What constitutes Misogyny?

[Saurian Tail]

Much of the conversation here in this thread has conflated two essentially different forms of communication. The difference between the written word and the spoken word is paramount.

Excellent point Charlie ...

Written vs Spoken
Verbal vs Nonverbal
Conscious vs Unconscious

In human interaction, the least precise of the pairs carries more information ... and more accurate information.

-ST

[Project Willow]

Hava, we've been talking to each other for what, 5 years now, I both like and respect you.

That's a bit of a mnipulative de-contexting.

Please, I was sincerely asking for clarification, ..had I upset you, etc. Thanks for letting me know.

You then implied that using the Bitch word, in general (without at this case even directing it at a known-specific person) is somehow offensive on my behalf.

Well, yes, using the word bitch, here, in this country anyway, is never neutral. Would you have me lie about that? However, my impulse was not to judge you, but be protective, and use a bit of humor to hopefully diffuse possible over-reactions from other posters. I imagined a whole bunch of folks chiming in against you at that point, and sought to interrupt that potentiality.

In the context of this board, which had seen actual verbal and non verbal assaults, I found your comment actually derogatory towards me, for using a really strong word in a very classy, quiet environment. Being a foreigner, and English being my second language, I felt "put in the corner".

Again, that was not my intent, but I am sorry you felt that way.

Now I see you are doing that again, by calling on other people to say whether they think that calling THEM (or You) a bitch would be offensive. I find this to be a demonstration of same.

No. If you'll look at the top of my post about the Bitch Manifesto it says: "For Norton". He used the word bitch in this thread http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?p=391249#p391249, and I was responding directly to him. It had nothing to do with you. This is a thread about misogyny. Bitch and other derogatory terms that are applied to women are almost a necessary component of any discussion of misogyny or any other kind of oppression. In fact, I'd like to know if the word is used, or something comparable to it, and how in Israel. I was hoping you would contribute that information.

[norton ash]

Lemmy Kilminster
For a woman to be truly interesting, she's got to be something of a bitch, doesn't she?

Willow, I was quoting one of the few progressive gentlemen of heavy metal music. I like the phrase for its source, its ambiguity, its folk wisdom, and the nod toward the kind of women Lemmy and I like. I don't think it's misogynist, but feel free to argue.

I think that for a man to be truly interesting, he's got to be something of a dick, though, doesn't he?

I'll quit my bitching now.

[Project Willow]

Willow, I was quoting one of the few progressive gentlemen of heavy metal music. I like the phrase for its source, its ambiguity, its folk wisdom, and the nod toward the kind of women Lemmy and I like. I don't think it's misogynist, but feel free to argue.

It was obvious that was your view, and I appreciated it. However, the word bitch is still loaded with far too much other baggage, for me anyway. That's why I posted the manifesto.

I think that for a man to be truly interesting, he's got to be something of a dick, though, doesn't he?

No, but that makes me feel better about some of my ex's.

[norton ash]

I think we're cool. It's a word I really am trying to use less, although I find it hard to stop using it as a verb for 'complain'. Whine or whinge is weaker, complain sounds too official, vituperate... meh. 'Pissing and moaning' maybe.

If I tell someone to stop bitching or even use the term 'bitching' it's pretty much always a man or myself. As in 'Sorry I was bitchy.'

It was a forbidden word growing up. I recall my kid sister telling my mom that I called her a 'lady dog.' So lady-dog became the joke insult at home.

Anyway, I will work to get it out of my vocabulary, because you're right-- it's loaded, it's sexist, and we don't need it.

Look forward to pissing and moaning here real soon!

[WakeUpAndLive]

While were at it I find a whole slew of colloquialisms *(after reading wiki, maybe slang or dialects would be a better term?)* used in todays general conversation that it further entrenches my thought that spoken and written word in their current form are detrimental. I know its not directly related to misogyny, but....

Terms like gay once use to mean happy, then it became a term for a certain type of male, now I myself (and have heard many other) use the term to describe when a situation didn't pan out the way they hoped or something wasn't working right. Bitch once meant female dog, then became a derogatory word towards women, and finally ended up as a term to describe "pissing and moaning" or female traits in a male. There are probably many more examples which I cannot think of right now, but this butchery and misuse of words is not helpful to societal growth.

*edit*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colloquialism

[23]

Most people I know will come up with the same answers to these two questions.

a) When you listen to someone speak, whose voice do you hear?

The speaker's.

b) And when you read someone's written words, whose voice do you hear?

Mine (the reader's).

If that is true, and you hear your own voice when reading someone else's words, then are the inflections yours as well?

[Nordic]

Men call men "bitches". As in "hey, today you're my bitch".

It's usually like that, "my bitch".

Oops, and I said I'd quit posting in this thread.

Just sharing info, no point other than that intended!

Totally, Nordic.

Do you find that guys use the term 'bitch' in this manner in an ironic/'endearing' way as some women do, or is it always a put-down? Like on that show 'It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia', where the one guy walks in and says, 'Hey, bitches!' to his buddies, one of whom is a woman...or is even that a sort of back-handed put-down disguised as chumminess?

