. In (4) the blogger complains about the
eagerness with which Japan and the US reconcile over WWII by calling the two
countries a pair of ‘cunning sluts’, implying that they behave in a manipulative
way, which is presumably unpleasant for China.
THE SLUTTIFIED SEX
This expansion of the referential reach of the female pejorative labels means that
these labels are taking on the function of generics, the way masculine generics in
European languages refer to both men and women (e.g. the German indefinite
pronoun man, as in Man muss arbeiten ‘One has to work’, grammaticalized from
the personal noun Mann ‘man, husband’). While both the masculine generics in Eu-
ropean languages and the biăo-suffixed female generics in Chinese create gender
bias, there is a fundamental difference in the kind of gender bias they create. The
former facilitate the development of a ‘people = male’ bias that perpetuates male
dominance and female invisibility (Silveira 1980; Hamilton 1988, 1991; Merritt
& Kok 1995). The latter facilitate a ‘treacherous people = female’ bias, which is
a generalization of the ‘sluts = female’ bias as a result of the semantic abstraction
and the persistence of the pejorative connotation of biăo. This bias generates
female visibility in a negative light and reinforces prejudice against women.
A significant gender difference was found in the generic usage data with the
gender ratio in Weibo population as baseline (X2 = 7.031, df = 1, p = 0.008). Specif-
ically, the generic uses are generated by male bloggers three times as frequently as
by female bloggers. To explain this gendered distribution, we need to understand
the effect of female generics. Essentially, the female generics serve at one and
the same time both feminization, that is, demasculinization, and the pejoration of
male or gender-unspecified referents. The effect resembles shaming a man by
calling him a ‘bitch’. What happens is, by tagging these individuals with a feminiz-
ing pejorative epithet, the speaker delivers an intentional affront to their masculin-
ity. This act of pejorative feminization accomplishes what B. Mann (2014:193)
terms a ‘shame-to-power conversion’ on which the very manhood of the actor
depends. Seen in this light, the gender difference in the generic use of the gendered
pejorative labels makes sense. It offers a glimpse at the way men in the Weibo com-
munity construct their masculinity by appropriating a device of female pejoration. It
bears repeating that the offensive potential of the generic use and its ability to
enlarge the actor’s own manhood by way of feminizing other men presupposes
the power of such uses to humiliate women in the first place.
Practices of sluttification in the Weibo community

Social labeling is a discursive practice that creates stereotypic models of self and
others. As McConnell-Ginet (2003:69) states, the practice of social labeling
opens ‘a window on the construction of gendered identities and social relations
in social practice’. The way the category [X – biăo] is used in social labeling
must be understood in light of the mutual discursive engagement in Weibo as a
community of discursive practice, in light of the shared knowledge and normative
beliefs in that community and, ultimately, in light of the social relations and gender
order they reveal and reproduce.
A common discourse focuses on how to spot a perfidious temptress, labeled as
xīnjī-biăo ‘cunning slut’, nǚshén-biăo ‘goddess slut’, lǜchá-biăo ‘green tea slut’, or
guīmì-biăo ‘best friend slut’. Women and men are equally interested in this dis-
course, though for different reasons. Women are spooked by the omnipresence
and invasiveness of seductive women, as one female blogger laments in (5) below.
(5) 绿茶婊数不胜数, 心机婊防不胜防

Lǜchá-biăo shŭbùshèngshŭ, xīnjī-biăo fángbùshèngfáng!
‘Green tea sluts are innumerable, cunning sluts are undeterrable!’
Women engage in the social sanction of the threatening women by developing

and sharing techniques of spotting, preventing, handling, and even counterattack-
ing them. While such discourse is often frivolous, involving stereotypes, for
example, of how a xīnjī-biăo ‘cunning slut’ is cleverly made up, or strategically
positions herself in a group photo to make her face look smaller and thus cuter
than the others, it occasionally gets philosophical when women wonder why
society produces so many lǜchá-biăo ‘green tea sluts’, and why men adore them.
Thus, the discourse is driven by what McGarty, Yzerbyt, & Spears (2002:14)
call ‘objective conflicts of interest’ between women who feel disadvantaged by
their female rivals in competition for men’s adoration—a limited romantic and,
by extension, economic resource. Keenly aware of such conflicts of interest,
some female bloggers claim that only women know how to spot a nǚshén-biăo
‘goddess slut’. Men who participate in the ‘slut spotting’ discourse tend to treat
it as a heuristic for understanding female behavior, as in (6).
(6) 凡是打不开瓶盖的女孩都是心机婊, 你看他们拆快递的水平, 那是刚刚

