You want to read a book that will make you uncomfortably reexamine the kind of rhetoric you use, right down to your choice of metaphors? Well, if you don’t, you should: Jeffrey Feldman’s new book Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy. It’s a convincing argument that the right wing punditry has adopted a violence stance, tone, and choice of words and media battles that undermines the concept of deliberative democracy. And while deliberative democracy can be unbelievably frustrating for liberals, a step back shows that it does work in our favor, because slowly over time, Americans have really become a more liberal (read: gentle, considerate people).
I can hear the bristling, but think about it. Liberals, for instance, have won the ideological war about equality. Conservatives have to find another way to frame issues when they’re arguing against equality, and thus have created empty concepts like “abortion is murder” or “reverse racism”. Those phrases burn, but it’s wise to remember that they’ve been forced into a dishonest territory because liberals have won the argument over equality. Conservatives can’t win in a fair debate where all sides present their views to be hashed out in the public forum, and they clearly know it, because instead of submitting themselves to the debate, the right wing pundits have instead turned to fear-mongering and reimagining our objectively peaceful country as a war zone. Think of how the gun control debate goes down, an example Feldman turns to early in the book. There’s not much of an honest debate about gun control in this country, because right wingers skip the facts and go straight for the mythologizing about how every Republican man is besieged by a bunch of gun-wielding maniacs, attacking him in airports and fast food joints, and even coming into his home to rape his wife, and if he wasn’t able to periodically litter the landscape with bullets, it would be worse. That this doesn’t reflect reality seems inconsequential to this image, probably because the image of violence has so much power over reason.
Apparently, some people are asserting that calling someone “boy” (as Rep. Davis from Kentucky controversially did to Obama) is just friendly, buddy-buddy stuff in the South. I see no reason to concede that point. Now, I’m from Texas, which is not the Deep South, but we have our fair share of inbred rednecks spouting Southernisms (I’m like 40% redneck myself, and prone to saying things like “fixing to” and “all y’all”), and I have never heard any redneck ever call someone a “boy” without meaning it to demean that person. Every single time. Even when you call a bona fide boy “boy”, it’s about asserting your superiority over him. Even if it’s used in a genial manner, it’s still an insult. Like you see someone taking a piss outside and you’re like, “Boy, what are you doing?”
There’s the watered-down version, as well, which is “young man” or “young woman”. It’s still asserting authority over the person addressed as such, but unlike “boy” or “girl”, it implies that the person addressed has some cognitive faculties, though minor and in need of correction. Like a kid who stayed out past curfew might get addressed as “young man/lady” while receiving a dressing down.
Then again, I’m far from Kentucky, so I asked a friend from a bordering state, and he said it’s used in exactly the same manner in Kentucky as it is in Texas. Pam maybe could ring in and let us know how East Coast Southerners use the term, though I suspect it’s in the exact same way. Which means quibbling over whether or not it’s racist is ridiculous. Of course it is.
Nicholas Kristof tries to tease out the difference between sexism and misogyny, suggesting that instead of viewing the violence and oppression towards women through the lens of irrational hatred of women (misogyny), we should instead see it as a systemic attempt at control that uses violence and oppression as tools (sexism).
In contrast, the evolutionary origins of attitudes toward women were based presumably less on hatred and more on desire to control them and impregnate them, so as to pass on one’s genes. Acquiring and enforcing a harem, so as to improve the odds of one’s own genes being passed on, might involve ruthlessness, enslavement and brutal beatings, but there was no evolutionary incentive for gender hatred as there was for hatred of different tribes. And of course much of the anti-women behavior around the world, from genital cutting to bride burnings to sex trafficking, is typically overseen by women themselves, and it’s easier to see their behavior as opportunism or deeply-embedded sexism than as hatred of fellow women. So that’s why I wonder if sexism, in the sense of discriminatory attitudes toward males and females, isn’t a better way of thinking about the issue than misogyny, in the sense of hatred toward women.
Other anthropologists I spoke to also noted that the most discriminatory restrictions against women tend to come not from those who profess to hate women, but from those who profess to honor and protect them. Think of Afghan society, for example. After interviewing many men who beat and lock up women and threaten to kill them if they take a false step, I’d say that their attitudes for females are a mix of bizarre honor and contempt, but not usually hatred.
I see his point, but in my experience, the men who most rhapsodically talk about protecting women are often the first to turn extremely hostile if a woman presents any kind of threat to his dominance. And it’s not a cool-headed response, either. Men who are violent against women tend not to have the calm demeanor of someone issuing a bit of discipline, but are swept up in temper and hatred of the object of their violence.
I don’t watch a lot of debating TV shows, because the format is geared towards using shouting matches instead of actual discussion, causing the conservatives to “win” the debate while actually losing the argument, and causing me to want to poke my eyeballs out with a fork and run around with gauze wrapped around my eyes, draped in robes and telling people on the streets about the pending end of American civilization. That was my reaction after watching a few minutes of Bill Maher last night. When we first flipped it on, it was shockingly good. Not great—still jumping around, not making cohesive points, but at least it wasn’t a cage match between some liberals who actually want to talk about the issues and some conservative doing the dance of destroying the conversation so that no one can speak a moment of truth on TV. It was some actor/activist guy who was alright, though he got a little excited and stated things that were largely true in ways that made him easy to discredit. And then there was Robert Reich and Rep. Barbara Lee, both of whom were awesome and amazing and making solid, killer points about our coming economic downfall from the twin national disasters of funneling wealth up (to the upper classes from everyone else) and out (into Iraq). Because things were getting uncomfortably intelligent, they had to drag some pipsqueak conservative on stage. I forget her name, but her parents should be ashamed. At that point, all the oxygen left the room and stupid reigned supreme. The liberals were winning, but instead of making genuine arguments, they were stuck scoring points with the audience, which doesn’t amount to much at the end of the day.
