Ms. magazine, which launched 50 years ago this summer, wasn’t destined to be called Ms. Ina roundtable interview about the magazine’s founding, published this week in the New York Times Sunday Review, Letty Cottin Pogrebin recalls that one name she and her co-founders considered was Sisters. Another was Sojourner, in honor of the 19th-century African American activist Sojourner Truth. And at one point, co-founder Gloria Steinem suggested Bimbo. “She meant it as an ironic appropriation,” Pogrebin told the Times, “but in those years, we didn’t have the luxury of irony.”
This wasn’t the only bimbo-drop in the June 19 Sunday Review: On the very same spread as the Ms. story is an essay about “BimboTok,” a “sex-positive and sex-work-positive” subset of TikTok where “comedians and creators mix makeup tips with articulations of left-leaning politics” while “talking about how hot and dumb” they are. “BimboTok came about at a time when the girlboss had more or less faded as a trendy cultural type,” writes the author, Sophie Haigney. “Bimboism offers an opposing and, to some, refreshing premise: Value me, look at me, not because I’m smart and diligent, but for the fact that I’m not.”
Neither of these stories troubles to define bimbo; both seem to take it for granted that we know what it means: An unserious young woman with what used to be called loose morals. An airhead. A floozy.
But bimbo wasn’t always an insult. It didn’t even always refer to a woman. Originally a masculine Italian diminutive, the word migrated a century ago into American slang, where it changed its sex and its sense.
Fifty years ago this month, seven Chicago-area women were arrested and jailed on eleven counts of performing abortions and “conspiracy to commit abortion.“ They were members of a clandestine feminist network known as “Jane” that, for four years before Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in the US, helped women terminate their pregnancies. Their story—more relevant than ever, now that Roe’s protections are in imminent peril—is told in a new documentary, The Janes, that will premiere on HBO on June 8. But The Janes isn’t the first telling of the story. In 1995, a former Jane member, Laura Kaplan, published a history of the group, The Story of Jane: The Legendary Feminist Abortion Service. I read it a couple of weeks ago and recommend it to you. (I found it in my local public library.) Here’s a passage that could have been written today: “Women are being reduced, once again, to the incubators of future generations with total responsibility but no power. That is the same oppressive view that the women’s movement sought to challenge. It is not just abortion, but women’s power to control their destinies that is at stake.”
Among the guidelines: Instead of choice (“harmful”), use decision (“helpful”).
Yes, this recommendation came from the Pro-Choice Caucus, not the Pro-Decision Caucus. But putting aside that mixed message, what’s the reason for the change?
Because that’s what we’re talking about this week. Don’t worry, though: I’m going to stay in my lane. Mostly.
In case you’ve been tuning out the news, and who could blame you: On Monday, a leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito for the majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, confirmed what many of us have been gloomily anticipating for years: that the precedents established in Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), long considered settled law, are about to be jettisoned. “The immediate impact of the ruling as drafted in February would be to end a half-century guarantee of federal constitutional protection of abortion rights and allow each state to decide whether to restrict or ban abortion,” wrote Josh Gerstein and Alexander Ward for Politico.
Here’s what “allowing each state to decide” can mean: Twenty-three states already have laws that could be used to restrict legal access to abortion. Under a state law passed by the Texas legislature in September 2021, abortions are prohibited after six weeks of pregnancy, before many women even know they’re pregnant. “The law empowers private citizens to sue anyone who ‘aids or abets’ a prohibited abortion,” the Texas Tribune reported in March 2022. “Those who sue could be awarded at least $10,000 if they win.”
Snitches get riches, in other words.
I believe abortion is health care. I support abortion access for anyone who needs it. But I’m not a lawyer or a legislator, so I’m using this platform to share some resources about my own specialty: language, messaging, and branding, all of which have played, and continue to play, outsize roles in the ongoing fight for safe and legal abortions.
I’m about halfway through Virginia Postrel’s 2020 book The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World, and the only reason I haven’t finished it is because I keep stopping to take notes, usually punctuated with exclamation marks. Postrel is a journalist and independent scholar who has written very good books about style and glamour; here she elegantly blends centuries of research and her own investigations (she learned to spin thread, spent a week at a traditional Indian dyeing school, and visited weavers of Guatemalan huipiles) into a highly readable and compelling history. The glossary alone is worth the investment in the book. As Postrel writes:
We drag our heirloom metaphors—“on tenterhooks,” “towheaded,” “frazzled”—with no idea that we’re talking about fabric and fibers. We repeat threadbare clichés: “whole cloth,” “hanging by a thread,” “dyed in the wool.” We catch airline shuttles, weave through traffic, follow comment threads. We speak of life spans and spinoffs and never wonder why drawing our fibers and twirling them into thread looms so large in our language.
It’s Week Eleventy-Kajillion of the COVID pandemic and we’re headed into the long Labor Day weekend here, and then the Jewish New Year. I have no amusing stories about names and brands today; instead, here are a few things I’ve been reading (and stewing over) that you may find interesting.
What is Phexxi? According to the product website, Phexxi is a nonhormonal vaginal gel that “works to prevent pregnancy by altering the pH of your vagina, which is different from hormonal birth control.” Its primary ingredients are lactic acid, citric acid, and potassium bitartrate (the last ingredient is better known, at least to cooks, as “cream of tartar”). In May 2020, Phexxi filed for trademark protection and received FDA approval; the product went on sale in the US in September 2020. An ad campaign—notably a 60-second video that urges women to “get past your compromises and get Phexxi”—launched in early February 2021.