的！
Fánshì dă-bù-kāi pínggài-de nǚhái dōu shì xīnjī-biăo, nı̌ kàn tāmen chāi kuàidì
de shuı̌píng, nà shì gānggāng-de!
‘All girls who can’t open a bottle cap are cunning sluts; look at the fortitude with
which they open express post packages!’
One recurrent blogpost that urges fellow bloggers to ‘value life’ and ‘stay away
from cunning sluts’ has become a collective heuristic for self-protection. Whether
female or male, all participants in the discourse take the misogynistic labels as
given, and share the stereotypes they represent. In other words, the stereotypes embed-
ded in these labels are consensual. Haslam, Turner, Oakes, Reynolds, & Doosje
(2002:161) argue that shared stereotypes not only allow individuals to represent the
social world in order to understand it, but enable them to ‘act meaningfully and col-
lectively within it’. The discursive practice of slut spotting in the Weibo community is
a collective act that relies on the consensual stereotypes constructed by the gendered
pejorative labels. That collective act in turn reinforces those consensual stereotypes.
The collective discourse about spotting a seductress and preventing her infiltra-
tion into one’s relationship comes with the collective bashing of such a female,
again by women. They hold her responsible for male sexual interest in her, and
THE SLUTTIFIED SEX
for her calculated submission to rich and powerful men. Thus, when discussing
nǚshén-biăo ‘goddess slut’, they describe her as a dreadful shé-xiē měinǚ ‘snake-
scorpion beauty’, and wàibiăo kuānróng dàdù, nèixīn àncáng shājī ‘tolerant and
gracious on the outside, malicious and cruel on the inside’. At the same time,
beliefs and values surrounding femininity are negotiated in the community.
Some women warn men of the danger of alluring temptresses, as in (7), while
others argue that men desire just that kind of allure, as in (8) and (9).
(7) 女神婊到处都是！男同胞们, 可长点心吧, 这样的女的不要接触的好

Nǚshén-biăo dàochù dōushì! Nán tōngbāo-men, kě zhăng diăn xīn ba,
zhèyàngde nǚde bùyào jiēchù de hăo
‘Goddess sluts are everywhere! Guys, be careful! Better stay away from such
women.’
(8) 女人眼里的心机婊, 往往是男人眼里的傻白甜
Nǚrén yănlı̌ de xīnjī-biăo, wăngwăng jiù shì nánrén yănlı̌ de shă-bái-tián
‘A cunning slut in the eyes of women is often a naïve-fair-sweetie in the eyes of
men.’
(9) 以前觉得绿茶婊千夫指, 现在觉得只有比不过的女人指, 男人还是爱的
Yı̌qián juéde lǜchá-biăo qiānfū zhı̌, xiànzài juéde zhı̌yŏu bĭ-bù-guò de nǚrén zhĭ,
nánrén hái shì ài de.
‘(I) used to believe that green-tea sluts are widely condemned, now (I) think only
lesser women denounce (them); as for men, they just adore (them).’
Aware of this male perspective, some women delight in their knowledge of skills
that define just the kind of temptress desired by men. In the same vein, some women
rave about beauty products that help them ‘master feminine body discipline’
(Bartky 1990:73) in order to become a wánměi lǜchá-biăo ‘perfect green-tea
slut’. Others are downright proud of their own xīnjī-biăo ‘cunning slut’ capacities.
In sum, the usage patterns of these misogynistic labels in the context of Weibo
are complex. They are not just indexical of the conflict between men and women, as
Mills (2008) says of linguistic sexism. They are as much an index of the ongoing
conflict between women who compete for men in their struggle for emotional
and economic resources. For women in the Weibo community, the personal
remains the personal, and is nowhere near the political.
DISCUSSION
Derivational morphology has not been systematically studied as an area in Chinese