But what occurred to me was that liberals or even people who just care about keeping this country from flying completely off the tracks do need to go on these shows, because these shows have the audience that we need to reach. But if you go on them, you’re going to face off with a conservative who isn’t there to argue (because their arguments don’t hold water), but to make sure that you don’t have a chance to argue your points. What we need is some kind of training to see these distraction tactics coming, so that people speaking for the left/thinking people can avoid these traps and make their arguments. Here’s a list of a few tactics conservatives use to shut down discussion, and what people arguing with them, especially on TV, need to do.
I’ve seen this commercial at a couple of blogs, and in both cases, the blogger defended it, but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone think that it’s anything but delightful. I’m sure the word “beaver” was not originally meant to be a nice word, but obviously, this commercial is reclaiming it in an effective way. But perhaps it was ready to be reclaimed? I mean, I’ve always wondered why “beaver” is supposed to be an insulting word. Who doesn’t like beavers? They are cute, they work hard, and sure, they could bite you (which vaginas can’t, though no one tell Chris Matthews), but on the whole, beavers have a positive role in our society. “Pussy” or any other cat pun seems meaner, because while cats are actually awesome, they have an unfortunate reputation with fierce authoritarians who dislike how a cat can reduce your pretensions with a haughty stare. But I can’t for the life of me imagine someone having a low opinion of beavers, so I never got why this word falls into the pantheon of ugly words for cunt.
I mean, it would be better if it was “otter”, I suppose. Really captures the playful angle, and would make for an even better visual pun in commercials. But “beaver” is not so bad.
Reading Anne Applebaum’s standard issue “the pointy-headed, white, liberal, middle class, self-absorbed feminists don’t care about women in the Middle East” routine a few days ago juxtaposed with a recent Bitch magazine article about the resurgence of the Jewish American Princess stereotype got my mind moving, but ever so slowly because it only occurred to me today what’s largely going on here with this particular feminist scapegoating. You know how the right has transformed a lot of anti-semitic stereotypes onto the more diffuse category “liberals”, because it’s both bad news to be openly anti-semitic nowadays (though more openly anti-black or anti-Muslim is still okay, apparently) and because these stereotypes were just too juicy to give up completely? Now we don’t have as much talk about Hollywood Jews, but there’s still plenty of crap you’ll hear about the Hollywood liberal set. The War On Christmas nonsense is about transferring a traditional slur against Jews onto this vague group called “secularists”. And it occurred to me that the favorite right wing myth about how feminists are supposedly all overprivileged spoiled brats is an update to the Jewish American Princess stereotype. Replace Prada, Chanel, and Lexus with reproductive rights, equality in the workplace, and anti-rape activism, and you have the 21st century version of an old slur. You don’t hear the words “boutique cause” attached to feminism for just random reasons. The baffling amount of “Sex and the City” references in right wing screeds against feminism is no accident, either.
Of course, there’s two major things that are accomplished with this stereotype. The first is that it erases the diversity of feminism. The implication in all these right wing rants about how “the feminists” don’t care about Muslim women implies a) that Muslim feminists don’t exist and b) that if they did they’d so want Americans to throw bombs at their houses. The first is ridiculous and the second even more so.
The second major thing, of course, is to minimize the importance of things like equality in the workplace, reproductive rights, etc. But of course, reproductive rights and equal opportunity at work are not boutique issues only relevant to a handful of overprivileged white women at all. In fact, said overprivileged white women are the ones who’ll probably be the least affected by things like abortion bans, and are least affected by sexism in the workplace now. The easy acceptance of lady lawyers, writers, etc. on the right shows amply how sexism in the workplace is much more of a concern to women living paycheck to paycheck, and could really use the 25% difference between their average paycheck and a man’s average paycheck. Reproductive justice is an annoyance issue to women with privileges; ban abortion in Texas, and I’ll just fly to New York if I need one, for instance. I’d rather not, of course, but I’ll live if I have to. But for women who don’t have the means to do that, the lack of access can be a life or death issue, and not just in terms of what you need to get an illegal abortion, but also just in terms of getting by in your daily life. Rape and domestic violence suck no matter who you are, but they suck 15 times harder if you don’t have the resources you need to escape or heal or get justice. See this post by Shark-Fu about the Pretty Bird Woman House that serves the Standing Rock Indian Reservation for a very good example of how these issues become even more important for women who are certainly lacking in these boutique privileges.
It’s kind of interesting to see how these hoary old anti-semitic stereotypes are being revised and renewed. In the past, they existed to excuse oppression of Jews, of course, but now that’s less of a prominent right wing hobby horse. So instead, they’re being revised in a way that’s two steps removed from the real targets—the poor and people of color mainly—but still that’s the end goal and end target of this nastiness.
The midnight basketball of doom.
