I’ve been meaning to write this post for at least four years, if not more.
Of course, there is always something else that requires my attention… Blah, blah blah (insert image of Dracula here). Plus I’ve had nothing but problems and bad luck when it comes to Internet access since I moved to Windsor, which doesn’t help at all.
But! Today’s the day, I guess.
The subject is both a musing and a pet peeve of mine. HUGE (yes, all caps, bold and italics. It is that bad) pet peeve: the use of women-pertaining words as insults.
Early on in my journey of unlearning all the sexist crap imbued in me by the patriarchal society I grew in, I realized that most insult words in all the languages I know (can’t speak for the ones I don’t know) have to do with woman related stuff.
How do you insult a woman? You call her a whore, a bitch, a slut.
How do you insult a man? Do you call him a man-whore, a dog or slut too? Of course not. You use a female body part -pussy, cunt, twat (the outstanding exception being dick or any dick-related word). But if you really want to drive the point, then you call him a son of a bitch. A motherfucker. Never a fatherfucker, no. Oh no. The worse thing you can call a man in English is a motherfucker (the absolute worst thing you can call a man in Spanish is hijo de puta which means son of a whore). Have you ever stop to think why this is?
Let’s go back to the first kind of insults for a moment. Twat. Cunt. Douchebag (I particularly bloody despise this one). For millennia, women have been told their vaginas are dirty, smelly, disgusting. In the last century they were even told they should wash their vaginas to try and keep them reasonably clean. So they invented those douche contraptions (douche meaning something of a shower), composed of a bag to hold the rinsing solution and a dildo-looking hand shower that is to be inserted in the vagina in a order to wash it, connected to the bag by a small hose. That is what people use as an insult. Incidentally, it find it ironic that people -in their ignorance- use the bag part as the insult proper and not the dildo-looking part. Hilarious. Only that it is not.
Now, I ask: Why would anyone in their right minds use a female body part (or a device used for -arguably- feminine hygiene) to insult someone else?
I’ll tell you why. Because we women are though lowly, unclean, debased, unworthy. Especially those parts of us involved in reproduction. Or *gasp* sexuality/pleasure. Thus it follows that the best way to insult anyone is to compare them to a filthy woman’s part. Capisce?
Furthermore, a woman who dares to enjoy her sexuality is a whore, a slut. Something undesirable. So much, it can be successfully used as an insult. It is bad enough for a woman to be called a whore* . But when you tell a man his mother is one… oh, boy; all hell breaks loose. Do not dare question the purity of his mother. If men could, they would all be borne by a virgin.
Think about it. Sleep on it.
And most importantly please, I beg of you, stop using swear/insult words that perpetuate patriarchal cultures.
Footnotes
* Bitch being initially the same thing, as bitches -females dogs- were the ultimate representation of a female that sleeps around. That however has somewhat changed and nowadays bitch is understood more as a bossy, unreasonable or downright malevolent woman; although “Son of a bitch” persists as an insult for a man.
Summer Solstice Musings 