It's a backhanded put down, not disguised as chumminess, but indistinguishable from chumminess, since a hell of a lot of men show affection for each other by constantly insulting each other.

[hava1]

Oh, I am now working on setting boundaries to "i am more feminist than you" put=me-downs.
I've had a rude awakening, in my habitat from ...lets say one very active feminist-blogger-activist who actually wreaked havoc in the field, by first protecting women from mysogenic attacks (by the usual males here, who are more macho than yours), but she turned out to have done the usual "queen of the classroom" drill, and I was examining where I fell for that. One opening was my own craving/weakness in looking for "protection", which is actually a very feminine pitfall. In the past we called men for help, now some women step into that nieche (or habituation). I don't need protection, thanks anyway.

As for bitch in ISrael, the word is Kalba (the feminine form of dog), means only an evil woman, or underhanded, no sexual subtext at all. An equivalent - is "dog" (kelev) for a man or "son of a dog/bitch". (From my scant knowledge in arabic - a common curse for someone who harmed you, was evil, would be "kalb" , dog). Since the word is used for both men and women, it has no gender charge.

I have no idea why in english it has become female only, an derogatory for women.

Hava, we've been talking to each other for what, 5 years now, I both like and respect you.

That's a bit of a mnipulative de-contexting.

Please, I was sincerely asking for clarification, ..had I upset you, etc. Thanks for letting me know.

You then implied that using the Bitch word, in general (without at this case even directing it at a known-specific person) is somehow offensive on my behalf.

Well, yes, using the word bitch, here, in this country anyway, is never neutral. Would you have me lie about that? However, my impulse was not to judge you, but be protective, and use a bit of humor to hopefully diffuse possible over-reactions from other posters. I imagined a whole bunch of folks chiming in against you at that point, and sought to interrupt that potentiality.

In the context of this board, which had seen actual verbal and non verbal assaults, I found your comment actually derogatory towards me, for using a really strong word in a very classy, quiet environment. Being a foreigner, and English being my second language, I felt "put in the corner".

Again, that was not my intent, but I am sorry you felt that way.

Now I see you are doing that again, by calling on other people to say whether they think that calling THEM (or You) a bitch would be offensive. I find this to be a demonstration of same.

No. If you'll look at the top of my post about the Bitch Manifesto it says: "For Norton". He used the word bitch in this thread http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?p=391249#p391249, and I was responding directly to him. It had nothing to do with you. This is a thread about misogyny. Bitch and other derogatory terms that are applied to women are almost a necessary component of any discussion of misogyny or any other kind of oppression. In fact, I'd like to know if the word is used, or something comparable to it, and how in Israel. I was hoping you would contribute that information.

[wintler2]

.. There are probably many more examples which I cannot think of right now, but this butchery and misuse of words is not helpful to societal growth.

True, but difficult to grapple with. You wanna get labelled 'Politically correct'? The venom put out by reactionary types on this issue is IMHO telling, revealing the hate that underlies 'just' words, but theres no denying that PC has become an effective attack meme. It occurs to me that there are parrallels with Conspiracy Theorist - both are used to shut down the consideration of inconvenient truths, prevent challenges to the status quo.

[Cedars of Overburden]

PC is often used as a stick with which to beat the oppressed themselves. If you are old or ignorant, someone who easily and innocently could have never heard that one simply does not say "illegal alien," for example, but "undocumented worker" instead, then the PC can easily accuse the speaker of 17 kinds of evil demented xenophobia. This kind of PC is a set of usage rules just like "good English" or "standard business English" which the privileged have used as a stick with which to beat the oppressed since God was a pup. Some people object to PC because they want the freedom to insult at will. Others object because they're being beaten over the head by the college educated who want a way to control others.

I myself am so old and out of it that Obama had been campaigning for a few months before I realized that others considered it rude and racist for me to call him a mulatto and that I needed to get the term mixed race firmly into my mind and tongue if I hoped to get anyone to listen to my pleas to stop loving his skin and his rhetoric and start studying his record. A non-PC but related thing --yesterday I realized that I was being mocked behind my back because I automatically put two spaces after a period and spell out numbers under 10. (Hey, 10 years of industrial typing, two years of AP style, and a lifetime of actual typewriter typing for free lance stuff don't go away because some kid thinks it's quaint.)

I'd actually never thought about it from the standpoint of someone for whom English is a second language. Hava, I've added such people to my list of innocent people who regularly get jumped by the PC police.

That being said, about 99 percent of the time I find bitch to be a fighting word, but I understand if I hear a younger woman use it in a way I can tell she intends it to be empowering. Bitch is also a lazy word. You could say "ornery" (to use one of Stephen's favorites) instead of bitch. (But then you'd be a bitch for stealing a male quality from men. ) You could say "hateful." You could say "assertive." Ornery, hateful, and asertive are three very different things but bitch might be said instead of all three and dozens of other more exact and meaningful words instead. It is more kind and useful to me as a woman to know that yesterday I was ornery (and meant to be) but today I'm hateful (and need and want to get over it).

