I was proud and disdainful of the use of swear words by my peers at school and (mostly) at Uni. Those who did displayed a sad lack of language skills and literary imagination was my pompous opinion. I became less precious about it as I got older but the rot really set in when I worked with the AMIEU (you will have to look that up if you don’t know what this stands for). Dear colleagues (mostly) they peppered their (and my) working day to day language with ‘Fs and ‘Bast’d’s and ‘S’s as a matter of course and I leapt into the tide. It took me a long time to realize my comrades could turn this language off like a tap – a skill learned when they were very young men I assume. Unfortunately I came to it all too late and never managed to do the same. This has had consequences for my children, but that’s a story for another day.
I have been thinking on these matters given events of the past week in Canberra and subsequent commentary about the ‘Browns B****’ poster. First up, it was interesting that our media no longer feel the need to be as coy about the ‘B’ word as I’m being. They repeated it out loud and without apology on radio, on television and in their newspaper articles. Even on good old Aunty. I was pleasantly surprised when one of my favorite bloggers, Grogs Gamut, restored the traditional B**** spelling. Makes me wonder whether the MSM (that’s tweet speak for mainstream media) would do the same with the ‘C’ word. An example of how moving to the extreme edge diminishes standards, a topic of interest to another of my favourite bloggers, Mr Denmore.
I digress. One word my former colleagues did not use in my presence was the word on the poster. I assume they used it elsewhere but maybe we were in such a male dominated environment it didn’t come up much. Or maybe, just maybe, they recognized the word’s fraught gendered context. This is not my usual language. I’m a proud feminist but gender studies and the like leave me cold. Apart from a stint reading radical French feminists in my twenties (they were fantastic and probably completely loopy and I don’t have the energy to go back there) I am not interested in overly theorising about all this stuff.
But B**** is a word that has very strong misogynist overtones. It is simply not a word applied to men. There is no male equivalent. As true at the start of the women’s movement as it is today. Young people are starting to broaden its use, asking scornfully of friends; ‘who is the b**** in this relationship?’ The question reflects aeons of gender stereotyping. Who is the weak and oppressed partner? Who ‘deserves’ to be slapped around a bit? Who’s being told what to do – ordered about? You have to be someone else’s B**** as the sign made clear. Young people understand where this word comes from. They get it. The MSM doesn’t.
Comparisons of hurtful jibes heaped on Prime Ministers past are irrelevant. John Howard being called the devil? Please! It was the sexual nature of this sign that made it offensive, demeaning of the Prime Minister and of all women. Whether they know it or not. Whether they are the 11 year old girl who is said to have produced it or Bronwyn Bishop and Sophie Mirabella who were so pleased to be standing in front of it.
And spare me all the slipping and sliding about whether Abbott endorsed the sentiments or not. If you speak at a rally in front of a sign you are endorsing it. Greg Combet knows that which is why he was strongest in condemning Abbott in the Parliament. Greg did not let the people with offensive placards at the rallies against Work Choices within cooee of his platform. He wasn’t going to let fellow travellers hijack his cause. Not so Tony Abbott. He is deliberately hitching his wagon to the cause of anyone with a gripe against the Government, or indeed those with a gripe against any government at all.
I hope, as another blogger Politically Homeless predicts, that this opportunism, and failure to condemn the ugly sexist sentiment inherent in the Browns B**** sign, brings him down.
– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Emily Forrest says
Here here!