Every now and then I climb into my serious pants, as our dear readers may know. Now, there is no credit for such a thing because some people will never take your words at face value especially if you do your writing at a deeply unserious site such as this one. We have had situations with Ann B*rtow, where we have essentially agreed with her, or tried to frame debate or further dialog. To no avail, generally. This is the cross we must bear. One interesting point however is the fact that words appear to have different meanings based on who is using them. A thread that runs through many of the skirmishes with Prof. Bartow and now the Aravosis situation, is the nature of offensiveness and insult. We have been on both sides of the issue. We have argued for the allowable use fo the term “cobag” while agreeing with the sexist nature of douchebag. We have found the term “Heathers” (after the movie) to be annoying, as the defining characteristic is most likely female in most people’s eyes.
There is a deeper discussion going on at Feministe and A Creek Runs North about insulting physical characteristics of a targeted individual, and how these insults are insensitive to those who share the physical characteristics with the target, but not the political views, behavior, what have you. A subtlely I would like to discuss is the fact that when someone makes you angry enough to insult them, or their words and behavior are so odious that you experience a visceral reaction to anything related to that person, you might actually see that person differently. For example, Ann Coulter is so revolting a human being, I consider her physically revolting, whereas if my dear friend looked exactly like Ann Coulter, I would not see her the same way. Everyone I know and like has physical imperfections, but I don’t necessarily see them, because when I look at them, I see the entire person, inside and out. For people I dislike, there is somewhat of a automatic cataloguing of their imperfections, and I would hazard that this could be somewhat of a general response. This argument is not a defense of physical insults, just some thinking on the issue. Additionally, if I were involved in a discussion (on either side of the issue) here is how I would want it to go.
Capt. Trollypants: “Ann Coulter is a disgusting, man-handed cow.”
Pinko Punko: “I’m not quite down with insults that delve into a persons appearance, CT.”
CT: “I’m sorry, PP. Let me explain myself. I think she is such a terrible person that when I see her, I see the caricature of her in my mind’s eye because she is so offensive to me. Think about caricatures, they exaggerate a person’s features to ridiculousness. That is how I see her.”
Pinko Punko: “I understand that, but I know some people that have man-hands that are not guys and they might be offended.”
CT: “I really wouldn’t mean to offend those other people, don’t you think they would know I wasn’t talking about them? I mean, in a way I mean ‘the man-hands attached to the person that is hideous to me on their inside’”.
PP: “They might not feel that way, CT. They could choose to feel that way, and it might seem OK, but not everyone would understand that that is what you meant. Maybe you shouldn’t use those terms.”
CT: “Well, some of MY friends have man-hands and they always laugh when I attack Ann Coulter because she is so horrible and they don’t care, just like some women didn’t care about John Aravosis stupid comments.”
PP: “I don’t know if that makes it OK. Some people might not feel that way. It is always the goal of the oppressor to get the oppressed to go along with it. It’s the MO of the patriarchy for sure.”
CT: “What if they don’t? What if these people don’t exist.”
PP: “Let’s pretend I feel that way, CT. Let’s say that I’m offended.”
CT: “I’m very sorry I offended you, PP. It was not my intent. I think we can agree that Ann Coulter is horrible.”
PP: “Yes we can, but what are we going to do about your insults.”
CT: “Well I truly find her man-hands disgusting, but I am not disgusted by my other friend’s man-hands. And I get so mad I just want to say it. The words that best fit my visceral reaction to her describe every aspect of her physical appearance. Like her bird-beak nose.”
PP: “Hey, I have a bird-beak nose.”
CT: “Yeah, but it looks sexy on you. Like Michael Vartan.”
PP: “Well, at least we had a discussion about this. You have to decide whether you want to knowingly offend me to my face now that I have said something, and I have to decide, knowing your intent whether I still will be offended, or even if we should still associate with one another. I have to decide whether in the scheme of things, if this is a deal-breaker for our relationship. Whether the world is black and white or if this counts as a grey area. If we can’t discuss these things, how can we move forward?”
CT: “I appreciate you not being an emu about this.”
PP: “You too, Captain T. Get back to trolling, but try to be more aware.”
