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December 03, 2006

Sexual metaphors and profanity

Neil the Ethical Werewolf has an excellent post about the connotations of sexual obscenities. I can relate to Neil's tendency to analyze foul language.

Swearing is a fascinating empirical and philosophical topic. Why is it that people reflexively scream taboo words in non-sensical contexts when they're angry, scared, astonished, or otherwise riled up?

One interesting thing about "swear words" is that they're conventionalized. You can't paraphrase expletives, except by substituting a culturally approved euphemism. For example, you can't use "sexual congress" in place of "fuck" in real swearing situations. "Screw you!" will work as a substitute for "Fuck you!", but "Get laid!" just won't get your point across.

Only certain words can be used to telegraph that kind of raw emotion. Kids are very interested in figuring out exactly which words are on the list. Do you remember intense debates on the playground whether some racy word was "a swear" or not?

Pure expletives seem to work independently of the nominal cognitive content of the expression. When someone bangs their thumb with a hammer and yells, "Fuck!", chances are that sexual intercourse is the furthest thing from their mind.

It's surely not coincidental that our culture's forbidden words usually have to do with sex and bodily functions. In Quebec, where the Catholic Church has historically cast a long shadow over daily life, the offensive expressions tend to be blasphemous rather sexual or scatological.

Interestingly, Quebec's atheists and agnostics use these blasphemous epithets with just as much gusto as believers. "Sacre!" still works, even if you aren't Catholic and couldn't care less about the church. English has a few blasphemous expressions, but "damn it" just doesn't pack the punch of "fuck it." "Bloody" and "hell" are hardly even rude anymore. ("Bloody" is a reference to the blood of Christ.)

Gutter insults are a little different from pure expletives. Most taboo names are actually similes. You can insult someone by directly accusing them of being stupid, lazy, inept, sexually unattractive, dishonest, or whatever. Or, you can use a curseword that stands in for the particular set of bad qualities you want to attribute to someone.

If you call someone "a pussy" you're imputing stereotypically feminine faults to them: namely being weak, squeamish, and cowardly. If you call someone "a prick" or a "dickhead" you're delivering a very different insult. By calling someone "a whore" you're attributing characteristics that our society normally associates with prostitutes: either a willingness to debase oneself for money, or sexual promiscuity. As Neil, Amanda, and zuzu observe, that elision only works because it piggybacks on our society's contempt for sex workers and sexually active women in general.

By contrast, there's no difference in the meaning of "Fuck!" vs. "Shit!" as a pure expletive, even though the two words refer to totally different things.

Some abusive taboo words function more as similes than others. "Bastard" used to be tied to the stigma of illegitimacy, but not any more. I remember being puzzled as a child when I found out that "bastard" literally meant someone whose parents weren't married when the were born. "Why would real bastards be more likely to be backstabbing or obstreperous?" I wondered. "Idiot" used to be a direct allusion to mental retardation. Nowadays, most people consider it an interesting bit of trivia that the term was originally a legitimate medical classification for developmental disability. To most people, "idiotic" is just another synonym for stupid.

Maybe taboo words have a life-cycle. They start out as ordinary words for taboo things. For whatever reason, some of them get picked up and conventionalized as expletives and/or terms of personal abuse. As language and norms change, the insulting connotation can remain long after the original taboo has eased.

It's interesting to contrast the status of the word "cunt" in British English vs. North American English. In the UK, the "cunt" seems to be going the way of "fuck" and "shit"--a general-purpose epithet that nobody particularly associates with female genitalia in the context of cursing. "Cunt" has even become a verb, as in "cunt off" and an adjective, as in "The cunting boiler is broken again." Whereas in the US and Canada, you can't use the word "cunt" without triggering associations with female genitals.

If taboo words have life-cycles, that might help explain why there are such vehement disagreements within the progressive community about the appropriateness of certain insults. Swear words reflect traditional values, that is, traditional in the sense of being widely held for a very long time. Our taboo vocabulary is a legacy of our actual taboos and hang ups.

When you use a word like "cunt" to mean a disgusting, immoral, or dissolute person, it's hard to escape the implication that cunts themselves are disgusting.

