Sissy

An insult for a man judged weak or girly, and for an effeminate gay man; from sis, sister, in use since the 1870s and partly reclaimed today.

Sissy is the insult for a man who is judged weak, timid or girly, and by extension for an effeminate gay man. It is often the first anti-gay word many of us ever heard, before fag or queer: the word for the guy who would rather draw than play football.

That is the trick of sissy. It polices gender first and sexuality second, and it lands on any man who fails the toughness test, gay or not. For us it often lands earlier and harder.

Where it comes from

Sissy goes back to sis, short for sister. Calling a man his sister was already an insult in the 19th century: Green's Dictionary of Slang finds sissy for a weakling in 1877, and for an effeminate gay man by 1887, in a New Orleans paper that described men who "look and walk too much like sissies". By 1897 an American medical journal was using it in a passage on effeminacy, which shows how fast the slang word and the clinical gaze met.

Green's also records sissy boy in 1881 and sissy-man, sis-queen and sissy-pants in the decades after, a whole wardrobe of variations on the same idea.

How it was used against us

For most of the 20th century sissy was the word that taught men what not to be. It was shouted in the street, in locker rooms and barracks, and dropped into crime novels and films as a quick way to mark a character as weak or suspect. The word carried the whole threat: act like this and you will be treated like a girl, or worse, like one of them.

How it is used today

Sissy has been partly reclaimed, in three different directions:

• Among gay men: used with affection for the femme, nelly side of ourselves, the way a queen might be called sis.
• In kink: a sissy is a man who enjoys being feminized, often in lingerie and makeup, usually as part of a dominance game. Here the word is a role, chosen and eroticized.
• As pride: some effeminate men wear it like a medal, precisely because it was thrown at them first.

If you want the rest of the family, see pansy and nancy, which work the same way with a flower and a girl's name.

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