By Zoe Williams (THE GUARDIAN, 14/04/06):
There is a new language on the streets of London and other British cities, according to academic research: "Jafaican", supposedly derived from Jamaican and African slang, is now way more prevalent than cockney. Despite the name, there is in reality no racial demarcation and a good deal more Ali G posturing here than genuine Jamaican roots, and the chief uniting feature of Jafaican speakers is age (very young).
But when you read the newspaper reports, you can smell the benign neutrality wafting off the page. "Listen here, chaps. When youngsters today say 'jamming', they mean hanging around! 'Nang' might not sound like a word to you and me, but it means good. 'Sket' is a loose woman, and 'bitch' continues to mean girlfriend - but sket seems to have replaced 'ho', which is now woefully out of date and used only by the rap community because it rhymes with so many things. 'Babymamma' has come and gone, to be overtaken by the old-fashioned sounding 'wifey'."
What all these words in fact have in common is that they define women by sexual function - denigrating them if they show any interest in sex themselves, ranging them according to their physical attributes and dismissing them once their physical peak has passed.
Now, vocabulary and slang are not incidental decorations to culture - they are at its core. While probably all the world's languages contain pejorative words for women, the frequency with which they appear in our new, fun urban slang should give us pause. It should alert us to the fact that this is not a playful alternative to cockney, it is about the formalised subjugation of women.
It is incredibly unfashionable to object to language and ideas that denigrate women. I'm almost embarrassed; I feel like I've left the house wearing something fluorescent. First of all, this is considered to be synonymous with humourlessness, as if the hilarity that was the Loaded magazine revolution (Oh, its dazzlement! Its flights of fancy!) effectively tainted any serious discussion of sexism with myopic earnestness.
This is why young women do not now call themselves feminists, even when espousing views that come, explicitly, from the feminist movement. And sure, nobody wants to be the last person in the country who objects to being called "darling"; nobody wants to be the person who isn't allowed to shave her legs, for reasons as opaque as her tights have to be. But there is a lot at stake here. If youth culture is increasingly sexually conservative and two-tiered in its judgments, and increasingly portrays one gender as the property of the other, this will ultimately tell in the way women are treated, personally and professionally, when today's teenagers are in their prime.
You could argue that it's telling already in the ever more misogynistic attitudes surrounding sexual violence. But whichever way you cut it, it isn't funny; and the idea that we never objected to it because we didn't want to sound like we didn't understand irony would be less funny still.
And second, we seem to have no pride in the women's movement, which - in the absence of any civil-rights movement or revolution - is probably the noblest public protest this country has seen. Why don't we take more pride in the sophistication, as far as it goes, of our gender relations? Why, for that matter, is the Equal Opportunities Commission's budget to be cut this month? Aren't gender relations trendy enough?
Ultimately, if our culture had any respect for feminism, teenagers in Britain would not be talking about women like this. It has nothing to do with female standing in Jamaica or the Ali G land of myth - this is a trickle-down from a prissy, cowardly, milk-livered British mainstream.