CT: “Eat it, cobag!”
PP: “CAP’N T!”
Wah wah, the end. We had a lot of serious pants in there. We only revisit this issue because it seems to come up again and again. I think it is because we still use langauge to communicate, and not the instant mind-melds I have been advocating, or maybe some kind of semaphore involving a Take 5 bar.
great post, with a very disturbingly sane conversation. my stance (in general, please email to negotiate) is that if people are being emus, make emu soup. or foie gras. not that i would know how to, i’m vegetarian.
also, we weell not stand for more excuses regarding a certain ginormously sized bar of chocolate which may or may not be made by nestle.
sorry if the comment is un-serious pants, mine have been soiled by my visiting teenaged overlords.
This weekend is a holiday weekend. I predicy 95% chance of movement on the mentioned front.
I can understand getting so angry at someone that you reach for any insult you can find, but I do think that it’s best to avoid appearance-based insults. And, no, I’m not a member of the PC Police. I just think that you can inflict a lot of collateral damage talking that way, and I don’t see the need to do that. For example, the other day I came across a rant about some loony right-winger and it contained the term “walleyed” as (I think) a way to express the stupidity of that person. So amblyopia equals stupidity and the writer has now insulted all the millions of people with this disorder, including me. Am I being touchy about this? Possibly, but what did it accomplish to use people like me as an insult? I doubt very much that it hurt the wingnut, but it did hurt me. And what we’re objecting to with these wingers is their ideas, not the way they look. So why not stick to their ideas? God knows there’s plenty there to criticize.
Yes, this is exactly what John the Emu did with his stupid “big girl” thing: turned a whole group of people into an insult and his point was completely lost in the ensuing fracas.
Emus have foie gras? Let the massacre commence!
Also, I can definitely tell you that Pinko does not have man-hands.
Where’s the challenge in emu foie gras Res? I would think that a gormand, such as yourself, would be up for a true challenge such as hummingbird foie gras.
Reminds me of the young couple newly in love shopping together for the first time that I overheard so many years ago:
Him: Mmmm shrimp pate!
Her: Yes that’s divine!
Him: Can you imagine how many shrimp livers it must take to make this much pate?
Her: Wow I never thought about that. You’re so thoughtful and smart!
It’s “gourmand”, and anyone who knows me can tell you that I’m a big fan of quantity as well as quality. Greasy, deep-fried quantity drenched in cheese sauce.
Also, young lovers in the grocery store get run down under the merciless wheels of my cart.
Just sayin.
Somebody is wearing their sassy pants today!
Where’s the challenge in emu foie gras Res?
Burying them up to their neck and force feeding them. Thats one deep hole and one long tube…
Perhaps a little historical context on this might be interesting…..
The terms “liberal” and “left” are not interchangeable. A liberal thinks the existing social order is basically fine – merely in need of some fine tuning, some “humanizing”. A leftist, whether they like it or not, is a revolutionary. A leftist thinks that no attempt to humanize the existing social order can ever overcome its essential inhumanity – the phrase “putting lipstick on a pig” comes to mind.
The conflation of “liberal” and “left” is mostly just historical accident. Liberalism is closely related to the rise of the modern nation-state, which is a product of the nineteenth century – if you think back on your History of Western Civ II classes, all those continental wars were about establishing the laws and boundaries of modern states, and the nature of relations between those states. (So, while it may not be accurate to say that liberalism is essentially nationalist, it is certainly historically a nationalist phenomenon.) Those states had to make concesssions to their working classes, because living conditions for them really were nightmarish – think back on any Charles Dickens you’ve read. The poor were often supporters of the old style conservatism, even the monarchy, because of this – serfs under a king had traditional protections against the ills of poverty that workers in a liberal state did not. Liberal governments established social programs in part to get the working class to buy into their new, modern way of organizing political relationships. This made the liberal state seem amenable to socialist goals on the surface.
(Bear with me just a little longer; I swear this will be relevant to progressive use of language shortly…)
But socialists (and remember, this is the 1800s, before the existence of the word “communist”) were not amenable to the existence of the liberal state, in part because it was a nationalist phenomenon, and socialism is inherently an internationalist movement. Socialists saw the state and nationalism as a variation on the old British dictum of imperial rule: “Divide and conquer”: divide the working classes into “nations”, and you diffuse their power. This brings us to WWI.
