Britain’s Dictionary by Georgia Howell

Roadmen. Lads. Chavs. Birds. Britain is home to our own dictionary of descriptors for teenagers, ways to describe both females and males that categorise and label people into narrow confinements, used daily in secondary schools nationally without a second thought. Seemingly harmless to outsiders, this lingo holds  more weight than its appearance on the surface, and ingrains a culture in the UK; a culture of toxic masculinity, of female belittlement and of strict, rigid gender definitions. 

A lad. As defined by Urban Dictionary1 as ‘someone who engages in typical testosterone-driven behaviour such as drinking, sport and having a laugh with mates’, this is a word used to describe the elite alpha males of our schools, the popular boys, what everyone aspires to be. The smug boys walking around in packs like wolves, throwing water bottles, talking at an obnoxiously loud volume and moulding the school rules to suit themselves. And a bird, a girl often coupled with a lad, described by Urban Dictonary as a female ‘who comes across as vain, ditzy, stupid or useless’. Also seen as the popular girls. They’re beautiful, they have cool boyfriends and they’re with the in-crowd- who wouldn’t want that? Although most youths wouldn’t know these specific definitions, this is the image in our head when we hear these terms. 

Do you see the problem here? 

Females aspire to be naive, to downplay any level of intelligence to satisfy these dominant, cool men. And this is just one example of an entire language found in the hallways of every high school in the UK, up and down this influential country. 

These words, a combination of letters creating vibrations and a minute sound leaving the mouth, are thrown around these walls like a sandwich in the lunch line. Thoughtlessly slipping out before the brain can catch up with the mouth, without anyone stepping in to question such comments. If a comment were to be made, the speaker would fall out of the hierarchy, crash down into the pits of loneliness and forgo all chances of popularity. They’d be labeled a loner, the lads would make their life a misery, jeering and sneering in the halls at the individual, and the birds would stand by, laughing at how witty and impressive these guys are, leaving those with a voice to rot on the sidelines. 

And this is affecting girls and women to a concerning extent. 

Young girls are moulding their personalities, their mindsets and behaviors to appeal to a type of male that fits into the societal hierarchy, and leaving behind ideas of feminism, individualism and unity to chase popularity and acceptance. This hierarchy extends out of school and into all spheres of British society; the media, culture and art, music, movies and beyond. A powerful woman, who thinks for herself and makes a stand against a lad, is bossy. She’s controlling and, in some cases, manipulative. This hierarchy, ingrained from the ripe old age of eleven upon entrance to secondary school, inevitably carries on through to adulthood. Many women, still indoctrinated by these ideas of subservience and the need to downplay their teenage education, refrain from reaching out to challenging careers, wary of male judgement for dreaming too big, fearing the threat of rejection and removal from the social bubble. That threat still looms too close for comfort. 

So what do we do? How do we dismantle frameworks so integral to our British identity? How do we end this vicious cycle passing through the generations? I don’t know. And this is why this problem is so massive, so frighteningly large in the UK. It would take a mental shift in society, a change in culture from school through to seniority. But one person couldn’t do that alone. Ten couldn’t. One hundred couldn’t. 

But one person could make a stand. She could fall away from the learned behaviors ingrained by society. She could be powerful, self-sufficient, display her intelligence, show her dignity and aspire to the path of her choice, and be strong enough to withstand the inevitable reactions from her peers. Could she be a role model to others hiding in the shadows? Perhaps she would initiate a ripple effect, a flap of a wing causing a hurricane of power. Empowerment. 

It must be worth a try.