Deconstructing The ICK

This is Part 2/3 in a Series

First, please see Part 1 here.

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Let’s talk for a second about why “the ick” has been so easy to discount, to trivialize. And then we’ll address how it’s been weaponized against women, how it’s been used to gaslight us.

The word “ick,” is inherently funny for reasons related to its semantic references and it’s phonetic structure. I’ll explain both: Semantically (the “meaning” component of language), it’s sort of “bathroom humor”—something that refers to things that are sticky, gross, grimy, etc. Phonetically, it features the “hard k” sound, which is well-known to humor writers as the funniest sound. The reasons for that are layered and complex, but many studies have demonstrated that people simply laugh more at words that have this linguistic feature.

So when we put these two “ick” factors together—semantic connotation and phonological resonance—it’s easy to see how “the ick” is rarely heeded as a serious warning sign, and instead trivialized as something humorous and meaningless.

The word “ick” is a linguistic accident that’s become a social misunderstanding.

It’s like the words “enervate” and “crepuscular.” If you don’t know these words, look them up because their meanings feel entirely counterintuitive to their phonetic structure, to what they sound like they should mean. This is true for the ick as well: it sounds funny, but it’s dead-on serious and should be interpreted as such.

I recently went on an internet deep dive to pursue more critical explorations of the ick, to see if I could find arguments that did not default to flattening the entire concept into women-blaming, into accusations of being superficial and picky. I mostly came up empty.¹ 🙄 As I articulated in part one of this series, this is NOT how I’m seeing women invoke the ick. Nine times out of ten, when I hear a woman say “I got the ick,” she’s referring to something a man does that accurately predicts hostility, aggression, disordered personality, or potential for abuse.

Are there women out there who are superficial? Who “get the ick” from something trivial such as a man who uses the wrong fork? Sure. There are superficial people of every gender making bad decisions all over the place, but that’s not the norm.

In case you haven’t noticed, this is what public discourse always does to women:

It takes the stupidest, most simplistic case—a woman breaking up with a guy when she realizes he’s 5’11” rather than 6’, for example—and then applies it inductively outward, mapping one woman’s poorly-considered action onto ALL women to prove that women are just being silly and ridiculous.

And that, then, justifies the dismissal of the very real and reasonable concerns of the other 99% percent of women. It’s what allows something like “the ick” to turn into a funny social media trend when what it’s actually predicting are things like verbal abuse and rape.

So, yes—that’s how this happens—that’s how we dismiss women.

Take this viral social media example:

This young woman recorded what went viral as the “6’5” finance guy song,” which was a JOKE. You can see it here:

And then a bunch of angry men lost their shit about it, seemingly believing it to be real (which is WILD — How could they not realize it was a joke? This is a whole other problem, but it reveals a lot about Incels’ lack of critical reasoning skills and helps to explain why they keep getting radicalized by morons). And a bunch of them started making videos like this one in response, which millions of them re-posted and shared:

Her joke song was used by manosphere incels to construct an entire collective persona of Dumb Young Gold-digger Woman—a persona which is wholly fictionalized—in which all women everywhere are represented as superficial bimbos. The incel crowd watching it was either too stupid to realize it wasn’t real or just smart enough to harness it for their own purposes.

In either case, it doesn’t matter, because what happened with this song is a great example of how social media content is used to inaccurately portray women, to shame women, and ultimately to discount our entirely valid concerns.

The same thing has happened with the ick. In Part 3 of this series, I’ll be debunking the advice being given to women who experience the ick.

In the comments, please feel free to share other examples of how you or other women have been misinterpreted—accidentally or on purpose—in ways that are misleading, trivializing, twisted, and dangerous.

1. I did find this one article that is compelling and worth a read: https://www.glamourmagazine.co.uk/article/the-ick-meaning