Back on my Soap Box - Words Matter

Elana Centor — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 07:55:06 -0600

The Santa Story caught my eye as well. I wrote about it on FunnyBusiness. The issue isn't the Ho Ho Ho and that some people may hear Santa's friendly holiday chant and think of a Heidi Fleiss. The issue is the name-calling that we allow and participate in when it comes to women.
From my post:

But here's an idea. Instead of making Santa change his chant which is just so Santa,how about treating "Ho," as in Don Imus Ho ,as an unacceptable term. The problem isn't Santa saying Ho Ho Ho. The problem is that our culture allows women to be called "Hos" and there isn't much of an outcry to say, "That is not acceptable."

You're not going to hear Don Imus saying that term on air again even though it was the description he used in front of HO that sealed his fate. Would he have lost his job (temporarily) if he had said Big Butted Hos? Would the advertisers and NBC Universal had outrageous indignation at calling women Big Butted Hos. I doubt it.

We've successfully deleted many defamatory terms from our everyday language and we should do it with Ho. If it is not acceptable to call a person of African descent the "N" word, and the"P" word for folks of Polish Descent is no longer spoken, nor the "S" word for people of Hispanic descent or the "K" word for Jewish people, then certainly we are capable of self -banning HO as a description for women.

But you have to be offended first. So far, the jury is out on that one. This week a Republican woman called Hillary Clinton a bitch and the audience laughed. Until we squirm when a United States Senator and a front runner in the polls to become the democratic candidate for President is called a Bitch, it will be a while before we, as a society, get around to stop calling women Hos.

elana
Blogher Contributing Editor,Business&CareersFunnyBusiness

Words

A Elliot — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 22:28:00 -0600

I love how whenever someone is made at a feminist, all feminists are lumped together. Clearly we must all be the same and apparently look the same too.

I do think that being asked not to say "ho, ho, ho" is ridiculous. Actually I found the comment on CUSS, albeit randomly in the comment section to another one of your posts not on this topic, to be very interesting. I wish that the poster had posted it here. My first thought when reading this post was instead of trying to change Santa's language, maybe we ought to change our own language and that of our kids.
Alex Elliot, Formula Fed and Flexible Parenting/a>

"Slut, slut, slut! Merry Xmas!:" On Feminism and Language

Suzanne Reisman — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 13:00:00 -0600

Sometimes I suspect news stories must be generated by anti-feminist forces to further foment resentment against feminist causes and arguments, because who on earth would otherwise be so ridiculous? A prime example of one of these suspicious events took place last week in Sydney, Australia. According to Agence France-Presse (AFP), prospective Santa Clauses have been warned not to say, "Ho ho ho," as some women may deem it offensive:

One disgruntled Santa told the newspaper a recruitment firm warned him not to use "ho ho ho" because it could frighten children and was too close to "ho", a US slang term for prostitute.

"Gimme a break," said Julie Gale, who runs the campaign against sexualising children called Kids Free 2B Kids.

Yeah. I'm with Ms. Gale. Certainly I have heard immature people giggle and make jokes when they hear, "Ho ho ho," but no one actually thinks that Santa is trolling for booty. The effect of this type of stupidity is exactly what backlash zealots want: feminists are bad people who take the fun out of everything. Even women who support feminism, like blogger Ingrid Caitlin are taking the bait and writing that feminists need to lighten up:

I have nothing against feminism. In fact, I think feminists have made great progress in narrowing the gap in inequality between men and women where voting, the home, and the workplace are concerned. But you have to draw the line somewhere, and when feminist women start complaining that something that has been so natural for so many years is offensive, I’m going to get pissed.

Because I’m a woman too, and when I hear “ho, ho, ho” being said by Santa Clause, I immediately start thinking of the very expensive Christmas list that I’ll be drafting to send to my parents. I’m not automatically assuming that Santa thinks I’m a skank. Well, he might, but that’s irrelevant. When I heard the story of Sydney’s new rule, I immediately pictured the feminist stereotype: a butch woman with unshaved … well, anything, an angry look on her face, and a sawn-off penis in her hand. In other words, a man-hater. For as many strides as conservative feminism has made, radical feminists and their automatic assumption that men are evil and that certain commonly-used terms and expressions disrespect women, labeling them as a sub-human or a man’s property, overshadow any of the good things that feminism has brought to society.

While I don't know whose nutty idea it was to ban "ho, ho, ho," I am willing to bet it was not a "butch woman with unshaved… anything, an angry look on her face, and a sawn-off penis in her hand" (other than the sawn-off penis in hand, this woman just described me pretty well!), which makes me laugh because what else can I do but cry that people buy into this ridiculous bullshit about who feminists are. Not only is it effective in scaring away women from claiming to be feminists (of course, Ingrid goes on to say that although she supports equality, she's no feminist! The horror of such an association!), but stupid policies also divert attention from real issues.

I think that gendered language is actually an important issue. When everything in the world is described in terms of maleness, it affects how we think about things and picture possibilities. For example, the word "he" in English doesn't necessarily mean a male; according to Merriam Webster dictionary, it also is "used in a generic sense or when the sex of the person is unspecified." That's nice in theory, but when I hear "he," I think of a male. This "generic" term thus completely leaves out women. In Spanish, as long as a male is present in a group of people – no matter how many women are also gathered – the group is referred to with the male pronoun. Women are left in the dust.

Somanyfuns conducted a nice experiment on her blog, writing a paragraph using a typical language and then rewriting it using female-only terms. Somanyfuns pointed out that gender-neutral (like using "he" to describe a person) is not the same thing as gender-inclusive. At the end of her post, she asks:

Did reading the female-specific language feel weird to you? Did you get used to it by the end of the response? When reading, did you think of women only, or of both men and women? Do you think the response would have had a different meaning to you if written in gender-neutral language, or male-specific language?

So who is leading the way toward gender inclusive language? In Issue #37, Bitch Magazine ran an article, "Zie, Hirself, & Per: Who the hell uses gender-neutral pronouns?" This is exactly what we should expect from a fine feminist publication called Bitch. Slightly less expected (to me, anyway) is that the main sources of blogging on gender inclusive language are seminarians. As Wendy writes at the group blog The Seminarians Sojourn: Words:

I started to model using gender inclusive language about God. Now, more and more, I am insisting upon it from my colleagues as I see that perhaps the rest of the world isn't quite as rosy as I had believed it was. I am beginning to see that there are still places in our society where people don't realize that women and men are ontologically equal in the eyes of God, not to mention equal in society.

What had really changed in me was my belief about the power of words. I believe that words can shape the way we think, can affect us subtly in ways that we are not even aware, can seep into our thought patterns and the way our brain shapes its perceptions of the world around us. So it became very important for me to use gender inclusive language everywhere.

Back to the original problem with language and feminism. By encouraging anti-feminists to get their man-thongs (aka jock straps) in a bunch by promoting senseless bans on words or phrases like, "ho ho ho," attention from far more serious gender language issues is cast aside. With tomorrow's official kick off of the commercial holiday season, I'm casting my lot with the seminarians. Ho ho ho!

Suzanne also uses puns and foul language at Campaign for Unshaved Snatch (CUSS) & Other Rants

BlogHer - "Slut, slut, slut! Merry Xmas!:" On Feminism and Language - Comments

Back on my Soap Box - Words Matter

Words

"Slut, slut, slut! Merry Xmas!:" On Feminism and Language