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Women swear as much as men – so here’s to equal-opportunity cursing

British women now use expletives more than ever, according to a new survey. But who gives a f...?

Women say the F-word five times more than they did in the 1990s.
Women say the F-word five times more than they did in the 1990s. Composite: Getty/Guardian design

Congratulations to women for shattering another glass ceiling this week: British women now swear more often than British men, and they say the F-word almost five times as much as they did in the 1990s, according to a study. Like that pillar of Britishness Adele – who described her Glastonbury triumph earlier this year as “fucking amazing” despite the BBC’s request that she keep it clean – the UK seems unable to get through an expression of joy or pain without resorting to a salty combination of rude words.

As someone who believes the word “ladylike” to be so offensive that it should never be uttered pre-watershed, I am wholly in favour of equal-opportunity cursing. I grew up so terrified of it that I thought “fart” was a rude word until I was a teenager. On the flip side, half of my family are Irish immigrants for whom cursing, for men and women, was celebratory and consoling. It was also subject to infinite varieties that showed the sheer gall and joy of taking a language and shaping it, changing it and moulding it to your mouth. It’s not quite the same as calling a stranger on a bus a dickhead, of course – it’s far more affectionate and eloquent than that.

Speech changes, and previously unacceptable words become mainstream, because that is how language has always worked – even if the kinds of people who object to split infinitives may protest. Take most great works of literature – the ones written by men – and you’ll come across a barrage of filth: it’s there in everything from Chaucer to James Joyce to Martin Amis (in fact, in the medieval Miller’s Tale, there’s a proto-Trump form of wooing: “And prively he caughte hire by the queynte”).

Besides, we have a healthier handle on swearing in the UK than in the US, where you can commit a gruesome massacre on cable TV at any time of the day, but you still can’t say “fuck” ever on network television, as the comedian Jenny Slate found out in 2010 when she did it by accident on Saturday Night Live and was let go shortly afterwards. “I don’t think it would matter as much if I was a boy,” she reflected a few years later.

That women are as profane as men is surely only a surprise to those who have not met women before. It is impossible to walk into a pub or an office without hearing both genders uttering the kind of filth more commonly heard on Game of Thrones – and of which, yes, even our delicate lady voiceboxes are quite capable.