The prevailing myth is that in the political media, memories are short. There’s one giant exception, of course, which is that dog whistle-esque grudge terms from wingnuts live in perpetuity. Witness, for instance, this headline from Townhall:
Teen Sex: The New “Midnight Basketball”?
Sometimes I wonder if the objective at Townhall is to shoehorn as many wingnut tropes into headlines (an articles) as possible, so that their readers have heads constantly spinning from the influx of sexualized scare-mongering, racist insinuations, red-baiting, and of course scare quotes. This headline, within the space of 6 words, manages to cram in nearly every trick in the Townhall book. The “teens are having sex while you’re watching reruns of ‘Friends’ and wondering how life passed you by,” technique has been polished to a sheen. Granted, it’s still as obvious as a turd sitting on the middle your carpet, but it’s a smooth, shiny turd, well-worn from use. Almost darling, really, but sane people would still throw it in the garbage.
Violet picked up a revealing little detail in the NY Times coverage of Huckabee’s inability to keep a lid on the fact that he helped release a known rapist from prison because he was enamored of a right wing conspiracy theory/to get back at Bill Clinton.
It has all the markings of salacious, tabloidian detail that can haunt a candidate, a lawmaker, an elected official, who walks and stalks the halls of criminal justice, who has, as he has said, weighed decisions on whether to impose capital punishment, and has ordered death.
She did us a favor and looked up the word, in case you don’t know what it means.
Main Entry: sa·la·cious
Function: adjective
1 : arousing or appealing to sexual desire or imagination : lascivious
2 : lecherous, lustful
There’s a couple of things going on simultaneously here. The first is that this is just more evidence that reality is the opposite of what hysterical anti-feminists claim—it’s not that feminists think rape and sex are the same thing, but the larger society that thinks that, and feminists are the ones who beg to differ. There’s some confusion that’s been sown on that point to make us look bad, which implies that there’s something bad about collapsing the difference between sex and rape, so I expect all the people who hit the fainting couch over the misinterpretations of Andrea Dworkin’s work to be writing furious letters to the Times now, because they really did refuse to distinguish between the gleeful copulations we all strive for and the rape and then rape and murder of two women.
Bean has a response up to Stephanie Coontz’s suggestion that the state get out of the business of marriage completely and instead issue a standard civil union contract to all couples who want it, gay or straight. I’ve said before that I think that’s a good idea, and that I also think the contract should be fairly easy to dissolve, and that a lot of benefits of marriage should be reduced. (For instance, I think alimony should be really hard to get, and only available to spouses who were openly dependent for a reasonable period of time.) Bean likes Coontz’s suggestions, but is wary of some of her rhetorical tactics of relying heavily on tradition to argue that marriage isn’t really a state issue so much as a religious issue anyway.
I also have to say that as much as I support Coontz’s marriage proposal (pun intended), there is something about her historical framing of it that makes me a little uncomfortable. Yes, one strong thing going for the so-called privatization of marriage is the practice’s historical roots. That said, I think we need to be careful not to idealize the marriage of the past, in which women were property and a marriage was a business arrangement. Coontz is completely right to suggest that the state is not the appropriate purveyor of “marriage”; the state should recognize civil not religious unions. But I think we can advocate for this shift without recalling the marriage misogyny of days gone by. It continues strongly enough today as it is.
Arguing from tradition is a crappy argument, of course, and not very logical. But I get why Coontz does it. Opponents of same sex marriage rights tend to fall heavily on tradition in their arguments, and she’s basically pointing out that if tradition is your thing, then you should have no problem with a more clean separation of church and state on this issue, since it’s even more traditional. It’s something of a gotcha argument, since we’re all aware that the “defenders of traditional marriage” are more defenders of specific gender roles that privilege straight men over everyone else.
The concern here is the framing issue, a la George Lakoff. When you argue inside someone else’s frames, you reinforce them. Even though Coontz has scored gotcha points that will help win the immediate argument, she’s managed to reinforce the idea that falling back on tradition is a good argument, and as Bean points out, that’s not really good for the overall argument when you’re talking women’s rights and gay rights. The part of me that knows this is at odds with the part of me that’s saying, “Ha! Your ‘traditions’ won’t save you now, wingnuts!”
Thoughts?
Discussion was had about pulling a “santorum” on Michael “Fear of Vagina” Smerconish. I think murcielago has the best suggestion:
You guys, come on. It’s already tailormade to be an adjective, the adjectival form of “Nice Guy ™”. As in, “I can’t believe that a totally smerconish guy like that thought he had a chance with you!” Or “I spent the afternoon chatting with Fred; he keeps complaining how girls aren’t interested in him, so I was telling him that if he’d just stop being so smerconish he’d be fine…”
It really rolls off the tongue better than “douchey”, don’t you think? I should enter it into the urban dictionary.
Jessica found this dipshit Michael Smerconish praising the word “vajayjay” and confirming to me my initial discomfort with the word was right on the nose. His reasons to think it’s such a marvelous word? It pisses off feminists and coddles the supposedly universal male fear of the dreaded vagina.* Jessica points out that Smerconish is beating the hell out of the strawfeminist.
But the Times also shed light on controversy in certain quarters. It seems like Eve Ensler and Gloria Steinem are unenthused about adding “vajayjay” to the lexicon. And a Manhattan OB/GYN was actually quoted as saying the word is a step backward.
