Lewis establishes his supposedly politically correct credentials early on when he notes that there was only ‘the occasional female in a blue blazer, two blacks, and a cluster of Japanese’ among the 127 predominantly ‘white male trainees’ who joined Salomon with him (pp.42-3). In my view, Lewis becomes complicit in the sexist language of the traders he worked with, but he does so in such a way as to simultaneously pretend he is exposing them. By the next page, Lewis is normalizing the metaphor, as he writes that, ‘Even knowledgeable thrift presidents felt they faced a choice between rape and slow suicide’ (p.125). First, he questions whether it could really be called rape when the transactions were entered into ‘between consenting adults,’ but then admits that ‘the abuse could have been even worse’ (p.124). Instead of stepping back to reflect on the significance of the sexual metaphor, as a sociologist might do, Lewis runs with it. But when Lewis interviewed one trader the violent misogynistic imagery exceeded mere fucking, as the man explained how the thrifts – the Savings and Loans banks that made home loans to Americans – ‘that did the big trades’ with traders such as himself at investment banks in 1981, ‘got raped’ (p.124 my emphasis). The ethnographer Caitlin Zaloom has noted how male traders associate with each other ‘in an idiom of homosexual humor that plays on the paradigms of masculine domination,’ where ‘Fucking and being fucked are the conventional expressions of financial dominance’ (Zaloom, 2006: 122-123 quoted by Jacobs, 2012: 386). By the 1980s excessive swearing in the workplace, as opposed to an occasional slip, probably symbolized the indifference if not contempt of bankers for the norms of white-collar work and the emerging concerns that overt verbal sexism could constitute harassment or discrimination (Maltby & Rutterford, 2012: 521).

If a professor said ‘Fuck the bankers!’ in a lecture on finance and society then the university might expect to hear from some student’s fee-paying father if she told him about it even if the father worked in finance himself and swore routinely in front of colleagues. Swearing is gendered and represents an exercise of power, or else it connotes being taken into the swearer’s confidence. Almost all of us swear occasionally, but few of us swear freely. Leaving in the swearing makes the book feel real, reassuring the reader that nothing has been edited out for political correctness, or that Lewis has been privy to the traders at their most unguarded moments when they say what they really think. From a sociological perspective, the prevalence of swearing and sexual metaphors calls for reflection on its symbolism, both for the traders themselves and for Lewis.

Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis