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 Reference Rosch and Mervis1975; Harris, Murphy, & Rehder Reference Harris, Murphy and Rehder2008). Table 1 shows a total of seventy-eight distinct types of [X – biăo] in the data.

Table 1.

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

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 items account for most tokens in a corpus while a large number of items are very low in frequency (Zipf Reference Zipf1936).Footnote ⁷ Figure 1 offers a log-log plot that visualizes this skewness 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.

Figure 1.

Rank vs. frequency distribution of distinct types in the [X – biăo] category.

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 category. How do we understand this distribution in terms of the cognitive representation 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 Reference Bybee2006, Reference Bybee2007). 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 Reference Bybee1995, Reference Bybee2006, Reference Bybee2007). 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 Reference Hopper and Traugott1993).

Morphologization comes with the semantic abstraction of referential meaning (Heine, Claudi, & Hünnemeyer Reference Heine, Claudi and Hünnemeyer1991). In the case of biăo, this can be seen in the loss of the literal reference to prostitution, which is available in the initial compounding 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 perceived as a seductress under the disguise of sexual purity. The semantic abstraction of biăo is more evident in subsequent coinages. For example, xīngzuò-biăo ‘horoscope 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’ 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 (Reference Ungerer2002) 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 Reference Hopper, Traugott and Heine1991; Hopper & Traugott Reference Hopper and Traugott1993). Hopper & Traugott (Reference Hopper and Traugott1993) show that the persisting association constrains the abstract meaning resulting from morphologization. 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 Reference Sweetser1990; Traugott & Dasher Reference Traugott and Dasher2002; Jing-Schmidt Reference Jing-Schmidt2010; Jing-Schmidt & Kapatsinski Reference Jing-Schmidt and Kapatsinski2012).

With regard to biăo, the negative perception and evaluation associated with its original referential meaning persists in its suffixal form as pejoration with an 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 monopolizing 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-bi ă o ‘best-girlfriend slut’ essentializes the perception of some women as boyfriend-stealing backstabbers under the disguise of intimate friendship. 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. (1) ‘I am honestly disgusted to be categorized as green-tea slut! But men just adore green-tea sluts, what can I do!’

2. (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 intended 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 connotation of the [X – biăo] category, they are the semantic prototypes or best exemplars 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 Reference Rosch and Mervis1975; Hintzman Reference Hintzman1988; Nosofsky Reference Nosofsky1988; Bybee Reference Bybee2007). As shown earlier, these prototypes are the most frequently used members of the category. There is cross-linguistic evidence that word frequency is determined by semantics (Calude & Pagel Reference Calude and Pagel2011). If this is true, the greater popularity of the prototypes should be interpreted as their greater meaning potentials. As is clear from the discussion earlier, each of the prototypical items essentializes a negative stereotype and carries a ‘condemnatory moral overtone’, to use Wajnryb's (Reference Wajnryb2005:133) 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 stereotype that women exercise their ‘natural cunning’ to obtain male adoration, in the words of Wollstonecraft (Reference Wollstonecraft1792/1996:25). In this light, the popularity of the prototypes 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 (Reference Wittgenstein1953) (Rosch & Mervis Reference Rosch and Mervis1975). 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 sluttified 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 interesting 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 psychological 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’.Footnote ⁸ Indeed, the above semantic analysis confirms the ‘sluts = female’ bias.

The representation of morphology reflects basic cognitive organizational principles (Bybee Reference Bybee1995). 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 Reference Nosofsky1988; Lavie Reference Lavie2005; Bybee Reference Bybee2007). This is exactly what led to the morphologization of biăo. Recall that the process started with the emergence of the ad hoc concept of lǜchá-biăo ‘green-tea slut’. Once created to describe a person or a phenomenon, a noun essentializes what it describes, thereby constructing a substantive entity or a trait that exists beyond its referent (Gelman Reference Gelman2003). The specific representation of this trait is stored in memory and can have a long-term effect on social judgment (Rothbart & Lewis Reference Rothbart and Lewis1988; Smith & Branscombe Reference Smith and Branscombe1988; Smith Reference Smith1991; Smith, Stewart, Buttram, & Tesser Reference Smith, Stewart, Buttram; and Tesser1992). 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 Reference Smith and Zarate1992:4).

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 Reference Smith and Zarate1992:4). 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 Reference Tirrell, Hendricks and Oliver1999:52) for women, let us now investigate how these pejorative badges are used in Weibo.

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 Reference Mills2008:2). However, little has been said about the part that women play in sexist discourse and its public reproduction. 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 n ǚ quán-bi ă o ‘women's rights slut’ and zhèngyì-bi ă o ‘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 participate 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 prototypes, 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).

1. (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.’

2. (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.

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 European 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 Reference Silveira1980; Hamilton Reference Hamilton1988, Reference Hamilton1991; Merritt & Kok Reference Merritt and Kok1995). 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). Specifically, 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 feminizing pejorative epithet, the speaker delivers an intentional affront to their masculinity. This act of pejorative feminization accomplishes what B. Mann (Reference Mann2014:193) 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 community 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 (Reference McConnell-Ginet, Holmes and Meyerhoff2003:69) 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 discourse, though for different reasons. Women are spooked by the omnipresence and invasiveness of seductive women, as one female blogger laments in (5) below.

1. (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 counterattacking 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 (Reference McGarty, Yzerbyt and Spears2002:14) 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).

1. (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, nǐ kàn tāmen chāi kuàidì de shuǐpíng, 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 embedded in these labels are consensual. Haslam, Turner, Oakes, Reynolds, & Doosje (Reference Haslam, Turner, Oakes, Reynolds and Doosje2002:161) 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 collectively 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 infiltration 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 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).

1. (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.’

2. (8) 女人眼里的心机婊, 往往是男人眼里的傻白甜

   Nǚrén yănlǐ de xīnjī-biăo, wăngwăng jiù shì nánrén yănlǐ de shă-bái-tián

   ‘A cunning slut in the eyes of women is often a naïve-fair-sweetie in the eyes of men.’

3. (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

   Yǐqián juéde lǜchá-biăo qiānfū zhǐ, xiànzài juéde zhǐyŏu 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 Reference Bartky1990:73) 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 (Reference Mills2008) 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.