In the years leading up to WWI, there was a widespread and fairly strong international socialist movement, loosely organized under the aegis of the Second International, which was sort of like a professional credentialing body in the sciences today – they’d hold conferences, publish papers, and try to figure out a way to further their goals.
WWI was no surprise. The political rumblings leading up to it went back to at least 1870, but had been getting worse and worse in the opening years of the twentieth century. In fact, it was so obvious that the great powers of Europe were gearing up for a major conflagration that in 1912, the Second International issued a paper indicating that when the war came, socialists of all nations would refuse to take sides in it, because the war was between the ruling classes of Europe, and only the working classes would suffer for it.
When the war finally came, the resolve of 1912 collapsed, and along with it collapsed the Second International. When push came to shove, socialists were overtaken by the intense wave of nationalist sentiment that overtook Europe. The socialists failed to live up to their beliefs, and failed to stop the war. It’s not just rhetoric about them failing to stop the war – there were enough socialists in the German government in 1914 that they could have blocked funding inititiatives for the war.
The socialists failed again after WWI, as well…..socialists briefly held Berlin in 1919 and might possibly have been able to take the whole of German government, but paid for their association with liberal groups by being sold out to the freikorps (who would ironically help feed the rise of national socialism a decade later).
After the dust of WWII finally settled, people with a Marxist bent were left to confront a half century of total failure. They spent a lot of time trying to figure out where they went wrong, and why Marxism – which unfortunately by 1945 had become synonymous with Stalinism – had failed to bring about the predicted world revolution. Beginning with the Frankfurt School, socialists started taking refuge in irrationalism. Horkheimer and Adorno published “Dialectic of Enlightenment” in 1944, which has come to be read as an attack upon the notional of human rationality that the Enlightenment is seem to embody. Science and technology are also attacked because of the fairly horrendous uses they got put to during WWII.
Rejection of rationalism was a vogue in a lot of disciplines after WWII, and helped to feed the rise of both poststructuralism and postmodernism (I’m
skipping over a lot of causal discussion because I’ve gone on too long as it is here). Poststructuralism is at its heart a rejection of rationality in language – this is the ultimate outcome of postructuralist Roland Barthe’s famous proclamation of “the death of the author”. If you write something, no matter what you think you might have meant when you wrote it, you actually meant nothing. All meaning comes from the reader, not the author.
These ideas were very attractive to the demoralized remnants of the socialist left, and produced a blending of pomo, poststructuralism, and socialism that continues to this day. The upshot of all this is that leftists have lost the ability to believe that genuine revolutionary (and I don’t necessarily mean violent revolution by that word) change is possible in the world today, and so they substitute symbolic revolutionary acts instead. Revolutionary use of language, revolutionary word games, revolutionary paradigm shifts – all have come to replace actual actions in the real world that might change real material conditions, because after Foucault and Derrida, it’s hard to believe that real material conditions even exist.
This is the origin of the language police. This is the origin of the belief that reclaiming “queer” so that it isn’t an insult anymore is a revolutionary act, and so forth. I’m not saying that it can’t be a revolutionary act, but if it stops there, if the only thing that changes is a person’s consciousness, then it’s a dead act. We’ve had fifty years of consciousness-changing since these sorts of ideas about social change arose, and in that time the global gap between rich and poor has reached levels unseen since the days of WWI.
While there is certainly something to be said for the art of stripping away the colonization of consciousness in our language use, I fear it’s become the last refuge for those who fail to believe they can make a difference in the material world. They’re left to police the last field in which they feel they have any influence – ideas without substance.
Sorry for having gone on so long. I’ve probably left out a bunch of explanatory detail necessary for this to make sense, too, and probably come off sounding like I much harsher critic than I intend to be, for which I apologize in advance. I’m really curious to hear what people have to think of this, though….this is a fairly recent synthesis of streams of several different ideas for me, things that have been rolling around in my head for a year or two now. Does this make any sense at all?
Jillypants, sorry about that-your comment went to spam-
I probably should have left out that bit about “increasing your manhood 10 inches”, then.
I think it’s a pretty long jump from the Second International to AmericaBlog. Also, having spent some qual-time with the works of Derrida and Foucault, I think your description of their respective oeuvres is more caricature than accurate characterization. Finally, I would be the last person to disagree that the modern left is up to it’s earlobes in various flavors of bullshit, but I’m not sure how that’s relevant to the matter at hand. I don’t think that anyone has suggested substituting language politics for concrete political action, but, as countless others have already pointed out, most of us are capable of thinking about more than one thing at a time.
What has happened here is that John Aravosis used the world “girl” (which – and correct me if I’m wrong here – pretty much has one literal meaning, that being the younger form of the female of our species) to mean “coward, traitor”. Since at least half of his readers were, at some point in their lives, “girls”, they pointed out that this cast them in an unwarranted bad light. And if John had said, “Sorry, I didn’t mean any harm by it”, the whole thing would have drifted away. Instead, he immediately lashed out and started banning-and-erasing.
Tell me, do you think that if he had said “Sen. Roberts is cowardly and lazy – what a Mexican!”, everyone would just shrug and say “let’s not be the PC POLICE get all caught up in those CRAAAZY POLITICS OF LANGUAGE”? I think not. Most of us would surely agree that modern progressivism asserts, at a bare minimum, that being born brown (or with a vagina) is not a birth defect.
There’s nothing “revolutionary” about not using “girl” as a synonym for “loser”, unless not being an asshole makes one a revolutionary.
You can increase my manhood? Finally, something GOOD about this blog!
RP- I think Jillypants was talking more about beyond the obvious- the extreme emus, as it were. At some point, changing the words just changes them into other words, so I can kind of see her point. Obviously I agree with your point about Cmdr. Munchwagon. He deleted again. He’s gonna baby that thread for a long time. I’m gonna leave that thread birthday messages. He will come around. He’s gotta start laughing sometime.
Patriarchy and heterosexism (and ageism and ableism and all the rest) are what they are. Language is where they live and breathe. I’m sorry if that seems less interesting than a global class struggle, but I’m willing to cross the liberal/leftist divide and take as my own Rorty’s description of the liberal as one thinks the best society minimizes humiliation and maximizes freedom. It follows that we are people who intentionally avoid giving pointless offense, especially using characteristics over which people have little or no control. We avoid humiliating people. That is precisely what is at stake in both the Aravosis argument and the more nuanced issues raised by Chris Clarke and Zuzu. Conservatives believe that life’s struggle produces a natural hierarchy of the dominators and the dominated, and language is as good a tool as any for accomplishing that. Leftists, knowing this, ought to know better than to use language the way conservatives do – the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Does that mean that language becomes the sole content of politics? Of course not. But it does mean that language is an ineradicable part of the political realm.
THose are some serious wide-whale cords you have on RP. I need to think about all of this some more.
Yeah, PP…….I was thinking about some of the fine, fine emu-dancing you’ve been doing with A.B. of late. J.A.’s comment was over-the top offensive, and there’s no doubt on that. But a lot of the rest of it – the sort of criticisms you were running into – just seem more disempowering than empowering.
I just find it puzzling how disconnected the modern progressive movement seems from anything that’s gone before it. There’s no overarching consciousness about what progressives want, how they’re going to achieve it, or what markers will indicate success to them; no sense that they’re aware of whatever successes prior to 1965 that they might have as a foundation to build upon. At least if they’re there, I haven’t seen them. And then this lack of focus seems to end up pitting groups against one another – gay people should be quiet about the Democratic party’s lack of support for them, because the war in Iraq is a more pressing concern, or women should consider parity in the ranks of CEOs as a marker of feminist success, even if that means that women become the CEOs of companies that market and sell crap that hurts women, like douches or whatever. How can feminist success be achieved in a world where big pieces of the global economy are rooted in maintaining religious structures that hurt women, especially when no one remembers how those religious structures came to prominence in the first place, so that they seem timeless and immutable? How do we figure out how to apportion the big ol’ pie of world resources so that they come with a heapin’ helpin’ of social justice a la mode, when we’re so confused about the roots of the current configuration that we think globalization is actually a recent phenomenon? Call me fusty and old fashioned, but I don’t think you can know where you’re going unless you know where you came from.