where sexism is particularly salient. This study has filled the gap by proposing a
sociomorphology that treats word formation as part of the mutual constitution of
language and gender order. Eckert & McConnell-Ginet (2016:22) define gender
order as ‘a system of allocation, based on sex-class assignment, of rights and
obligations, freedoms and constraints, limits and possibilities, power and subordi-
nation’, and argue that it is ‘supported by—and supports—structures of convention,
ideology, emotion, and desire’. In the context of contemporary China, rising wealth
inequality goes hand in hand with growing gender inequality. These two conditions
shape the power structure and gender order by which female sexuality is exchanged
as a commodity and consumed by elite men.
Since the beginning of the reform era in 1978, China has undergone an unpar-
alleled economic boom. This development is accompanied by an equally unprece-
dented widening of the wealth gap, which has become most substantial in the last
two decades. The top 10% wealth share rose from 40% in 1995 to 67% in 2015,
while the middle 40% and bottom 50% wealth shares collapsed (Piketty, Yang,
& Zucman 2017). At the same time, gender inequality in China has deepened
since the reform (Erbaugh 1990; Berna 2013). Within the last decade, China’s
rank in the global ranking of gender equality index fell from rank 63 in 2006 to
rank 91 in 2015 (The global gender gap report 2015:140). While many factors con-
tribute to gender inequality, the most salient and measurable form of it is the wage
gap (Chen, Ge, Lai, & Wan 2013; He & Wu 2017). Furthermore, although the surge
in real-estate wealth accounts for up to 50% of the Chinese wealth increase in the
last two decades (Piketty et al. 2017), women were denied a fair share of that
growth, which aggravated the gender wealth inequality (Hong Fincher 2014).
Unsurprisingly, the most dramatic accumulation of private wealth in China’s
history has a male bias. In fact, as Osburg (2009) argues, an ‘elite masculinity’
has been erected and is upheld by the new wealth and its associated power and
clout. Young and attractive women from all walks of life are absorbed into the
orbit of this elite masculinity, as objects of male desire and symbols of male
status. The status of these women is ‘defined by their position within a matrix of
wealth, femininity, and sexuality’ (Osburg 2013:114). A direct consequence of
this elite masculinity, Osburg observes, is ‘a Darwinian struggle among women
over the patronage of men’ (Osburg 2013:130) in a ‘market that trades in attractive-
ness for material comfort’ (Osburg 2013:133). The commodification of sexuality
has been noted in sociological studies on Chinese sexuality in the postreform era
as part of a larger social turbulence marked by surging divorce rates, normalization
of premarital sex, rampant extramarital sex, and the return of prostitution (Farrer
2002; Farrer & Sun 2003; Jeffreys 2006, 2010; Parish, Laumann, & Mojola
2007; Zhang, Parish, Huang, & Pan 2012; Ruan 2013). These social issues and
the tendency of sexual commodification in particular have been attributed to
Chinese moral decline as a result of the capitalist market reform (Wang 2002).
While moral decline is a conspicuous social reality in postreform China, it does
not capture the social problems at a finer granularity. What is ignored is something
more profound: gender and power disparity. It is female sexuality that is being ex-
changed in material transactions, and it is elite masculinity that dominates those
transactions.
The gender material inequality characterized by male wealth concentration
shapes the gender order in postreform China. Critically, the masculinization of
wealth and power has shattered the ‘May 4th dream of removing material
THE SLUTTIFIED SEX
transactions from marriage and sexual relationships’ (Osburg 2013:128), has

