Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Thoughts on a Word: Foxy


Foxy is assertive, even aggressive, maybe ready to run her claws down your back. Foxy is canine, vulpine; foxy is active, not passive. You can't quite trust a foxy lady; she's cunning, sly, a trickster, and she might just outfox you. Silver foxes aside, chances are that if you are foxy, you are a woman. More specifically, you are—ooh! a foxy lady.

Women are usually likened to cats, not dogs; from pussycats to cougars, the idea is that coy feline elusion is in keeping with the supposed essence of woman. Still, we choose a member of the Canidae family—the fox—to describe women. We like woman-as-fox so much that we assign both sexes of the Vulpes genus to her: She is both fox and vixen. Both connote a sexy trickster, but the vixen is less playful than her male counterpart, more apt to bite than to merely wink. Foxy is the only way we can refer to a woman as a dog and not be out to wound her.

We started using foxy just before the turn of the 20th century; its first recorded use is in 1895 as African American slang, though it jumped the color line in the early 1900s. It's notable that it took Americans to describe women as foxes: For centuries, cultures around the world had hinged their myths on quick-witted, cunning foxes, and much early American culture sprang from people who then hunted foxes just for kicks. But once we started using foxy, we didn't look back. It became widespread in the 1940s—curiously enough, at a time when women were wearing foxes around their shoulders—but is most associated with the 1970s. Yet it lingered beyond that: A study of top slang terms at the University of North Carolina from 1972 to 1993 reveals foxy as one of the top 40 slang words used. Its enduring appeal may be a testament to Pam Grier's blaxsploitation template Foxy Brown (1974)—or, more likely, to that perennial college-dorm favorite, Jimi Hendrix's "Foxy Lady."

From the first psychedelic twinge of that off-kilter note, we know that Hendrix, not the foxy lady, is the predator. Its plodding, mid-tempo guitar riff tells us he's not exactly in a hurry to come get her, even as the lyrics indicate that she is soon to be possessed. She may be a wild animal—but he knows she's just a cute little heartbreaker, a sweet little lovemaker. In the end, the foxy lady isn't a fox at all, or if she is, her cunning wit is no match for this bigger, badder wolf. He's coming to get her—and what's more, when we listen to the creeping, aggressive discord that creates the song's magic, we're rooting for him to win. After all, he won't do her no harm, right? Carmen Borrero, a girlfriend who required stitches after Hendrix hit her with a bottle, and Kathy Etchingham, who endured a beating from Hendrix with the handset of a public telephone, might disagree.

We like foxy because of its mix of sly power and potential to be captured, if only you're quick enough. Foxy implies a certain amount of action, even aggression, from the person labeled as such. Foxy cannot be icy blonde or a next-door innocent; foxy knows there's a hint of musk about her. At the same time, it's no accident that we call women foxy and not wolfy—a fox might even bite you, but she won't do that much damage. Foxy gives us a knowing, smoldering trickster, not a domineering destroyer. And we return the favor to foxes: High-class Brits of yore aside, we didn't really shoot foxes. We preferred to trap them.

Foxy is a bit quaint now; even Megan Fox yields a surprisingly anemic number of puns in the press, while Michael J. Fox adopted a false middle initial in 1980 in part because of the inevitable headlines his real name, Michael Andrew Fox, could invite. We have Foxy Brown, of course, but even her handle is a callback to the 1974 film. Foxy gives us a retro appeal of an era that too many Americans remember for us to fetishize the way we do the old Hollywood broads, dames, and bombshells. In fact, I'd bet that many women known as cougars were, once upon a time, merely foxy ladies. And unlike the fox, the cougar is a bit too powerful—a bit too moneyed, a bit too sophisticated—for even someone with the prowess Jimi Hendrix to simply come get.

11 comments:

  1. Let's not forgot Foxy Throwdown:
    http://ratcityrollergirls.com/teams/derby-liberation-front/foxy-throwdown/

    ReplyDelete
  2. Love her! She's been Foxy since she was five!

    ReplyDelete
  3. hi autumn, i'm a new reader & i've been enjoying going back through the archives. :) just curious, what do you think about 'cute'? i'm a short asian college student who often gets mistaken for a high schooler, & it's a word i run into a lot. is it really just a height thing?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi Em! So nice to "meet" you, and thank you for reading!

    "Cute" is definitely on my list of words to research, because it's definitely a loaded word. I'm not surprised that you're called "cute" a lot if you're petite, and also I think that Asian women have a lot of stereotypes to face--"cute" being one of them. Also, we associate "cute" with youth, and if you have a round face that can make you look younger...and therefore "cuter"! Really I think it's about youthfulness.

    But I've talked to some women about this word who have found it belittling or dismissive. If you want to be taken seriously, being "cute" can sometimes work against you because people do associate cuteness with youth and naivete. Of course, that's when you can just surprise people...but it's not fun to not be taken seriously.

    What do you think about it? How do you feel when people apply that word to you?

    ReplyDelete
  5. there have definitely been times when i felt like i was being underestimated or not taken seriously. as far as using 'cute' as a measure of attractiveness, i feel sometimes like there's a connotation of unsexiness. maybe it's just me, but having a word used to describe puppies & kittens also applied to my appearance hasn't made me feel particularly desirable.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Em, that's so interesting what you point out about it not necessarily being a "sexy" compliment. I've not been called cute often--I'm 5'6" and sort of, I guess, serious-looking? It's just not a word that people often apply to me. But when I was a teenager I desperately wanted to be "cute" because I thought it was sexy--because it was seen as girlish and sort of deferential. I think I wanted to be called something I wasn't, you know? We want what we don't have.

    When I get to "cute" I'll definitely be thinking on this. If any other thoughts on this word come to mind, please let me know! I'd love to hear whatever you have to say.

    ReplyDelete
  7. This was the perfect description of the term and meaning of Foxy. I googled it because that term is often used to describe women in several languages, actually. Your explanation made so much sense in that Foxy can evolve into Cougar as women mature, ha! So true in so many ways.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I often get told I have a foxy face. Not sure if this is what they mean. What complicates matters is that being an Indian, you never know if others are using the term in its original connotation, or are just misusing it!!

    ReplyDelete
  9. article is fantastic and I really love it, thank you for writing to share this special handshake and greetings from Obat Bius | Obat Aborsi Cytotec

    ReplyDelete