Which Gender Swears More? and Why?

It is quite a common assumption nowadays that men are ruder, and tend to use more profanities or taboo language than woman do on a general basis. But is this very generalized opinion fact or fiction? And if it is true why is this the case?

It is a fascinating topic as it is probably accepted by most people that men tend to swear more than women. The first piece of evidence I found on this subject was by Michael Gauthier and his report called Profanity and Gender published by the university of Lyon presents a table set up into categories and it shows some surprising results, the researcher asked women and men how often they would use swear words and phrases, and in contrast to popular belief it found out that 15.7% of the women they asked said the used swears "very often" while a marginally lower 14.8% of the men asked said they used swears "very often". This evidence shows us that even though men are perceived as the most likely gender to us swear words, these particular results show that men and women show no noticeable different in the amount they swear.

This evidence does show us that women and men are very similar in how much they think they swear, and this is very surprising to me. I think people tend to think that men swear more than women because women, on a general basis, seem to be a lot more polite than men, this is a point that has been put across by Robin Lackoff, as she states that one of the many characteristics of women's speech is to use super polite forms. I think this is something women do in public because women rely more on positive face, where they have the need to feel liked so by not swearing in public all the time makes sure they are doing as much as they can to get positive face. Whereas I believe that men are mostly more based on negative face, where they don't want to be imposed upon, but there is still a slight need to be liked but not so much that they are going to stop themselves from swearing when they are out and about.

The research done by Gauthier also goes onto state that 27.7% of men tend to swear "more than usual" when they are with their other male friends, whereas only 7.1% of women swear "more than usual" when they are with other female friends. This suggests that men use swearing a lot in a group environment. This evidence doesn't surprise me at all as this shows that men probably egg each other on and often get rowdy and raucous when they are with each other. Whereas some women seem to find swearing aggressive, and a somewhat unattractive traitr. But all in all I was surprised to see that women and men have seen themselves as having the same frequency of swearing.

 

Robert Graham