After hours of reflection, and in consultation with my man friends, I think I have it figured out.
Pardon my directness, but I refuse to beat around the bush. The feminists, it seems, have a proprietary interest in female genitalia.
I do admire his straightforward attitude about it: The problem with feminists is that they think that vaginas belong to women, when everyone knows that the proprietary interest in vaginas is all men’s, and we have a history of violence and oppression to back that up. Feeling lucky, punkettes?
Via Jill, this article about the TV-friendly euphemism “vajayjay” really drives home the point I was making earlier about how women’s body parts have this entire taboo around them that men’s parts just don’t. The word was used on “Grey’s Anatomy” and took off, because people are desperate for a new euphemism for the dreaded but important body part.
It began on Feb. 12, 2006, when viewers of the ABC series “Grey’s Anatomy” heard the character Miranda Bailey, a pregnant doctor who had gone into labor, admonish a male intern, “Stop looking at my vajayjay.”
Turns out the writers were poking a stick at the censors, who wouldn’t allow them to use the word they wanted to use.
Shonda Rhimes, the creator and executive producer of “Grey’s Anatomy,” who brought the word into full public view, never intended to promote a euphemism or slang term for the female anatomy. Rather, she fought to use vagina in the script.
“I had written an episode during the second season of ‘Grey’s’ in which we used the word vagina a great many times (perhaps 11),” Ms. Rhimes wrote in an e-mail message. “Now, we’d once used the word penis 17 times in a single episode and no one blinked. But with vagina, the good folks at broadcast standards and practices blinked over and over and over. I think no one is comfortable experiencing the female anatomy out loud — which is a shame considering our anatomy is half the population.”
Carol Lloyd has a really great blog post about the well-known aversion (especially amongst women) to the word “moist”. Language Log had an interesting blog post about word aversion, too, and there are two notable things about the phenomenon: it mostly strikes women, and there’s a certain what you might call trend to the words. Here are some favorites, if you can figure out what the trend is.
moist
cornucopia
panties
luggage
tissue
creamy
fleshy
goosepimple
Boob. Panties. Swimsuit.
I’ve also known women who physically cringe at the word “cunt”. The phenomenon (except when it comes to “cunt”) is written off as a weird word issue, but Carol Lloyd suspects something else is going on. I bet you’re suspecting that, too.
Last week the moist conversation took on a new dimension when Charles Doyle at the University of Georgia posted to an academic language list-serve that his use of the word in a Shakespeare class had prompted several of his female college students to inform him (in an amused, not outraged way) that the M-word was offensive to women. According to professor Doyle, the women offered no explanation for the word’s bad juju, but one male student suggested that it might have something to do with female sexual arousal. To which I offer the following comment: No, duh.
Since then some posts have suggested that the moist embargo is yet another feminist absurdity (a theory too absurd to dignify with a response). But maybe the college students were not talking about the word per se, but about the professor’s use of it. Doyle says he used the word to describe Egypt in “Antony and Cleopatra” — and the association with women’s sexual arousal “is not at all beside the point.” So are these women squeamish about Shakespeare’s (or Doyle’s) bawdy vision, or do they actually believe the word that has sold Betty Crocker cake mixes for decades is now an obscenity? Either way, it’s weird to imagine that in this era of happy-go-lucky explicitness, we could suddenly start getting offended in a college Shakespeare seminar and turning ordinary words into taboos. Is there a growing Victorianism lurking in our verbal closet? Or is it that since an open revulsion with the female body is no longer kosher, our disgust searches out substitute targets?
Scott and Matt are talking about a favorite diversionary tactic of conservatives:
One has to keep in mind the broader picture here, too. The right’s main tactic whenever Democrats want to do something that might be helpful to any group of citizens everywhere is to identify some even more desperately poor group and claim that their opposition to helping out is driven by a die-hard commitment to these truly needy types. Try to help the working class, and the underclass are trotted out for moral blackmail. Try to help the middle class, and what about the poor? But then when push comes to shove, these are the same people trying to cut section eight housing programs, trying to cut food stamps, etc. The only people they’re really serious about helping are the extremely wealthy beneficiaries of their tax cuts.
Scott correctly identifies this as part of a larger issue for the right when it comes to framing their arguments, which is that their end goals/results are generally unpopular, so they at least have to put up a semblance of caring about progressive goals while undermining them.
Which creates what I call the “stupid or evil?” conundrum. Stupid-or-evil tends to be the major question when it comes to a slightly different tactic of the right, which is to claim that their asinine ideas are actually better at achieving progressive goals than progressive policies. Like claiming that dismantling Social Security will improve the retirements of the poorest elderly in our nation. Or claiming that bombing the shit out of people and making them hate you is a good way to win people over to Western-style democracy. A lot of the time, I think that evil wins out over stupid, such as the free market capitalist nuts who think that sending economies spiraling into widespread inequality and overwhelming levels of poverty will eventually help the poor (those TVs will come if you can weather the starvation now! soon! yes, TVs any day! we swear!). Right now, only the extremely stupid are wowed by the theory of trickle down economics; everyone else who trots it out is just taking advantage of the assumption of good faith.
