Like, Gatekeeping, Like, Intelligence

Influencer, fashion mogul, and podcaster Emma Chamberlain has come under fire in the past weeks for her podcast, “Anything Goes” for being too simplistic when talking about topics such as love and mental health. 

Users all over the internet are telling the 22-year-old to “go to college” before she uses her platform to discuss heavy topics. Her recent episode, “Is Romantic Love an Illusion?” is facing heavy criticism for being overly pessimistic about love and gender relations in a way that is massively overgeneralized. Internet users claim she does not have the language or critical thinking skills to be talking about these subjects. 

My first response is this: if you are going to Emma Chamberlain’s podcast, with the host’s entire brand being that of an approachable and casual friend, for a researched lecture or analysis on philosophy, maybe you should be looking at your own critical thinking skills before coming at someone else. Just maybe. 

Beyond that, though, it’s not entirely surprising to see a young woman deemed “stupid” or “simple” for sharing her opinions. 

The linguistic gatekeeping of academia has been keeping the opinion of women and other minorities out of the higher education sphere for centuries. 

To focus on women* — young women, specifically — let’s look at the example of “like”. It’s well known that saying “like” too much, especially in an academic context, is seen as a sign of stupidity, and makes the speaker (if the speaker is a young woman) seem much less serious to some. 

Being girlish is considered being dumb in our society, especially in higher education, and the word “like” is mostly associated with the valley girl. Some call using “like” lazy, and some call it infantile. 

I’ve had a teacher count the amount of “likes” used by female classmates of mine down when presenting, rather than critiquing the content of their argument or presentation. As in, he tallied down each time she said “like” on his rubric for her, and then made a comment on it in front of the entire class. I just cannot imagine a scenario where someone would track a white man’s speech patterns instead of listening to what he’s saying. If a man is speaking, we assume he knows what he’s talking about, until he proves otherwise. For women, it’s often the other way around — especially when their linguistic patterns don’t mimic their male peers. 

Celebrated author Malcolm Gladwell addressed this inaccurate critique of young female language use in 1992. The word “like” can be a discourse marker, a preposition​​, a suffix, and a “quotative complementizer” at once. 

For example: 

“She smells like pinewood.” The word “like” is used correctly here. 

“The boy I saw at the mall was, like, 20 years old.” “Like” is used correctly here, and it serves a purpose— the speaker likely does not know the exact age of the person she saw and can qualify it with one word. 

“So I was like, ‘what do you mean by that’?” “Like” is used correctly here and again draws an important boundary of an indirect quotation, rather than a direct one. Which, might I add, is incredibly helpful when citing a scholarly source in a verbal argument, without risking attacks for being inaccurate or not exact. 

“He is, like, not happy.” “Like” is correct here and marks a special importance on “not happy”, making “like” a substitution for “very” or “super”. 

It is not a young woman’s fault that those who criticize her speech are too lazy to even consider the intricacies of a word used so often. How ego-driven must one be to assume that he is correct, and the word used so typically by the masses is not?

What I mean to say is that there are no natural barriers to intelligent discussion— they are all drawn by those who specifically want to keep people out of the loop, whether from prejudice or from feeling threatened. 

If all men in academia were forced to seriously consider the thoughts of a woman in their lecture who uses “like” to start her sentence, they would be doubling their internal competition of “the smartest in the room.” This is obviously not to say all men discount women based on linguistics— and if you were thinking that, you again were discounting a woman’s argument not on principle or conclusion, but on a non-sequitur of a dismissal, which is a much stronger sign of lack of intelligence than, like, any linguistic quirk I could think of. 

Beyond that, linguistic intelligence is a double-edged sword for women. The undertones of maternity and softness required to be “feminine” in Western society mean that even when discussing academic topics, we ought to make it understandable to as many people as possible. 

In front of me, I have a 3000-page book. “The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism”, for a class I’m in, full of different authors and their writings, and critiques of their writings. 

When introducing Judith Butler, a famed gender studies author, the editors critique not her arguments, but her language. 

“How are we to understand [the terms she uses]?” 

“Her difficult style and specialized terminology seem to guarantee a small audience for work that aims to have political consequences.”

These are actual quotes from a book that has writings from Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud. Foucault is in this book, but is not criticized for being “overly complicated.” It’s laughable. She is not the overly complicated one here. 

And while it is true that she is writing in a post-modern context, compared to the antiquated ramblings of Hegel, it is too clear to be a coincidence that a woman was accused of not appealing to the masses in a book detailing some of the most nuanced arguments of history.  

So, we have two sides of a sexist and gate-kept coin. 

Emma Chamberlain, a young woman, not by any means trying to replace academic scholarship, is criticized for simple language when discussing a complicated topic. 

Judith Butler, an accomplished scholar, is criticized for complicated language when discussing a complicated topic. 

It sounds to me like we just don’t want women discussing, like, complicated topics. 

*It’s important to note that the intersectionality of marginalized language patterns should not be ignored. While I did not delve into the intricacies of African-American Vernacular English–my own white identity making it not my argument to elucidate, I recommend this article to start studying its history and importance.

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