undone the promise of socialist China that women hold up half the sky, and has
resurrected patriarchal structures that subjugate and condemn women to male
predation. Female economic dependence takes away women’s epistemological
agency and emotional autonomy and facilitates female sexual objectification,
self-objectification, and sexual commodification.
Sexual objectification occurs when ‘a woman’s sexual parts and=or sexual func-
tions are separated out from her person, reduced to the status of mere instruments, or
else regarded as if they are capable of representing her’ (Bartky 1990:35). In the
market realities of sexuality in postreform China, women are not just sexual
objects, they are sexual commodities to be acquired, kept, and exchanged (Zheng
2006, 2009). For elite men, the most desirable category of women is characterized
by youth, beauty, and sexual purity (Osburg 2013). That is, the kind of women that
fit the stereotypical imagery of the virginal lǜchá-biăo ‘green-tea slut’. For a young
woman looking to succeed in this market economy, catering to the desire of elite
men or, to use the words of De Beauvoir (1949/2011:347), ‘modeling herself on
his dreams’, becomes a rational strategy. She has to make ‘herself prey in order
to make a catch’ (1949/2011:349). In doing so, women engage in self-objectifica-
tion by treating themselves as an object to be evaluated on the basis of appearance
(McKinley & Hyde 1996; Fredrickson & Roberts 1997). This explains young
women’s obsession with competitive femininity, with the art of seduction, and
with artifacts and methods designed to disguise and improve the female body
and to transform it into a perfect object of male desire. Understood in the larger
societal context, women’s sexual objectification is the product of women’s
inferiority in the gender power hierarchy, and their self-objectification is the inter-
nalization of that inferiority (Bearman, Korobov, & Thorne 2009).
Schlegel & Barry (1986:147) argue, ‘where men control women’s subsistence,
men also control their sexuality’. The truism that ‘modes of production and repro-
duction’ underlie ‘the Eurasian pattern of female dependency and subordination’
(Harris 1993:72–74) is as true as ever in the context of twenty-first-century
China. The formation and usage of the misogynistic labels cannot be explained
in isolation from the socioeconomic relationship of subservience and domination
that is at the core of the social structure and gender order of postreform China.
The ubiquity of female pejoration we see in the Weibo data is symptomatic of an
enduring misogynistic tendency to blame women for moral decline in Chinese
society, and it perpetuates a gender order the quintessence of which is a relationship
of subservience and domination.
While the lexical pejoration of women is well documented across languages,
little beyond the anecdotal has been reported on how derogatory epithets are actu-
ally used in a community. Our study has filled the gap. Our findings are consistent
with the point made by Graddol & Swann (1989:132) that it is ‘at least an over-
simplification’ to consider men as the ‘sole inventors and validators’ of sexist lan-
guage. The common sluttifying discourse practiced by men and women is driven by
mutual concerns among members of Weibo as a community of discourse practice.

The discourse practices such as slut spotting and slut bashing are performed as a
way of ‘engaging those concerns’ (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 2016:46). Impor-
tantly, the gender stereotypes and normative beliefs shared by members of the com-
munity sanction their collective discursive act of sluttifying woman. That discursive
act reproduces those gender stereotypes and beliefs that constitute the discrimina-
tory gender order.
CONCLUDING REMARKS
Language use is a habitual act, which makes it hard to eliminate verbal misogyny
when it becomes part of the lexicon. Although the lexicographical fate of the pejo-
rative labels remains to be seen, their morphological productivity suggests their
popularity in the Chinese online community. Additionally, the unique mediality
of wireless communication influences language use. The speed and reach of
networked mass communication make it easy for catchy neologisms to proliferate,
especially those that capture common concerns in the community (Jing-Schmidt &
Hsieh 2018). By contrast, the anonymity of virtual discourse takes away the social
inhibitions that in traditional face-to-face interaction compel language users to heed
interaction rituals. As a result, anonymity can lead to blunter sexism (Bernstein,
Monroy-Hernández, Harry, André, Panovich, & Vargas 2011; Herring & Stoerger
2014), and can be ‘used as a shield from behind which to offend, attack, defame,
and harass others’ (Hardaker & McGlashan 2016:92). All of this can contribute
to the persistence of verbal misogyny in wireless China.
Chinese women have come a long way from their feet-bound past and still have a
long way to go toward gender parity. Obtaining institutional support and harnessing
collective activism for nonsexist language will be crucial to success.9 This task is
for women to start. Critically, in order to ‘think their way out of patriarchal
gender definitions and their constraining impact’ (Lerner 1993:220), women
must first SPEAK their way out of those definitions by quitting complicity in
verbal misogyny.
NOTES
*We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers and the editor of Language in Society for their feedback
and suggestions. We thank Maram Epstein and the students of the Fall 2017 graduate seminar EALL 611
at the University of Oregon for the comments and discussions on an earlier draft of this article, and Volya
Kapatsinski for discussions about power law and exponential distributions. We take full responsibility
for all remaining errors in the writing.
1
In keeping with the central theme of linguistic sexism and in the interest of space, this introduction
highlights scholarship on gender differences and refers the reader to Leaper (2014) for an in-depth review
of gender similarities vis-à-vis differences in language use.
2
For a full review of this literature, see Chan & Lin (2018).
THE SLUTTIFIED SEX
3
The Chinese online source baidu.com translates the suffix -biăo as ‘bitch’. We find the translation to
be inaccurate, as ‘bitch’ does not allude to sexuality, but is ‘reserved for women perceived as socially
deviant, mean, overly demanding or smothering’ (Wajnryb 2005:148). We chose the translation ‘slut’
for two reasons. First, the sexual connotation it carries is the closest to that of biăo. Second, its perva-
siveness as an insult to young women in Anglo-American cultures parallels the productivity of biăo
in Chinese cyberspace.
4
http://t.zhongsou.com.
5
http://www.wesdom.me/weibo-pdf/
6
Modern Chinese words are predominantly disyllabic (Sun 2006). This phonological structure
imposes morphological dependence on monosyllabic morphemes that are free in Classical Chinese.
As a consequence, biăo as a lexical noun is morphologically bound and needs the noun suffix -zi to
form the word biăo-zi ‘female prostitute’.
7
Zipfian distributions have been widely observed beyond word frequency. See Adamic & Huberman
(2002) and Piantadosi (2014) for detailed discussions.
8
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/23/slut-female-word-women-being-female.
9
As this article was being finalized, the First Plenary Session (March 5, 2018) of the 13th National
People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China recommended in the Report on the Work of the
Government the ‘elimination of gender discrimination’ in employment, a notable and welcome move
toward gender equality at the level of government policy.
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(Received 25 August 2017; revision received 23 February 2018;