Notice that "dick," "prick," "dickhead," and "schmuck" are much milder insults than "cunt." What do you think that says about our society's attitudes, past or present, towards the female genitalia? However, you can instantly up the ante for male-genital-based insults if you add an implication of gayness, i.e., "cocksucker."

Most insults are somewhere between a live simile and a dead metaphor. People who speak the same language can disagree about where a particular insult falls on the continuum. At a certain point, "bastard" ceases to be a dig at a person's parentage and becomes the industrial-strength counterpart of "jerk." I don't hesitate to use the word "lame" to describe something inane, but I won't use the word "gimped" to indicate that something's broken. I don't use the word "cunt" as an insult, but I occasionally call wimps "pussies." For some reason, "gimped" and "cunt" just feel too closely tied to values that I reject. I don't have an argument for drawing the line exactly where I do.

Why are progressives, myself included, sometimes tempted to use insults that have sexist connotations? There's the lure of the forbidden, I suppose. There's also the desire to throw out the word you know to be the most offensive, literal denotation be damned. If you think that Michelle Malkin is the most contemptible person in the media, it's tempting to deploy the c-word simply because it's the rudest one-word thing you can call her. Some philosophers would argue that to you "cunt" just means the most despicable kind of person. (A lot of words we now consider to be homonyms started out with the same or similar meanings and drifted apart over the years.)

Most importantly, if you're going to insult someone, it's important that you pick an insult that will actually shock and hurt them. If you're trying to insult someone who's sexist and homophobic, it's probably more effective to call them "a pussy" than "a wimp." Maybe this is also the best reason to stay away from these kinds of words--they force you to play within your opponent's value system. As such, they are the consummate failure of framing.

Calling Michelle Malkin "a cunt" is the equivalent of calling the Republicans "the party of big government"--a terrible rhetorical move whether it's deserved or not. "Big government" is a Republican frame that Democrats have to counter with a better frame of their own. Fighting about who's really the party of big government just helps the Republicans by reinforcing their way of looking at taxes and the state. Likewise, "cunt" and "fag" originated in a conceptual scheme where vulvas are gross and gay people are subhuman. It's very difficult to use those insults without reinforcing the values that made the epithets make sense in the first place. An individual can sever the tie between the word "cunt" and cunt-hatred, but that doesn't mean that word has lost its associations for its audience.

Neil says that he doesn't use words like "cunt" very much because the negative connotation of the word is at odds with the positive associations he has with actual female genitalia. That's more or less how I feel about it. If a metaphor is live for you, and you disagree with what you take to be the underlying value judgment, it's less satisfying to use that phrase as a term of abuse.

[Mandatory context disclaimer: I'm not saying any word should be off-limits. Context is everything. Obviously, the standards are different for using a word in fiction, satire, direct quotation, etc. The appropriateness of the term also depends on who uses it, and for which audience.]

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» Names of Reproductive Organs Used as Insults! from A Blog Around The Clock
Neil's attitude towards vaginas is very positive. Lindsay asserts that swearing is a fascinating philosophical topic. Amanda debunks the old tired counter-arguments. And many, many comments on all three threads will keep you busy for a while. Mind you,... [Read More]

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"You can't paraphrase expletives, except by substituting a culturally approved euphemism. For example, you can't use "sexual congress" in place of "fuck" in real swearing situations. "Screw you!" will work as a substitute for "Fuck you!", but "Get laid!" just won't get your point across."

This is why books like _English as a second f*cking language_ are so important, since, as I sadly know, there's nothing more pathetic than someone cursing poorly in a language he or she doesn't know well and fucking it all to hell.

Why are progressives, myself included, sometimes tempted to use insults that have sexist connotations?

Same reason anyone else is. It's easier.

It takes more effort to notice and forego sexism than it does to just spit out the commonplace-but-sexist insult.

It also takes more effort to insult someone as an equal than just to play the privilege card. I can try to remember to call people assberets, or I can draw on all the work society's already done for me in convincing everyone that women and their genitalia are weak and dirty, and just call 'em cunts. And all that already-done work also means that "cunt" has been loaded up with way more offensiveness than "assberet." The c-bomb does more damage.

The problem is that, if you're a progressive who cares about things like reinforcing sexism, the collateral damage isn't worth it.