The S-CHIP fiasco lends credence to “evil” over “stupid” as well, since conservatives who realized there was no way to advance the argument that you could get more health care to kids by denying them health care resorted not to giving in to reality—sort of the gold standard of arguing in good faith—and instead went straight into shit-flinging mode. Score one for evil.
Jill and Zuzu are taking Matt to task for a post he wrote criticizing the Guttmacher study that shows that abortion bans not only don’t reduce the abortion rate, but in some cases can contribute to increasing it. His views were roughly “don’t buy it” and “so what?” Which isn’t to say that I think he’s being an asshole at all, but Zuzu is right that the first argument reeks of privilege, in that it downplays the tenacity of women and the long-standing history of underground and illegal abortion.
What I’m interested in right now is the privilege on display — Matt, who will never have to face the question of whether to have an abortion, dismisses the Guttmacher study as “questionable.” And why? Because, gosh, it just doesn’t make any sense that women would seek abortions where they’re illegal and dangerous!
It’s unfortunate that he went that route, and Zuzu is right—it only takes a few moments to see how the need to abort a pregnancy isn’t really a choice for women, and in fact the term “pro-choice” is a bit misleading on that. Not being pregnant right now is, for most women who get abortions, right in the “need” category, and need tends to be impervious to the laws in a way that want doesn’t. If he took a few minutes to really imagine what it must be like to be a woman and have the low-level but nagging fear of unplanned pregnancy following you, much less to be a woman stuck in the hellish situation of being pregnant when you desperately don’t want to be, he’d realize his quick hand-waving dismissal is what doesn’t make sense, not the study, performed by the rigorous and well-respected Guttmacher Institute.
I want, badly, to write something coherent and witty about the various delusions that pour out of the Shrub’s mouth and are getting revealed to the public from Robert Draper’s upcoming book, but I can’t. Usually, I find delusional wingnuts darkly funny, but right now I keep thinking about how Bush’s delusions have cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of people—by the end of it, I suspect we’ll easily toll it up to over a million—and I just get depressed. Also, it’s raining, which makes my gloom worse.
So instead, I’ll take a page off Jessica’s blog and out of her book and mock these assholes instead.
THE men’s magazine which sparked outrage when it offered a $10,000 boob job as a competition prize has responded to its critics by launching a search for Australia’s sexiest feminist.
Zoo Weekly magazine angered health and women’s groups when it urged men to “win” their girlfriend a boob job by sending in shots of her cleavage.
The lad’s mag today revealed its new competition - a search “for the hottest girl in sensible shoes” - promising the winner a year’s supply of deodorant and a sexy photo shoot.
When I read this, I flashed on the part of Jessica’s book where she talks about her woman’s studies professor making a list of the worst names you could call men (pussy, fag) and the worst you could call women (cunt, bitch, whore), the general point being that the worst thing you could say about someone was that he/she is a woman or feminine. I’d suggest reading the book; I’m going on memory here.
This article in Salon by Lucy Silag about gossip is kind of irritating because the author sets up an experiment designed to fail. She vows to quit gossiping, but decides to define “gossip” so broadly that it renders her mute.
For the purposes of my challenge, I’d defined gossip as any instance — spoken, written, even gestured — in which the affairs of another are discussed without that person’s knowledge, but how could I hope to plan my wedding, for instance, without discussing with my partner how much my parents might be able to contribute?
Talking about your own business without every person involved in the room is not gossip. Nor is saying, “She’s doing well and got a new promotion,” to someone who asks after your friend. Gossip is more about shaming and setting social standards, basically talking about people’s behavior in a way meant to stigmatize and scandalize. “So-and-so got a promotion,” isn’t gossip. “Did you hear that she’s not exactly faithful to her husband?” is.
What I found interesting about the article, however, is that Silag trips over a very gendered set of expectations and doesn’t breathe a word about the unfairness of it all—she finds that she’s unable to speak at all with her new rule, but doesn’t pause to consider that men don’t have her dilemma. Speaking of others? Gossip. Speaking of yourself? Narcissistic at best, catty (”Well, I wouldn’t pay for Netflix that long.”) at worst. Speaking of ideas, books, movies, hobbies? Too nerdy/lofty/intellectual. She never says word one in the article about how men have a lot more social space for all these forms of discourse. Men speaking of ideas, interests, or hobbies are considered normal, and if sports are involved, it’s practically a holy ritual. Men are pretty much by definition not gossips or cats (unless they’re gay, but again, fear of the feminine is the rule), so they can speak of others without generally getting that accusation.
Of course, there’s no reason to put faith into stereotype that women gossip more than men. This survey of cell phone users and how they use their phone wasn’t the most scientific, but it seems solid enough to ask people what they speak about and finding that men use their phones to gossip “as much” as women. Actually, more, but the writer didn’t want to say it.
The study found that men gossip at least as much as women, especially on their mobiles. Thirty-three percent of men indulge in mobile gossip every day or almost every day, compared with twenty-six percent of women.
Anyway, Silag found that she was basically cut off from speaking of ideas and of others and of herself, putting her in a situation where she didn’t have much to say at all. Which I think is basically the point—outside of babbling at babies, female speech is pretty stigmatized, and it’s fairly easy to shame any woman at random by saying she talks too much. The sexist rabble at Salon immediately latched onto the solution to the female speech problem—women should be seen and not heard.