accepted 7 March 2018; final revision received 8 March 2018)
Address for correspondence:

Zhuo Jing-Schmidt
Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures
Friendly Hall 308
1248 University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403-1248, USA
zjingsch@uoregon.edu

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The sluttiﬁed sex: Verbal misogyny

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‘resolution of the women question in China’, Andors (1983:168) hoped, ‘is to be

DATA AND METHODS

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388 Language in Society 47:3 (2018)

THE SLUTTIFICATION OF WOMEN: A

The morphologization of biăo

Language in Society 47:3 (2018) 389

TABLE 1. Types of [X – biăo] ranked by token frequency.

Rank Type Freq. Rank Type Freq.

1 xīnjī-biăo ‘cunning slut’ 158 12 wúliáo-biăo ‘boredom slut’ 1

390 Language in Society 47:3 (2018)

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The pejorative connotation of the category [X – biăo]

392 Language in Society 47:3 (2018)

The semantics of the root X

Language in Society 47:3 (2018) 393

394 Language in Society 47:3 (2018)

The representation of morphology reﬂects basic cognitive organizational princi-

USAGE PATTERNS IN WEIBO AS A COMMUNITY

Wenger (1998:139–40) proposes the notion of a community of practice, treating it

Language in Society 47:3 (2018) 395

Usage patterns of the gendered pejorative labels

(3) 男主说白了就是个圣母婊, 这种人在乱世竟然能活下来才是奇迹

In (3) the blogger criticizes the self-righteousness of the male protagonist of a

396 Language in Society 47:3 (2018)

Practices of sluttiﬁcation in the Weibo community

Language in Society 47:3 (2018) 397

(5) 绿茶婊数不胜数, 心机婊防不胜防

Women engage in the social sanction of the threatening women by developing

(6) 凡是打不开瓶盖的女孩都是心机婊, 你看他们拆快递的水平, 那是刚刚

398 Language in Society 47:3 (2018)

(7) 女神婊到处都是！男同胞们, 可长点心吧, 这样的女的不要接触的好

Derivational morphology has not been systematically studied as an area in Chinese

Language in Society 47:3 (2018) 399

400 Language in Society 47:3 (2018)

transactions from marriage and sexual relationships’ (Osburg 2013:128), has

Language in Society 47:3 (2018) 401

mutual concerns among members of Weibo as a community of discourse practice.

402 Language in Society 47:3 (2018)

Language in Society 47:3 (2018) 403

404 Language in Society 47:3 (2018)

Language in Society 47:3 (2018) 405

406 Language in Society 47:3 (2018)

Language in Society 47:3 (2018) 407

(Received 25 August 2017; revision received 23 February 2018;

Address for correspondence:

408 Language in Society 47:3 (2018)

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