I have a sneaking suspicion that this article must be obliquely referring to the recent Firedoglake cunt-whore controversy. I'm a little ambivalent about the whole thing, but not because of the so-called offensive language. Sometimes I wonder if we active participants of the blogosphere become a little to involved in the cyberworld. I mean the whole c-word controversy has been the buzz of the political internets for the past several days, but outside of there who has heard about it and who really cares?

I read Pachuctec's original article that started the firestorm, and personally I thought it was gratuitously pornographic and juvenile. I also consider it a little embarrassing when you consider the caliber of some of the guests they have at their Sunday book salon (Keith Olbermann, Joe Wilson, et al.) If I were a well-respected journalist like Mr. Olbermann I know I wouldn't want to appear at a site that editorializes with such sophisticated phrases as:

...Such a shame to have to answer to us dirty fucking hippies with a list on the back of a napkin. Here, Madam Tauscher: use it to wipe your chin.

The chin-wiping being a reference to post-fellatio cleanup, for those of you not willing to read the entire article. To me, locker-room talk like this is no better than Jeff Goldstein's dick-slapping taunts. I freely admit I'm no angel, but then I don't have a major blog. (Or a minor one, for that mastter).

Now that I've stated my opinion on that I'll address the larger issue: Is it THAT important, all things in the world of politics being considered? Sometimes I think that the majority (but certainly not all) of the left-right blogosphere debates are like shouting matches in echo chambers. The indignation from both sides seems a little exaggerated at times, and then it gets magnified as the story gains prominence, but people on the outside are completely oblivious to the entire exchange.

I'm not admonishing anyone about this. I'm just making an observation.

Do you remember intense debates on the playground whether some racy word was "a swear" or not?

I feel like a hick, because our word for it was "cuss" words.

"Why would real bastards be more likely to be backstabbing or obstreperous?" I wondered.

What's interesting to me is that while the word has lost its association to its "real" meaning, the stereotype that children of single mothers are shifty is still alive and kicking. No one worries about the moral character of motherless children, but there's endless amounts of hand-wringing about it when it comes to fatherless children.

Is it THAT important, all things in the world of politics being considered?

No. But this issue is a stand-in for a larger issue, which is the importance of getting everyone on the liberal train on board with opposing sexism. Which is important because, as James Wolcott said, we need to be able to vigorously defend up and coming female politicians in the Democratic party against sexist insults that will be coming their way. So, it's a small thing itself but it stands in for a larger issue, one that really will affect all women---for one thing, it's been demonstrated that female politicians tend to have much better voting records on feminist issues than male politicians on average.

Also, I think it's important because we keep having the same fight every six or seven weeks. Whether it's John Aravosis calling someone "a little girl" or Pach dropping the c-bomb on some centrist Democrat, or whatever. Honestly, I don't think the strife stems from fundamentally different values, I think it's because people are talking past each other every time.

Amanda did really good job of dismantling a lot of the bad arguments used to defend that "cunt" post.

If only we could analyze the root causes of this ongoing rift within the progressive community, maybe we could find some way to rise above it. Or maybe we'd just retrench and keep fighting, I don't know.

No one worries about the moral character of motherless children

That's because if you worry too much about motherless children, Jonathan Franzen kicks your door down and beats the shit out of you for horning in on his turf.

In Tennessee, we also said "cuss."

Lethem, I mean. Typo. Got my dour Jons crossed.

Indeed, I have found this very subject interesting for many years (I guess that's what I get for being a speech major back when).

And I also find that it dovetails rather nicely with this little phenomenon that I've noticed over the past few years: Even when you TALK about a bad word, you can't use the word itself in some instances.

Take the latest Michael Richards flap. He blows his stack call some hecklers niggers and goes down in flames. But for the following interval, no one, and I mean NO ONE used the word when discussing why it was bad.

Also, a while back I saw an episode of Oprah where they were discussing when women are bitches (or, to use a non-gender specific term, assholes), and they never used the one ONCE during the whole show. They preferred to use the term "the B-word".

I can see, for reasons of propriety, not wanting to say something along the lines of, "Fucking hell your Majesty, but the Princess sure has a great ass!" or not using the word nigger and coming off as a racists, but I think that when certain words can't even be used outright, I think we've turned the corner into Sillytown.

If only we could analyze the root causes of this ongoing rift within the progressive community, maybe we could find some way to rise above it.