The New York City Council, which drew national headlines when it passed a symbolic citywide ban earlier this year on the use of the so-called n-word, has turned its linguistic (and legislative) lance toward a different slur: bitch.
The term is hateful and deeply sexist, said Councilwoman Darlene Mealy of Brooklyn, who has introduced a measure against the word, saying it creates “a paradigm of shame and indignity” for all women.
I can support the wiretapping of your phones. I can support your illegal detention and demand that you be tortured with no hope of habeas corpus on the horizon. I can wave away the death of over half a million civilian Iraqis. I can demand that your children go to fight an adventure war and get killed while my children sit pretty at college manning the college Republicans. I can show up at your doctor’s office and accuse you of moral turpitude because of what I imagine your sex life must be like, and I’m still the paragon of decency.
But if I say you’re fucking awesome, I’ve crossed an unspeakable boundary and only then have I managed to betray the bounds of civility.
This is according to Don Surber and all the other wingnuts defending the routine use of arbitrary taboos and Calvinball rules of debate that are used to concoct fake controversies to run liberal activists out of jobs and deprive them of funding. The latest witchhunt is against YearlyKos, which Bill O’Reilly is trying to defund by pretending to be offended at some random comments that were found after his staff was assigned the thankless job of combing through probably millions of comments to find something for Bill O’Reilly to find offensive. It’s how he has fun, you know. After he’s done at work, O’Reilly likes to relax by visiting public restrooms in San Francisco, one after another, until he finds a toilet that someone forgot to flush and boom! All the evidence he needs that gay rights are the end of life as we know it.
Surber uses a very unfortunate euphemism when describing his fear of naughty words.
If you’re a fan of Banksy, check out his Flickr group.
Sabotabby linked to an article on Israeli doublespeak in Counterpunch, and it’s well worth reading, if only to see how widespread the phenomenon is. If hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, then doublespeak is the tribute that oppression pays to justice. Most of these phrases that are documented will lift your eyebrows, but as Sabotabby notes, the phrase “moderate physical pressure” is probably coming our way, to excuse widespread torture.
Moderate Physical Pressure and Work Accidents
Israel was at one time the only country to officially sanction the use of torture, euphemistically referred to as “moderate physical pressure.” Lea Tsemel, a defense lawyer and founder of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) remarked, “Israel is the only Western country that openly uses torture. This is not some brute in the secret services beating up a prisoner. It’s done in the open. There is quiet legitimation by a high-ranking commission and government ministers” (New York Times, May 8, 1997).
The Sunday Times had already arrived at the same conclusion in June 1977: “Torture of Arab prisoners is so widespread and systematic that it cannot be dismissed as ‘rogue cops’ exceeding orders. It appears to be sanctioned as deliberate policy.”
Whenever a detainee died under torture, it was dismissed as an unfortunate “work accident.” It took a ruling by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1999 to ban the practice. Unfortunately they have now reversed themselves. A judgment issued this past June allows Shin Bet to use methods regarded by PCATI as torture when in a “ticking bomb” situation. With likely wide interpretation of this circumstance, it appears a green light has just been issued to reinstate the practice.
On the new blog Open Left, a diarist uses the word “framing” while not understanding the first rule of framing. His argument is that in order to “reframe” the abortion debate, we should agree that abortion is very bad but talk about how to reduce it. That is not reframing. That is the opposite of reframing. When you concede that abortion is bad, you are arguing within your opponent’s frame.
If you want to reframe an argument, you phrase your arguments in a way that brings your opponent onto your turf. So someone wrings their hands about how bad abortion is, to actually reframe the argument, you say, “Actually, I think that it’s great that women have this choice. I think it’s important that we as a society value women’s equality, health, and human rights, and that we make all medical care they need available to them as we do men. What do you think it’s a bad thing if women have full access to all the health care they need?” That’s reframing.
I’m all for pushing birth control and welfare as wedge issues—also, it’s great to talk about how women need the full range of choices, including the choice to give birth if they want—but wedge issues are a different rhetorical tactic.
Well, here’s an interesting if utterly creepy controversy. A couple of rapists break into a house and gang rape the woman who lives there, then force her son presumably to penetrate her somehow, and then pour chemicals in the boy’s eyes. Articles describing the attack invariably say that the boy was forced to “have sex” with his mother, a phrase that’s just too pleasant to be accurate. Shakes and Jennifer are protesting, saying the word “rape” is a better term. But that’s problematic, because the boy was just as much a victim as his mother of the sexual assault.
The term “having sex” is really inappropriate, I agree. For one thing, even in non-criminal uses, it’s something close to a euphemism, though not quite. I’d argue that it describes an event, not an action, and the specific actions are left to the audience’s imagination. Most people use it to mean boring old vaginal intercourse, but it doesn’t have to mean that. Homosexual sex is still “having sex”, and I’d argue that we’d be a smarter nation on the whole if we admitted oral sex is sex, apologies to Bill Clinton. More importantly for my feminist heart, the idea to “having sex” describes an event, not specific actions, makes features like consent more important than the physical actions that happened. If “having sex” is a concept more than a specific act, then it does indeed become easier to distinguish between assault and real sex, which is what Shakes and Jennifer are getting at.
Still, the word “rape” is also something that shouldn’t be thrown around lightly and implies culpability. Most of the time, that’s not an issue. Most people who force sex on someone else did it on purpose and need to be held accountable for their actions. But this boy didn’t rape; he was raped, as was his mother.
