Just Another Talking Cunt

Belledame's post about language and dehumanisation and ... stuff has finally shaken me loose of the dithering about whether or not I wanted to post this here.

This is the text of a post I did not make to usenet earlier today, because I knew that whatever response it got would be entirely too depressing, and I'd rather be working on my wedding liturgy than flail at people who refuse to wrap their heads around things.

The context is whether insulting people with the word "twat" is misogynistic, by the way. And whether pointing out such use of language, even if accurate, is something worth concerning oneself about. It is perhaps unsurprising that it's the same usenet group as this one. I suspect, after nine and a half years there, it's coming up on time for me to give up and find some other writers' kibbutzing group.



Actually, this is one of those things that's fairly fundamental, from the right perspective.

I grew up in a culture in which words with a female gendering association were used as significant insults to imply that people were subhuman. (Likewise, I grew up in a culture in which words referring to disabilities were used to imply that people were subhuman, and I live *now* in a culture in which words referring to sexual orientation are used to imply that people are subhuman.)

The flavor of the discourse is such that I am *constantly* reminded of my second-class status in many contexts. One newsgroup I read is only manageable because I killfile for such sexist comments on the first offense. The insult discourse is, to me, *the same thing* as the treatment of traditionally female-gendered labor as less important and less worthy of remuneration than traditionally male-gendered labor, to pick a for-example. Womanness is less worthy than maleness; thus, womanness is an insult and woman-work doesn't pay well.

All of these are rooted in the notion that femaleness is less valuable than maleness, intrinsically a marked case, something of low status and low worth. And in a "you've got to be carefully taught" kind of way, people who can inanely parrot language without thinking that reinforces that notion create, reinforce, and support a systematic setup in which not only is femaleness something shameful - and thus something that women are obligated to feel bad about - but one in which I could, say, get excellent general medical coverage to address my prostate problems but coverage of my pregnancy is a special interest costing more.

I don't have the luxury of being able to treat it as a separate, minor issue; it may be tiny, but if it is tiny it is only so because in this context we are looking at something that's only three iterations of the fractal pattern. It's not a different fractal from the same pattern at a thousand iterations, and, being a fractal, it looks *exactly the same*.


I live in a world where my fundamental worthlessness is taken as a given, and where that message constantly reinforced by sexist-rooted invective among many, many other things.

Building a world where I am a valuable human being requires challenging the subtext of an entire culture. Sometimes I'm too tired to fight the same damn battles again and again, because it never ends; there's always someone who thinks that having my _existence_ treated as sufficient background to formulate an insult is not a real problem worth being concerned about.

I don't know; I kind of value my existence. Having it framed as degrading by default gets wearing.

No, womanness being used as an insult is not the biggest problem in the universe, but a world in which womanness was not immediately siezed upon as one of those high-calibre heavy hitters would necessarily be a profoundly different one than this one.