Screen grab from the 60-second ad
Does Phexxi work? Its parent company, Evofem Biosciences (“Science with a Soul”), says that in clinical trials “with perfect use,” the gel is 93 percent effective in preventing pregnancy. As for the Phexxi name—well, let’s talk about it.
The economic downturn that followed the 2008 financial crisis became known as a mancession: a recession that disproportionately affected men. (I wrote about it in August 2009.) The COVID-19 recession, by contrast, is having a disproportionate impact on women, but no one’s calling it a womancession.
“‘Shecession’ hits women’s finances”: Los Angeles Times, May 9, 2021, Page A1
OK, not “fetch,” exactly. The thing that’s been made to happen is a made-up word: cheugy. As with “fetch,” though, the word’s inventor was a high school girl, and the people spreading, defining, and discussing it are young women. Unlike “fetch,” which in the 1997 2004 film Mean Girls was supposed to mean “cool” or “desirable,” cheugy is the opposite: out of date, trying too hard, inauthentic.
It’s not quite “basic,” which can describe someone who is a conformist or perhaps generic in their tastes, and it’s not quite “uncool.” It’s not embarrassing or even always negative. Cheugy (pronounced chew-gee) can be used, broadly, to describe someone who is out of date or trying too hard. And while a lot of cheugy things are associated with millennial women, the term can be applied to anyone of any gender and any age.
(It’s closer to CHOOG-ee. Here’s a pronunciation guide from the hypnotic #EnglishWithJulien.)
Cheugy was coined by Gaby Rasson in 2013, when she was a student at Beverly Hills High School. Now 23 and a software engineer, Rasson told Lorenz that she’d “wanted a way to describe people who were slightly off trend”:
“It was a category that didn’t exist,” she said. “There was a missing word that was on the edge of my tongue and nothing to describe it and ‘cheugy’ came to me. How it sounded fit the meaning.”
What sort of sound symbolism did Rasson have in mind? That remains unclear, as does any specific meaning of cheugy. (It has “slight negative connotations,” Lorenz reports, but is also “totally open to your interpretation,” according to one of her sources, another 23-year-old woman.) It may be worth pointing out that similar-sounding slang terms have been circulating for decades. A 1997 commercial for Sprite poked fun at a fictional soda brand, “Jooky,” the antithesis of Sprite’s authentic flavor. The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) recorded a 1968 citation for chookee in Louisiana: “a country hick”; the author Shelby Foote, who was from Mississippi, used chookie in his 1977 novel September September: “One of those hungry little nineteen-year-old chookies—hair ironed flat, pullover sweater a couple of sizes too small, white socks.”
Cheugy spread among Rasson’s friends, and then to their friends. Someone called @cheuglife posted a definition on Urban Dictionary on November 8, 2018.
Cheugy finally went mainstream (-ish) when 24-year-old Hallie Cain, aka @webkinzwhore143, posted a TikTok about the word on March 30. Cheugy, Cain told her 4,000+ followers, “is the opposite of trendy … it’s used when someone follows these out-of-date trends.” The following day, Cain defended cheugy against accusations of “classism”: “Really expensive designer things can be cheugy, the same as inexpensive things can be cheugy,” she insisted.
Some people love cheugy.
Oh man, "cheugy" is a wonderful word. Thank you SO much Gen Z, once again, for finding the perfect word for a feeling I've been trying to put my finger on for 15 years.
There’s also a backformed noun: a person who’s cheugy is a cheug.
Discovering chuegy reminded me of two things: 1. Girls and young women are constantly inventing slang, and hurrah for that. 2. A lot of that slang is designed to police one’s peers: Who’s out? What’s ugly? Who should we shun? Girls need to keep tabs on that stuff, and it takes a long time to outgrow the need.
The cheugy of my own Los Angeles adolescence was sosh, pronounced with a long O. It was a vague put-down; in my junior high school, girls were constantly rolling their eyes and saying so-and-so was such a sosh. (In my memory, boys never used the word.) It apparently was clipped from social, but I never figured out why “social” was a bad thing to be, or what sosh really meant. As far as I could tell, it had something to do with trying too hard, which overlaps with cheugy’s connotations. And if there’s one thing a girl or a woman must never do, it’s look like she’s trying too hard; just ask Hillary Clinton. Fortunately, I eventually went on to high school, where there was a whole new set of vocabulary words, and customs, to master.
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Related: An excellent word invented by a teen girl: bershon.
Over the last month I’ve looked at political ads from two recently formed advocacy organizations: the anti-Trump Republican group The Lincoln Project (“Mourning in America”) and the progressive group Meidas Touch (“Looters”). Today I’m turning the spotlight on a third organization, Republican Voters Against Trump (RVAT), which launched in May 2020 with $10 million for targeted advertising on social media and Fox News. RVAT is a project of Defending Democracy Together (DDT—maybe an intentional evocation of the notorious pesticide, maybe a coincidence)—whose leaders include big-name conservatives such as Bill Kristol, Christine Todd Whitman, Linda Chavez, and Sarah Longwell, who was recently profiled in the New Yorker.
RVAT has been churning out ads featuring people who voted for Trump in 2016 and intend to vote against him in 2020. “Rather than showing President Trump saying deranged things or listing his missteps,” observesWashington Post opinion writer Paul Waldman, “we hear from a Republican voter who has turned against him.” There are dozens of these first-person stories on the RVAT YouTube channel (and you can record your own, if you’re so inclined). But the ad I want to talk about here is a more conventional attack ad—with some distinctive twists.