And I do see a lot of retreat into language games as both a cause and an effect of that, for the resasons I’ve stated above, and I do blame that nebulous category of “postmodernism” for a lot of that. I’ve spent some time with Foucault as well, albeit less with Derrida, and I am pretty squarely in the camp of those who find them to be pseudointellectual bloviators. Foucault’s work on sexuality, for example, just seems to be devoid of any notion that human beings are biological beings at all, and assumes that all sexual desire is created by culture, which is an idea that I have too much respect for biology to give too much credence to. And I can’t accept the idea that Enlightenment-style reason is just another metanarrative amongst many from which one might choose – although to be fair, I’ve only just gotten “Dialectic of Enlightenment” and haven’t read it yet, so I don’t want to tar the Frankfurt School with responsibliity for that pernicious idea until I’ve actually read it.
As I said, it’s just something I’ve been mulling over lately, trying to make sense of. I’m still thinking these thoughts through, trying to figure out where they lead….and blowing off homework to do it, too, which is bad.
I just find it puzzling how disconnected the modern progressive movement seems from anything that’s gone before it.
well you shouldn’t really be puzzled. there’s been many billions of dollars poured into many media outlets to make sure that situation gets there and stays there.
DAYUMMMM!!!\
and will someone butter up PP, he’s on a roll with all this aravosis-blogging.
all i’ve got is a weird video to round up my content-free front page(except for the dewine bit)
I agree that’s a huge part of it, AIF, but I don’t think that’s *all* of it. The first counterexample that springs to mind for me is how feminists sometimes have a hard time reconciling their views on how to improve the way women fit into and profit from the modern world with concrete examples of women doing just that – like surrogate motherhood or sex work. Feminists get split into these “sex positive” and “sex negative” camps over sex work, because of disagreement over whether it is dehumanizing to sell one’s sexuality for money. But I think there’s a larger question that often goes begging in this issue, which is whether or not it is dehumanizing to sell any aspect of our personality for money – over what it is appropriate to sell for money at all. Why is sex work dehumanizing, but not office work (I just watched “Office Space” recently, which is why that comes to mind)? Or factory work? Asking those questions involves linking feminism to issues of class and money that – just in my opinion here – seems to get neglected on occasion. And it’s also a perpective that can be hugely enriched with a good historical perspective. (Once again, this is just one example that sprang to mind quickly – I’m not trying to say it’s a paradigmatic example of what I’m talking about).
I dunno – perhaps I’m just projecting my own lack of focus out onto the world around me, but I don’t see these sorts of explicit, cross-boundary connections being made very often or very emphatically. If I’m just missing it, I’d really love it if someone could point out to me where this is going on.
jillian, the best i can gather is that “progressives” of all stripes are not a cohesive unit because there are many many ways of defining, planning for, and achieving the progress. being a conservative or reactionary otoh is the easiest thing in the world to be. all you gotta do is say: i like it the way it is, or i like it the way it used to be. the first one is somehwat defensible, but the second one usually has all sorts of undertones.
btw, if you want a really serious pants discussion on all the issues you’re trying to meld together, then you might have to get on the LBO-Talk mailing list. it’s open to everyone and they seem to be pretty cool about most things
the address: http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/lbo-talk.html
in fact the entire LBO site is worth a look.
aif – I think you hit the nail on the head there. All stripes of the left feel that their way is not only the best way, but the only way. One of the best examples of this is the Spanish Civil War. Socialists, Republicans, Communists, and Anarchists were constantly competing for each other in which ideology would end up with the power once they had defeated the forces of facism (and fascism in this case included some groups that were not really facscst.) The power struggle on the left side of that war caused a weak alliance and could not be controlled enough to actually form a strong enough union to defeat the fascists.
Jillian, I wonder if that is a microcosm of the 2 World Wars. If the idealists of Socialism had been able to resist war, would they have instead been overwhelmed by the nationalists and fascists?