Video

Language It’s a Virus

Hello, I'm calling this Language, It’s a Virus, which is a line from Laurie Anderson, the great Laurie Anderson. “Girls or women?” In the late 1980s I was presenting sessions in a junior high here in Madison. There was an educator speaking before me, she was from the Rape Crisis Center. I’ve had a complex relationship with RCC but I really respect them. I was sitting in the back of the room quietly waiting my turn. She referred to “middle school women.” From context I understood what she meant, but I had never heard this usage before and I didn’t make noises or anything aloud, but inside I was really kind of outraged by that language. And some of the girls sitting around me seemed really confused. They were whispering back and forth to each other. And she said it again, “middle school women,” a second and a third time. And it seemed like every girl in the room was like, “What? Who’s she talking to about?” One of the girls sitting right in front of me turned to me and said, “Does she mean the teachers?” And I said, “No, she meant you girls.” And the girl immediately whispered my explanation to the girls sitting near her. And all of them looked at me with looks of complete befuddlement in their faces.

I mean, sure, if a speaker referred to “men and girls” meaning junior high school boys and girls, that would be problematic. No question. But calling 11 to 13 year old girls women, I think, is wrong. I’m sure the intent of most progressives and feminists and good people, my peeps, is not to push girls into being adult women and therefore vulnerable in a different way than they are already as girls. But I think calling them women is kind of an unexamined, inadvertently problematic thing. And I just will not do that. I’m sure you’re aware of that recent anti-abortion zealot, the woman who said about a 10 year old girl who had been impregnated in Ohio and had to go to Indiana {for an abortion}. She was impregnated when assaulted by her mother’s boyfriend at age 9, and there she was pregnant at 10, and the woman, the zealot, said a woman’s body is made to carry a baby. So this was a defense and a resistance to helping the girl get an abortion.

This notion that a woman’s body is made to carry a baby. This is, of course, untrue. At 10 years old, a girl is not a woman, and she is not able to safely carry a fetus to term. Pregnancy and birth are hard enough on the bodies and spirits of adult women. A girl’s body is not ready to carry a fetus, and she’s emphatically not a woman. That is why I use girls and women instead of just saying women. It’s also why I use the term female to mean girls and women. And I understand that some women feel that the term female is problematic. I will take responsibility in this for my usage and everything else I put on TikTok. We may have to disagree here.

And then I was, I have a new word, but I was in a three hour prevention session with juvenile offenders. They were allowed to take a break halfway through and play some music, their music as they drank some juice or whatever, and I sat and listened with them and they kept glancing at me and asking, should we turn this off? And I said, why? Well, it’s kind of nasty about women. And I said, hmm, okay, I’m fascinated to hear it and I said well we you know I’m not gonna hate you let’s talk about that when we go back into the session. So I said, you know about two-thirds of the kids were African-American and in the same way that I don’t want a mansplain I don’t want to blacksplain so I didn’t tell them what they should think. I said I have some real questions about the repetitive use of the N-word.

They didn’t have this word, but they kind of suggested that it was a cultural issue, and therefore it was okay. I said, well, they asked why did I think it was problematic, and I asked them if they thought the heavy use of the N-word revealed any internalized self-hate, which I believe it does, but again I’m not telling them. And I said, “Tell me, tell me.” And the other issue, and they had some nuanced stuff. I mean, these were kids, but they were intelligent consumers of culture. I said, The other issue for me, and not examining the N-word, is that we don’t examine the frequently associated word, the B-word we might say, bitch. And I said, Because I hear a lot a bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch. And that’s actually the boys were hearing it in their songs and that’s where they turned to me and said, Should we turn this off? And you know, I want them to look at what they’re consuming. I want them to look at the meta messages because if they hear 10,000 usages of bitch and 50 of woman, it predisposes them to kind of automatically see women as bitches.

Men Stopping Rape very briefly had for about a year, year and a half, had an office and we got junk mail of course. So one of the pieces was directed to Men Stopping Rap. The computer dropped the E. We looked at it and we laughed internally and then we said maybe we start with heavy metal and other predominantly white musical forms before we go after rap. I mean all language is complex. There’s nuance and there’s levels and there’s, you know, my mother at 85 referred to going out to lunch with some of her woman friends. She called them the girls. Was I gonna scold her? Of course not.

Similarly, when women call other girls or girls or women call other girls are women bitch, you know, I don’t, that’s not my work to tell them what they’re “doing wrong.” For many years I’ve been a fan of the performer whose stage name was Bitch. I subscribed for years to the wonderful and now lamented late magazine Bitch. Women have a complicated relationship with bitch. For some the usage is ironic or sarcastic or even celebratory, but men using bitch, is completely indefensible, I believe. I find it deeply problematic when males from hate crime targeted groups feel that they have an open pass to use the only negative epithet bitch. I’ve never heard black men use the term bitch in a celebratory manner. It’s not said respectfully as a way to express the awe that they feel in one woman or women. It is a put-down.

For decades I’ve asked some gay men about their use of the term bitch. They admit that it’s never positive. Over the years, the vast majority of misogyny I’ve encountered and confronted came from presumably heterosexual males but there is a strain of gay misogyny. I believe this sprang from how we raise all boys. I’ve spoken about the pressure on all boys to disprove the multiple daily allegations of the twin terrors female and gay. I believe that some males instead of attempting to disprove the allegations of gay and female, ramp up the misogyny using the word bitch, I don’t think gay men appropriating this word is liberating for anyone.

And there’s a quote about bitch from the CD Disposable Heroes of Hypopacy was the group featuring Michael Franti, the Great Michael Franti and the song was famous in Dandy, like Amos and Andy.

The fourth chorus verse is,

so we join the flavor of the month club,

we swallow the flavor of the month,

while holding our crotch was the flavor of the month,

bitch this, bitch that was the flavor of the month,

being a thug was the flavor of the month,

Then no to drugs was the flavor of the month.

Kangol was the flavor of the month.

Rope gold was the flavor of the month.

Adidas shoes was the flavor of the month.

And bashing Jews was the flavor of the month.

Gentrification was the flavor of the month.

Isolation was the flavor of the month.

My pocket’s so empty, I can feel my testicles, because I spent all my money on some plastic Africa necklaces. And I still don’t know what the colors mean-- red, black, and green.

I think we can all do a lot better than the hate language of the oppressors instead of replicating it. Thank you.