[hava1]

PC is often used as a stick with which to beat the oppressed themselves. .

totally.

In the cyber-feminist space, I have seen that the discussions of miniscule nuances of language can be a spit in the face to women who at the same time are experiencing life threatening abuse, domestic violence, poverty and rape, daily. I cant help feeling that the expanded "space" created for the nuances of the FEW, is there at the direct expense of suppressing large scale oppression, nearby. its psycho=social colonialism.

Having said that, its always good to have the pioneer forces doing their thing, but the balance here is of substance, coz feminism is also supposed to be bringing in different style of "progress", from the male dominated one (erecting fancy pyramides over multitude of dead slaves and calling it the pinnacle of civilization).

--
The english hadicap here led me to google some on ESL, and find a wealth of material, new to me, on the globalization of English, the creation of "international english" dialect, and the question of "Englishes", namely, whether we are looking at a phenomenon of "english take over" by gradually "Settling" English globally , as in seeding it via commerce, administration and internet, and with the future/current creation of local variants. Interesting subject...

as for me, the decline of literacy in the USA (with all the recently acknowledged "learning disabilities") make me pass as dyslectic native speaker sometimes )

[Kate]

Ornery, hateful, and asertive are three very different things but bitch might be said instead of all three and dozens of other more exact and meaningful words instead. It is more kind and useful to me as a woman to know that yesterday I was ornery (and meant to be) but today I'm hateful (and need and want to get over it).

Cedars, that is such a beautiful insight, I actually felt like bolding the whole darned thing. Thank you for that. And yet I won't bold the whole thing. Why not? Because of consideration for the reader, that's why not. When everything is in bold print, it's the same as when NOTHING is in bold print.

And here is the right place to tell you that I type like you do, and always WILL type the way you do. And the reason why has nothing to do with "quaintness," which I am often inclined to translate as "the complaint of the lazy" (because hitting that space bar twice is so much extra effort, ya know). When sentences are all scrunched up together, it's much more difficult for the reader to follow the separateness of individual thoughts linked together in a paragraph.

And research has shown the truth of common sense lying behind such fundamental rules as making a double-space between the end of one sentence and the beginning of another: we do NOT, in fact, read one single word at a time. The eyes and the brain don't work that way, at least not efficiently. Instead, we take in a larger PICTURE, one which in a glance reveals the greater structure formed by the words. [Because of an auto-immune disorder which is making my eyesight worse, I've come to understand and appreciate how much my brain recognizes the very SHAPE of both individual words and the larger "architecture" of sentences and paragraphs.]

On another blog, I saw a polite request from multiple readers that the writer not "scrunch" together sentences, and to please refrain from typing EVERYTHING in lower case. The response from the writer was ferocious; how DARE such authoritarians refuse to appreciate the writer's freedom to type in new, iconoclastic, and creative forms!!! Of course, all the writer was doing was making the text virtually UNREADABLE, in the sense of "harder to follow," requiring so much more intense concentration from the reader. And that's just rude to one's readers, IMHO.

Here I apologize to Canadian Watcher for going off-topic yet again; nonetheless, basic consideration for others, imagining the needs of others, putting oneself in the metaphorical shoes of the "other" -- in other words, EMPATHY is such a huge factor in whether or not misogyny will even be SPOTTED by both men AND women in their social interactions with both same- and other-gendered persons, let alone transformed by new awareness into more conscious kindness for all.

[Canadian_watcher]

Great points about Politically Correct language. I hadn't thought of it being used as a weapon to cheaply win or at least conveniently derail an argument before. I personally like and appreciate that we say things like "chairperson" instead of 'chairman' and never thought of that as PC, rather I thought of it as inclusive.

I can't tell you how many times I've heard those gender-neutral words mocked, however, and I'm sure that forms a part of why younger women shrink from feminism these days. It is pretty hard to justify those little changes without sounding overly delicate and then getting a few eye-rolls. Lets say it comes up in a staff meeting or something - it seems there's always someone who feels free to label the inclusive word as stupid ... and each woman in the room must choose between silence/agreement or arguing that the word changes serve a purpose. Should she choose the latter she will forever afterward being looked at as "the feminist" and take the heat for that in subtle ways.

Cedars - fwiw I plan to keep putting two spaces after periods and spelling out numbers under ten. Or would that be: '...numbers under 10?' Anyway, I like those habits.

EDIT: cross posted with you Kate. As you can see we were thinking along the same lines so no need to worry about going off topic. It's interrelated, as you say.

[wintler2]

CW, i guess in your staff room example one could 'push' for the acceptance of PC language (perhaps even 'cheaply win').. or one could use an individuals resistance to it as indicative of failure to grasp the premises, and hence need to restate/re-sell their importance. The latter is the more 'boring' long way round, so probably the more likely to succeed in the long run.. ?