The Language Used Against Women: A Pattern Emerging in Villains

Several women who disclosed childhood sexual abuse told me they were dismissed as “jealous of their sibling”. The pattern made me question what else the language used against women might reveal when we start looking at their stories together.

When I started Villains, I was interested in the words we use to turn women into the problem.

Crazy. Dramatic. Difficult. Selfish. Attention-seeking. Liar.

Some of them were depressingly predictable.

Jealous was not.

Or at least, not like this.

I know how jealousy gets used against women in relationships. The jealous girlfriend. The jealous ex. The jealous bitch. It's a familiar way to dismiss a woman's discomfort or suspicion by making her emotions the problem.

But within the first 30 or so submissions to Villains, I started noticing something I had never encountered before.

One woman told me about experiencing sexual abuse as a child. When the case went to court, she said she was portrayed as being jealous of a sibling.

Then another woman told me something remarkably similar.

Then another.

I mentioned the pattern online because by this point I was thinking: what is going on?

Another woman replied.

Yep. Her too.

Why jealousy?

That's the part I can't stop thinking about.

These weren't hundreds of thousands of responses from which I had gone hunting for a connection. This appeared within a tiny early sample of stories. And it was so specific.

If you'd asked me before Villains to list the ways a girl disclosing sexual abuse might have her credibility attacked, I could probably have guessed liar. Attention-seeking. Making it up.

I don't think I would ever have said:

They'll say she's jealous of her sibling.

And yet here were multiple women independently describing versions of precisely that experience.

I want to be careful about what I claim from that. At this stage, I have observed a pattern among women who have shared their experiences with me. Villains isn't a representative sample of all women, and I haven't yet systematically analysed the submissions. I don't know how common this is.

I don't yet know where the language originates, how often it appears in legal proceedings, or whether there are particular contexts in which it is more likely to be used. But now I know to ask those questions.

And that's important.

What happens when you discover it wasn't just you?

There's another reason this has stayed with me. Sometimes finding out that your experience forms part of a wider pattern can completely change the way you understand it.

I know that from my own life.

It took me eight attempts to leave an abusive relationship. For a long time, I interpreted that as something about me. Why hadn't I just left? Why had I gone back? Why couldn't I do the thing that seemed so obvious from the outside?

Then I found domestic-abuse information explaining that survivors commonly take 7 attempts to leave before leaving permanently. Suddenly, something I'd been interpreting as an individual failure looked very different.

My experience wasn't proof that there was something uniquely wrong with me. There was a pattern. And patterns give us context.

That's part of why I'm becoming increasingly interested in what the Villains submissions contain collectively, rather than only individually.

Villains has accidentally become an archive

I started Villains to paint women. I ask women to tell me what happened to them, what they were called, who used those words and what those words did. Without really intending to, I have started collecting an archive of the language used against women — and the circumstances in which that language appears.

I now have around 200 formal submissions still to work through, alongside hundreds of comments and messages from women describing their experiences.

Taken individually, they're stories.

Taken together, they might also be data.

There is information here about the words women are called.

• Who calls them those things.

• What happened immediately before those labels appeared.

• What behaviour the language excused.

• What behaviour it discouraged.

• What the woman was trying to say when somebody found a word that made it easier not to listen to her.

And I'm starting to wonder whether the portraits are only one way Villains can make those experiences visible.

What if we could map the language?

I'm nowhere near ready to publish findings. First, I need to work out what responsible analysis of this material actually looks like — including consent, anonymity, methodology and the enormous limitations of analysing a self-selecting group of people who chose to submit to an art project.

But I want to explore it.

I want to know whether particular words cluster around particular experiences.

• Does dramatic appear when women express pain?

• Does crazy appear when they challenge somebody else's version of events?

• Does selfish appear around boundaries?

• Does attention-seeking appear around disclosure?

• When does jealous appear?

• And are there patterns I haven't even noticed yet because I've been reading these stories one woman at a time?

There is something that feels almost like a toolbox beginning to emerge.

If we understand the language used to undermine women, perhaps we become better at recognising it when it happens.

The language equivalent of walking home with your keys between your fingers

Women learn strategies for navigating risk. We share them with each other. Watch your drink. Text me when you get home. Share your location. Walk together. Put your keys between your fingers.

Some of those strategies are imperfect. Some are responses to a world we'd rather change than adapt ourselves to. But I've started wondering what the linguistic equivalent might be.

What happens if you recognise the script?

If somebody responds to your boundary by calling you selfish, does knowing that thousands of other women have experienced the same transformation give you a fraction more certainty?

If you're expressing pain and somebody tells you you're dramatic, could recognising the pattern help you resist immediately minimising yourself?

If you're disclosing something that happened to you and suddenly the conversation becomes about whether you're jealous, unstable, vindictive or attention-seeking, could knowing how often credibility is attacked through character help you hold onto what you know happened?

I don't want Villains to produce another list of things women need to do to protect themselves. I'd much rather contribute to changing the conditions that make those defences necessary.

But perhaps recognising the language is one small part of that. Because language doesn't only describe women. It can change which women we believe.

Which women we listen to.

Which women are allowed to be angry.

Which women are permitted boundaries.

Which women become unreliable narrators of their own lives.

Which women become the villain.

I started this project wanting to paint those women and give their stories somewhere to exist.

I'm beginning to wonder whether, together, their stories can show us something none of them could show us alone.

And it started, for me, with a phrase I wasn't expecting to find:

She was just jealous of her sibling.