STOP POLICING

Advising women to change their language contributes to conformity to masculine norms

BY SARAH LIU

It was like Grammarly with a twist. A few months ago, during my usual routine of falling into a zombie-like state while mindlessly scrolling through TikTok on a Saturday afternoon, I stumbled across a video encouraging women to erase the word sorry from their vocabulary with the help of a Google Chrome Extension: Just Not Sorry. As the name implies, the extension helps the writer reduce their use of phrases that may undermine the writer’s confidence by underlining them in red. The creator of the extension, Tami Reiss, said her intent for her app was to help women apologize less. Now, I didn’t end up downloading the extension (probably because I was somewhat afraid that I would find red lines coloring every single one of my emails), but I did become more conscious of when and where I used the word sorry.

After a week, I found that sorry was indeed a part of my daily vocabulary, but not in the way I had expected. On most occasions, I didn’t apologize for a failure on my part, but instead, as a way to add a polite tone to making a request. For example, when I wanted to move in front of a classmate standing in front of me, I asked, “Sorry, can you move to the side?” Through my usage of the word sorry, I was able to make a firm request without coming off as annoyed.

It’s these types of apologies that the app Just Not Sorry and other media are trying to help women eliminate