Honestly, I don't know if it bears that much theoretical scrutiny. It's not like the FDL guys have some sort actual position they're defending. It just seems like they're pissed that others have presumed to question them (and, I'd guess, responding so heatedly and defensively because they know very well that they have no defensible position).

If only we could analyze the root causes of this ongoing rift within the progressive community, maybe we could find some way to rise above it.

Seriously, Lindsey, is this what contemporary feminism has come to? Who really believes that you will change the way people use this type of language? "Keeping up the good fight" is only self serving for those who have a need to rail.

As someone raised and educated in Quebec, I learned to swear in two languages, we also lived in an ethnically diverse area so we gained swear words in several others. As a child, this meant that my brother and sisters and I could go to our rural cousins and swear in front of our grandmother. This is with one caveat that we learned early on- tone of voice was everything. If we swore in french, greek or chinese while sounding normal we could get away with anything. Our cousins knew that we were up to something but they couldn't call us on it.
I think that this is where the whole thing blew up. FDL had a context problem and rather than recognizing it and moving on, they tried to cover it up. From a childhood lesson- once grandma catches you, take you punishment, learn your lesson and move on or it could ruin your whole summer.

If only we could analyze the root causes of this ongoing rift within the progressive community, maybe we could find some way to rise above it. Or maybe we'd just retrench and keep fighting, I don't know.

Well, the root cause really does go back to agenda-setting. People really look up to Fire Dog Lake as a blog where they don't have this hostility to "identity politics", but in fact see the big picture here, and the importance of having the liberal resurgence be about economic progressivism AND foreign policy issues that are based in trying to keep peace AND opposition to oppression by race, sex, and sexual orientation. Markos and the Sensible Liberals out there want to see these goals as somehow opposed, but I think that will are fixing to see that they are intermixed.

And Nancy Pelosi's rise to Speaker is going to be huge for us peddlers in mere identity politics. Sensible Liberals are always seeking what goal they have to compromise on to get another, and while they were debating---do you give in on the war? do you give in on women's rights?---a woman rose to the 3rd most powerful position in the country, and controls the agenda of DC now and guess what? She was against the war from the beginning and a supporter of women's rights. Compromising your principles to get things done turns out to be the exception, not the rule.

And now we're seeing the damage that the widespread tolerance of sexist slurring is going to do to the Democrats because this whole arsenal of attacks against Pelosi will be handed out in the mainstream media that wouldn't be there if sexist language was as shameful as racist language. And it's going to hurt the people who were against the war all along, because she's been there with us. If more people would got on board with this antagonism to sexist language that feminists demonstrate, then we could have had a much better chance of minimizing the damage of these attacks. The reason tensions are high right now is the people who mock the "PC police" were often doing so, like Markos, to make us seem inconsequential so people like him get to set more of the agenda. And in doing so, they shot themselves in the foot. I think the whole cloth liberals who think all these issues are important are seeing this happening, seeing that we were right, and getting pushier because of it.

A few links:

The BBC ranked list of bad words. Contrary to what I expected, based on the discussion here, "cunt" is at the very top of the list.

This one has a little background and observations on linguistic understanding of swearing.

A study of the semantics of swearing, in Australia, focusing on "shit", "fuck", and "cunt".

A web page on all things "cunt", in particular, the hundreds of words with the same Indo-European root.

"Most insults are somewhere between a live simile and a dead metaphor." this is but one example of the stellar analytical writing that you've given us today. you've certainly thought about this a lot, and your points are clear and direct.
however, at the end of things, editorial brackets say: "Context is everything. Obviously, the standards are different for using a word in fiction, satire, direct quotation, etc. The appropriateness of the term also depends on who uses it, and for which audience." you could say the exact same thing about non-swear words and be just as correct, which makes me wonder if there is actually any difference, fundamental or otherwise, between "curse" words and "apropriate" ones. if context is "everything", then aren't the words themselves (i.e. separated from context; isolated and studied as social indicators) meaningless?

I said: "...based on the discussion here...": actually, the discussions elsewhere about British use of the term.