The issue in this case, which is admittedly unusual, is that there’s a reliance on euphemism that creates confusion. I figure the whole problem would be resolved if the specific act (presumably vaginal intercourse) was described, coupled with the word “forced” to clarify the issue. Ugliness such as this crime doesn’t deserve the cover of pretty-sounding euphemisms. What do you think, Pandagonians?
Consider this part of the Feminism Friday series.
I suppose disease-prevention does benefit men, but so does pregnancy-prevention. There’s a reason men are terrified of getting a woman pregnant. It isn’t like disease-prevention is a man-only concern or sexual fetish. The problem here may have something to do with gender, in fact it’d be easy to convince me it does, but the relationship Marcotte describes here doesn’t really make any sense. This seems like far more of an issue with everyone’s pleasure and choices than women’s in particular. Of course, that makes perfect sense: many of the religious don’t like recreational sex, and they’re angry when men and women alike have it.
I dare say that I never argued that men don’t see the benefit of preventing pregnancy; many do. But Mike’s main problem here is assuming that people’s behaviors and beliefs about sex stem from a rational perspective, which is statistically impossible. If people behaved rationally about sex, our unwanted pregnancy rate would be a fraction of what it is now. Even if you assume, as many sexists do, that only men can be counted on for rational decision-making, that shouldn’t matter, because no man anywhere who didn’t want a baby right now would have sex with a woman without either a condom or verifying to his satisfaction that she can’t get pregnant. Clearly, that’s not happening.
I know the Governator didn’t quite mean to encourage the idea that knowing two languages somehow makes you stupider than knowing one, but that’s the impression he left with his speech before a convention of Hispanic journalists.
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s remarks that immigrants should avoid Spanish-language media if they want to learn English quickly left some Hispanic journalists shaking their heads.
“You’ve got to turn off the Spanish television set” and stay away from Spanish-language television, books and newspapers, the Republican governor said Wednesday night at the annual convention of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. “You’re just forced to speak English, and that just makes you learn the language faster.”
As Marc notes, there are few things more endearing than having a speaker at your professional convention slam your profession, and quite a few of the attendees work for Spanish-language media. But more to the point, Schwarzenegger—who hasn’t managed to shake his own Austrian accent well enough for the standards he lays out—doesn’t really go to much effort to hide his hostility towards the idea that Mexican-Americans might cherish bilingualism.
“I know this sounds odd and this is the politically incorrect thing to say and I’m going to get myself in trouble,” he said. “But I know that when I came to this country, I very rarely spoke German to anyone.” …..
In October, the governor was criticized by Democrats when he said some Mexican immigrants “try to stay Mexican” when they come to the United States and urged them to learn English and U.S. history and “make an effort to become part of America.
No one disputes the idea that children of immigrants would do well to learn English, but anyone with a modicum of education in how language acquistion works will know that children who speak English in school will learn it. In fact, it strikes me as a distinct advantage to have English in school and Spanish at home, so you grow up bilingual. But by the Governator’s own measure, there’s something unseemly about using two languages frequently enough to be properly bilingual.
I wish I could chalk up our national inability to grasp that it’s a good thing to know more than one language to the simple fact of geography—we’re bigger than any European country, so linguistic diversity seems less compelling. But it’s more than that, and Schwarzenegger’s attitude here points to it. We’re actively hostile to bilingualism. I grew up on the border between Texas and Mexico and was raised by a family with many bilingual members and I can’t speak Spanish, because no one ever prioritized the acquisition of other languages. Now, there’s no doubt that I look like a pinche guera, but it would be nice not to be so utterly and stupidly the complete pinche guera package. And the Governator would do well not to discourage the great importance of teaching kids to speak many languages, if only to preserve the pleasure of having conversations that stupid Republican-voting, Mexican-hating assholes can’t understand when they eavesdrop in public.
Quick question: When you read the title of the post, did you pronounce the word “motherfucking” in your mind? If you were to read it aloud, would you just go ahead and say “motherfucking”? Odds are yes, which gets straight to the heart of why the “seven words you can’t say on TV” is such a silly concept. The taboo against certain sounds pronounced in order is top of the list of hard to defend, because you have to argue that such syllables pronounced in that order create a harm so great that the First Amendment to the Constitution needs to be flouted to protect people. In lieu of that, you have to point in various directions, invoke unsubtle arguments against lower class people, and generally make an a$$ of yourself, as Bill Murchinson does in this incoherent article about why the FCC needs to waste taxpayer money keeping the f-word off the TV.
The good news is he reveals the agenda behind promoting taboo words right off the bat.
A federal appeals court panel in New York used President Bush and Vice President Cheney — if you can believe it — as a lever to pry open a little wider the passage to free speech of the no-holds-barred variety. When I say no holds barred, I mean every *$!!#$% word of it — as we used to write in quainter times.
The court told the Federal Communications Commission it couldn’t punish broadcast television for letting fly the same kind of language our leaders use now and then in unguarded moments. One such moment came when Cheney growled to one of the less clubby Senate Democrats, Pat Leahy, Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, that Leahy would do well to … oh, well.
