Sissy

What is a sissy?

Sissy is, in English, a slur for a boy or man who is seen as unmanly. In BDSM it is the name for the one who takes on the feminized role within sissification, usually with humiliation as the means. The word keeps its sting in doing so: that is the intention.

Where the word comes from

From a little sister. Etymonline dates sissy to 1768 in the meaning “sister”, as a drawn-out colloquial form of sis, which appears from 1659 as a shortening of sister and was widely used in American English from 1859 for girls and young women. In the nineteenth century Sissy was also simply a girl’s name, short for Cecilia or Priscilla.

Dickens still uses it that way: in Hard Times one of the chapters is called “Sissy’s Progress”, after the character Cecilia. Not until 1873 does the same dictionary record the meaning “effeminate man”, with the adjective from 1891. A good hundred years lay between the pet name and the insult.

What the word does

It cuts sharper than its counterpart. The encyclopedia describes sissy as the male mirror image of tomboy, but with a far more negative charge: research from 2015 shows that the two words do not weigh the same, because sissy is nearly always disapproving and much harsher, while tomboy rarely raises concern. On school playgrounds the word counted as “relentlessly negative”.

What it attributes is a little list of what is supposedly missing: courage, strength, athleticism, coordination, testosterone, libido, imperturbability. From the late 1980s some men began to reclaim the word for themselves, and that is the movement the scene use rides along on.

Why the scene keeps the word

Because a neutral word would not work here. In sissification the naming itself is the instrument: the same encyclopedia notes that the feminized party is called sissy “as a form of erotic humiliation”. A kinder word would drain the scene.

That is also where the reason to handle it carefully sits. A word that is arousing within an agreed scene is, outside that scene, simply an insult. For the person themselves and for anyone who happens to overhear it. You draw that distinction not with a dictionary but with an agreement: who may use the word, where, and when it goes off again.

Where this fits on this site

This role I do not offer; I stand on the giving side, and here the man is the one who undergoes it. The word does come up in conversations, though, usually with the question of how you make something like this discussable without it becoming big right away. Such conversations belong with the BDSM date.

Sources

• sissy. Online Etymology Dictionary, Douglas Harper. Provides the dating 1768 for the meaning “sister” as a drawn-out colloquial form of sis, the dating 1873 for “effeminate man” and 1891 for the adjective in that meaning, the use as a girl’s name in the nineteenth century as a shortening of Cecilia or Priscilla, and through the entry sis the dating 1659 for that shortening of sister and 1859 for the general American English use for girls and young women.
• Sissy. Wikipedia. Provides the description as a pejorative for a boy or man who shows no masculine traits, the list of what the word denies (courage, strength, athleticism, coordination, testosterone, libido, stoicism), the relation to tomboy with the finding from Compton and Knox’s contribution to The International Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality (2015) that the two words are asymmetric in their stigmatizing force, the qualification “relentlessly negative” for the school use from Thorne’s Gender Play (1993), the reclaiming of the word by some men from the late 1980s (Pronger, 1990), the use as a pet name for Cecilia with the chapter “Sissy’s Progress” from Dickens’s Hard Times, and the finding that the feminized party within forced feminization is called sissy “as a form of erotic humiliation”.

Related terms

• Sissification. The process this role exists in, with the build-up and the literature.
• Forced feminization. The same practice under its English name, with the question of what “forced” does there.
• Degradation. Why downgrading can arouse, and where that tips into damage.
• Humiliation. The wider practice of humiliation as a stimulus.
• Scene name. The other way people give themselves a name in the scene.
• Dollification. A role that is also about transformation, but into a doll instead of into a woman.
• D/s. The relationship within which such a role takes on meaning.