Personally, I don't use the word 'cunt' but that's just me. Maybe there's some merit in the argument that the word shouldn't be used, but in general I thought the whole dust up was overdone. It didn't seem fair to use the instance of controversial language to accuse the writer of acting in bad faith and being guilty of Great Gender Heresy or, worse, to insinuate that the incident suggested that there was Something Terribly Wrong with FDL itself, a site I've always found solidly progressive and intelligent whenever I've read it.

The idea that this incident will somehow cripple Pelosi's leadership strikes me as far-fetched at best. The knives will be out for Nancy regardless of how prim and PC bloggers are. But I did enjoy the flaming hypocrisy involved in the tortured reasoning which concludes that 'cunt' is beyond the pale but 'prick' is hunky dory. I'm sure that kind of double standard will never come back to bite us in the ass.

I tend to think of Coulter as a 'twit'. The word has a feminine connotation, I think - one doesn't reach for it when describing a man, unless you wish to diminish his manhood(tm). That might just be my particular choice of language.That said, I'm going to go get a nice crappy sanwich and cuppa while I enjoy this statement:

But I did enjoy the flaming hypocrisy involved in the tortured reasoning which concludes that 'cunt' is beyond the pale but 'prick' is hunky dory. I'm sure that kind of double standard will never come back to bite us in the ass.

Ass, cunt, hunky, bite, oh, never mind.

as Kim said. Also, in Maryland, we said 'cuss' too.

Thanks, Utica. I'm not sure if there's a difference in kind between so-called swear words and any other kind of talk.

I guess there's an empirical difference, namely, what actually comes out of people's mouths when someone cuts them off in traffic.

The other difference I can think of is that there's a certain class of words that has the power to offend by mere mention, as opposed to use. For example, I admit that I'm squeamish about even mentioning the most notorious racial slur against black people. That's partly because I'm a white person, and partly because it's just such an ugly and emotionally-laden term that I don't want to subject my readers to it unnecessarily. In theory, we should be able to discuss the word without using it against anyone, but in practice I'm not so sure.

"Cunt" is a somewhat ugly and upsetting word too, at least to me, but I feel more comfortable spelling it out because I'm a woman, and it's less likely that anyone is going to misinterpret my mentioning the word as some kind of endorsement or legitimization.

Notice that people don't use "the d-word" as a stand-in for "dick." Whereas a lot of people won't write or speak the so-called "c-word" or the notorious "n-word." That taboo often extends to the use of the c-word to refer to the vulva/vagina, whereas "dick" is one of the tamest colloquialisms for the penis that I know of.

"Dick" is roughly equivalent to "pussy" on the epithet scale. Rude, sexist, but not unspeakable in casual adult company. The two are also comparable on the rudeness of slang terms for body parts scale.

In Quebec one of the favorite swearwords is 'tabernacle'

The idea that this incident will somehow cripple Pelosi's leadership strikes me as far-fetched at best. The knives will be out for Nancy regardless of how prim and PC bloggers are.

And if I'd argued that, you'd have a point. Luckily, I didn't. I said that the culmulative effect of tolerance for sexism has led to a point where she can easily be disparaged for her gender on TV. And that if we created an environment where people were discouraged from reaching for the sexism right away, then that would not be true.

I made this point over at Pandagon, but it might be useful to reiterate. (I don't mean to be presumptuous.) Words normally have two meanings, until people with agendas get their teeth in to them, and then they take on more. 'Cunt' is a descriptive term, in the normal sense. When I use it with my sexual partner, it is not a bad thing. 'XYZ is a cunt' is a different statement, that does in fact implicate feminist critique in ways that calling some asshole a 'dick' does not. (Um, Irony intentional).

Why are progressives, myself included, sometimes tempted to use insults that have sexist connotations?

Maybe because you, and a lot of other people, don't see insults with sexist connotations on the same level as insults with racial or religious connotations.

An exercise: read either Pachacutec's or TRex's posts with "nigger" or "kike" or "mick" or "wop" or what have you in place of "whore" (and change imagery appropriately) or "cunt" and see how you feel about the posts then.

A mite differently, yes?

I agree fishbane. I think "cunt" is a perfectly good slang term for the female package and not offensive at all as a descriptor. I'd like to see it reclaimed for descriptive use. It's one of the few slang terms for female sexual anatomy that doesn't sound like a silly euphemism.

Just personally, I find there's something creepy all the those little furry animal metaphors for the lady bits.

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