This post by Jeffrey Feldman on seeking a frame on abortion that accomplishes both the goal of advancing the interests of the Democrats while protecting abortion rights is pretty interesting. He correctly identifies the problem with “safe, legal, and rare”, which is that it buys into the idea that abortion is a bad thing. As activists, clearly the counter-message is that abortion is a good thing. But for the Democratic politicians seeking office, offending the middle—the people who both want to preserve their own rights and want with those other women, you know, those having-sluttier-sex-than-me-women, don’t get the idea that it’s okay to be a slutty slut—isn’t the best strategy. And as much as it pains the purists to say this, it’s better to have mealy-mouthed pro-choicers in office than anti-choicers. Jeffrey’s suggestion is for pro-choice Democrats to instead frame the pro-choice view as the best balance between women’s rights and anxiety about emasculation the fetus. It’s a word that doesn’t concede territory to anti-choicers and helps recenter the discussion where it belongs, which is on the rights of actual human beings, which women are.*
It might be too complex of a frame, though. I don’t see why not simply refuse to discuss abortion outside of the context of the rights of citizens. Politicians are champions at doing the left-right question dodge and reframing questions into terms that suit them better. So, whenever you get a question from a Fetus Person that ignores, as they have to, the humanity of women, bring it back to that. For instance, in the question from Joel C. Hunter that Jeffrey quotes:
Abortion continues to be one of the most hurtful and divisive facts of our nation. I come from the part of the faith community that is very strongly pro-life. I know you’re pro-choice, but you have indicated that you would like to reduce the number of abortions. Could you see yourself, with millions of voters in a pro-life camp, creating a common ground, with the goal ultimately in mind of reducing the decisions for abortion to zero?
Say, “Abortion is not fun for any woman, which is why we’d like to keep them rare. I would also like to keep heart surgery rare, if I can help it. But just as we’ll never wipe out heart disease completely, we will never wipe out unplanned pregnancy completely, because women are human and sometimes they have circumstances outside of their direct control. I support prevention in health care. We can reduce the number of abortions and number of heart surgeries by helping Americans have better access to prevention. In the case of abortion, the best prevention is contraception and comprehensive sex education. I’d like to empower women to have the fullest range of options available so they can make the best decision for themselves.”
I don’t see why that’s so hard.
Exactly as bad as what Don Imus said
My Book Report on All Quiet On the Western Front
All Quiet On the Western Front was a pretty good book. I liked it. It had lots of good battle scenes and stuff. It was written good, and Erica Maria Remarque is a good author. She was very famous for this book, and rightly so.
There were problems with this book, however. Mrs. Remarque didn’t spend enough time telling the story of World War I. I would have liked to know more about it, it would have made the story make more sense. For example, when was it? Who fought in it? How did it start? Who was Archduke Ferdinand? Where is Serbia? What are anarchists? What’s a turn of a century? What’s a century? What are trenches? Are they naturally occurring, or manmade? What is cavalry? What kind of horses do they ride? Why was Austria hungry?
(more…)
Even when you feel bound to say “yes,” you can still say “no.”
Photo: everyday_stranger
Hugo’s got a terrific post up about the way we socialize women to say “yes” even (and especially) when they want to say “no,” and the exercise he uses to help his students become more aware of that:
In the past, I’ve asked my students and youth groupers to keep a “log? of how often they say “yes? when they’d rather say “no? over the course of the week. Some of them actually have developed spread sheets, with columns! (People-pleasing taken to the platinum level!) They list to whom they said yes when they’d rather have said no; they list the request itself; they are encouraged to journal about why they said “yes?, and to speculate what the consequences would have been (both for themselves and the other person) if they had said “no.?
I don’t usually ask them to start practicing saying “no? right away. I find it’s often more effective to get young women to see just how often — and to how many people, and in how many varied circumstances — they say “yes.? Saying “yes? to things we would rather not do is of course part of living in community. But we raise women to find “no? a much more difficult word to say.
[Emphasis mine.]
I don’t want to imply that my experience is universal among women, but I do know I used to have a terrible time saying “no” when I meant “no,” often because I didn’t know (or didn’t know in time to say it) even that I wanted to say “no.” That’s because I didn’t know what I wanted in the first place, because since when did what I wanted ever matter?
That reminds me: Does anyone here need anything? Are y’all doing okay out there? Anyone thirsty? Can I get you something to drink? I have iced tea or water or diet ginger ale, but I could probably run to the store right quick if you’d like something else. Iced coffee? A beer? Say, how about a sandwich? I would love to fix you a nice sandwich.
Ooooh! I’m telling mom!
Pam, unsurprisingly, was absolutely right: It’s wrong to attack Ann Coulter for her uncivility (hopefully it was clear that I was relatively sarcastic in this title), if only to avoid giving John Hawkins something to talk about:
How hypocritical is it for the left side of the blogosphere, which is filled with bloggers who can barely go 3 or 4 sentences without dropping a F-bomb, to be complaining about Ann Coulter using an offensive word?
Only in right-wing land is calling someone a “fucker” considered a personal insult. Profanity and slurs are not the same thing, Hawkins.
But Hawkins really entertains with his next act:
Additionally, it’s worth noting that more than a few liberal bloggers have used the word f*ggot as well. Here are 5 I was able to pull up with just a little googling (note the *’s were added by me and not contained in the original posts)
Heaven-forfending aside, here’s the list of bloggers who he “J’Accuse”s with his “gotcha effort”:
