Feminism Friday: On “Bitch” and Other Misogynist Language

cross-posted by Melissa McEwan , originally posted at Shakesville on November 20, 2007

[Important Note to Feminist Noobs: This is a long post. It contains lots of different, though related, Feminist 101 kind of ideas about misogynist language. Please carefully read the whole post before commenting. If you don't understand one of the points that is made in the post, I highly recommend asking for clarification before issuing an opinion on it. If you make an argument in comments that has already been discredited within the post, be prepared to be thoroughly mocked.]

Andi Zeisler, co-founder (with Lisa Jervis) of Bitch magazine, wrote an interesting piece for the WaPo this weekend on “the B-word,” its cultural connotation, and its reclamation:

Bitch is a word we use culturally to describe any woman who is strong, angry, uncompromising and, often, uninterested in pleasing men. We use the term for a woman on the street who doesn’t respond to men’s catcalls or smile when they say, “Cheer up, baby, it can’t be that bad.” We use it for the woman who has a better job than a man and doesn’t apologize for it. We use it for the woman who doesn’t back down from a confrontation.

So let’s not be disingenuous. Is it a bad word? Of course it is. As a culture, we’ve done everything possible to make sure of that, starting with a constantly perpetuated mindset that deems powerful women to be scary, angry and, of course, unfeminine — and sees uncompromising speech by women as anathema to a tidy, well-run world.

…[Bitch magazine is] not about hating men but about elevating women. But too many people don’t see the difference. And, at least in part, that’s why the B-word is still such a problematic term.

Definitely read the whole thing.

I found it particularly compelling because of its pertinence not only to the sexism surrounding Hillary’s campaign which we’ve been discussing around here recently, but also because in the last week, I had a really retro and disheartening conversation about sexist language—a really retro and disheartening conversation about sexist language that I’ve had dozens of times before.

Feminism Friday – Feminism 101: “Sexism is a Matter of Opinion”

By Melissa McEwan (Crossposted from Shakesville, where it is part of Liss’s ongoing Feminism 101 series)

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There’s a very common misperception that sexism is subjective—that any given incident identified by one person as sexist could be identified by another as not sexist, and either both of them are right, because the whole thing is just a matter of opinion anyway, or the latter is right, because if it’s not equally obvious to everyone, it can’t be sexist. It’s this conventional wisdom about the subjectivity of sexism that underlies the ubiquitous “I don’t see it” rejoinder, particularly recurrent in discussions of expressed sexism against women, on which this post will be focused.*

Sexism is, in fact, not subjective. What’s subjective are individual reactions to sexism, but sexism itself can be objectively determined. (I’ll come back to that in a moment.) Individual reactions to sexism will, naturally, be as vast and varied as the individuals who react—but because there are men, or women, who aren’t offended by something, or don’t find it sexist, doesn’t mean it isn’t. One can always find someone who refuses to be offended by something: That Michelle Malkin wrote In Defense of Internment doesn’t American government-built concentration camps any less objectively offensive or wrong.

So: Toss out the idea that there must be unanimous consent, or even majority agreement, that something is sexist for it to be determined as such. In fact, toss out the idea that sexism is determined by subjective opinion altogether.

Feminism Friday Open Thread: Misogyny in Political Activism

There’s been some fantastic blogging about this recently regarding the candidacy of Hillary Clinton for the Presidency of the USA. Shakesville especially has been clarifying people’s thoughts this week:

• Melissa: Damned if you do…
• Melissa: Stealth Vote Salon (a roundup of other’s responses to the post above)
• Kate: I Am Not Ashamed

A lot of division is being manufactured over whether white male Democrats, for instance, are going to vote for their gender or their race in the primaries. Nobody in the media is really looking at how close the two front-running candidates are on most issues, and how impressive both of them are in different ways so that, as Kate says, Democrats in the primaries are essentially voting on which kitten is the cutest, and would be happy to vote for either when the actual presidential vote comes around.

Of course, misogyny is a phenomenon that is seen worldwide wherever women candidates run for any public office. We certainly saw instances of misogyny here in Australia in our last Federal election, directed mostly against Julia Gillard, who is now our Deputy Prime Minister, and plenty of the same accusations that women intending to vote for a woman were voting purely out of sisterly solidarity instead of on the issues (implication: can’t trust chicks with the vote!).

I’d love to see a collection of posts from bloggers all over the world about instances of misogynistic attitudes used against women running for office. Please discuss the issue here and add links to memorable posts.

Feminism Friday: Humour as a tool for shaming and silencing

Last week’s Feminism Friday post was on why Rape Jokes Just Aren’t Funny, based on a series from Melissa McEwan of Shakesville, and at the crosspost on Hoyden About Town Bernice made a telling comment.

Humour – the final frontier of colonialisation. You really now you’ve co-opted someone into the frame of dominance from which you work, when you can get them to laugh at jokes insensitive at the least, vicious in the usual. Which is why it’s so important to berate those humourless one who fail to laugh or worse still dare to complain – they’re obviously not with the programme.

Liss, via an extended photo-essay (warm up your scrolling finger), provides the hook for our Feminism Friday post again:

For the Discerning Gentleman: You, Too, Can Decorate Your Life With Disembodied Boobs

(Some pictures may be NSFW)

After the “fun” part, Liss gets down to the point, which echoes Bernice’s comment.

Happy Halloween

Scare us all! Open thread for creepy stories and revoltingly sexist costume links (because strangely, we don’t see superheroes in costumes like this, at this time of year or any other).

Alternatively, if you’re doing something kickarse for Halloween or Samhain, link here to your posts about it.

Feminism Friday: The origins of the word “sexism”

Although it has long since become a household phrase, the origins of the term “sexism” are not widely known. In researching this article, I found that the term is most commonly dated to the 1968 paper “Freedom for Movement Girls – Now”, however there are actually two other known appearances of this word prior to the publication of that article.

Pauline M. Leet’s “Women and the Undergraduate”

According to Shapiro (1985) the term was most likely coined on November 18, 1965 during the “Student-Faculty Forum” at Franklin and Marshall College (p. 5). The word appears in Pauline M. Leet’s forum contribution entitled, “Women and the Undergraduate”, where she defines it by comparing it to racism:

When you argue…that since fewer women write good poetry this justifies their total exclusion, you are taking a position analogous to that of the racist — I might call you in this case a “sexist”… Both the racist and the sexist are acting as if all that has happened had never happened, and both of them are making decisions and coming to conclusions about someone’s value by referring to factors which are in both cases irrelevant. [p. 3]

[Leet (1965) in Shapiro (p. 6)]

Caroline Bird’s “On Being Born Female”

Shapiro also documents the first time the word appeared in print: Caroline Bird’s “On Being Born Female”, published on November 15, 1968 in Vital Speeches of the Day (p. 6). In using the phrase Bird also expanded it; both explicitly connecting it to the act of judging a person based on their sex and highlighting hierarchical imbalance by talking about how sexism has helped to keep power in the hands of those who already have it:

There is recognition abroad that we are in many ways a sexist country. Sexism is judging people by their sex when sex doesn’t matter.

Sexism is intended to rhyme with racism. Both have used to keep the powers that be in power. Women are sexists as often as men.

Women who get good jobs do it by outsexing the sexism. They persuade the boss that a woman’s intuition is needed. Or that women pay more attention to detail. They know isn’t so, but they use the sexist arguments to get around prejudice.

It is sexist to ask: Could we ever have a woman president? In India they don’t ask because they have a woman chief executive. The question is like “Would you want your daughter to marry a Negro?” Now that your daughter might do it, you don’t ask.

It is sexist to ask “What can women do to end violence in America?” Women aren’t any better than men, thank God, and it is sexist to demand that they ennoble the entire population.

Sexism made sense when the only way a woman could make a living was to become a wife, and being a wife subjected her to the risk of pregnancy all her childbearing years. But it makes no sense when a woman has control of pregnancy.

[Bird (1968) (p. 90)]

Sheldon Vanauken’s “Freedom for Movement Girls – Now”

In December 1986, the pamphlet “Freedom for Movement Girls – Now” was written by Sheldon Vanauken. In it, he talks about “the sexist myth”:

A myth. A myth like the racist myths we’re all too familiar with, designed to explain and perpetuate the superiority of one race and the inferiority of another. But the sexist myth is the greatest and most pervasive myth the world has ever told itself- at once explaining, condoning, and perpetuating male superiority and female inferiority, meanwhile denying -craftiest touch of all! – that to be secondary in everything is at all inferior.

[Vanauken (1968)]

The terms “sexist” and “sexism” appear several times throughout the rest of the article without any citation to Bird or Leet, although the oversight does not appear to be intentional. Because of this, however, the erroneous belief that Vanauken was the originator of the term was picked up by several feminist groups at the time, thus leading to the common misconception that he was the one coined the terms (Shapiro, p. 7).

Conclusion

Leet, Bird, and Vanauken all made an important contribution to the popularization of the term “sexism”. Because of their efforts, and that of the women’s groups who picked up the term and ran with it, sexism has become a household term that everyone understands on some level. They should be remembered and honored for their roles in shaping modern feminism.

Recommended Reading:

• Fred R. Shapiro (American Speech, Vol. 60, No. 1 [Spring 1985]): Historical Notes on the Vocabulary of the Women’s Movement, pp. 3-16.
• Lorraine Code (Cornell University Press, 1991): What Can She Know?: Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge (pp. 64-65 in particular)
• Sheldon Vanauken (Special Collections Library, Duke University): Freedom for Movement Girls – Now
• Caroline Bird (Vital Speeches of the Day, November 15 1968): “On Being Born Female”, pp. 88-91.

Feminism Friday: Open Thread on gender dominance issues in sexuality, slurs and raunch culture

Where do you point a male feminist ally (whose alliance up until now has been based on largely unexamined egalitarian impulses, but who hasn’t read any theory) to find good introductory analysis of gendered dominance in sexual behaviours, and how attitudes towards and about sexual behaviours play back into gender relations more widely?

Some of his questions:

• Do languages other than English use slurs based on domination by penetration to designate others as inferior or designate events as problems e.g. “we’re so screwed”?
  (I believe the answer is yes, but languages aren’t my forte.)
• If other languages use such slurs, does that mean that the penetration=domination paradigm is not just cultural?
  (I warned him against the essentialist fallacy here, in that acculturation is not just ethnically specific, and shared cross-cultural behaviours don’t necessarily mean an underlying biological explanation.)
• Why is popular culture emphasing acquiescence to brutal domination in sexual encounters as being somehow more satisfying than consensual non-brutal egalitarian sexual behaviours?
  (I said “more satisfying for who?” and pointed him towards Faludi’s Backlash.)
• If the penetration=domination is such a monolithic worldwide point of view, how can subverting that paradigm in favour of egalitarian sexuality be done?

There’s an awful lot to unpack in those questions, which is why I’m a bit stumped.

As a start, I’m pretty happy with Backlash as an overview of much background that will be required before he can fully examine the issues he has raised. He’s old enough to be moderately familiar with a lot of Second-Wave personalities and broad concepts from a pop culture point of view, but hasn’t delved more deeply.

What else other than Backlash?