A follow-up on my “Quitcher Bitchin“ post from yesterday since I think I may not have clearly reflected my concern. Turns out last week Kimberlly of of The Errant Wife found herself subjected to a rash of insults that possibly better reflect the point I was trying to make.

Well, who doesn’t love a torrent of abuse on a Thursday?

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So far I have been called despicable, a urinal, a whore, a cunt, a bad mother a bad wife, a swine: and that is just what they are calling me on my comments, you should see what they are saying over there. By a day in it had degenerated completely: apparently I should be killed and I should have AIDS – if the world were fair that is. Interestingly, the comments got uglier as time went on. “Group think” as my husband put it. Much as we bloggers legitimize ourselves via our similar leanings – they draw strength from their numbers.

The use the perceived worst things of femininity: I have my period, I am a bad wife, a bad mother, I am ugly, I am fat, I am rapidly aging, I have a big vagina, I am (god forbid) saggy – they judge me based on a view of what it is to be a woman that I have long since rejected.

It fascinates me that in crafting their insults they see only the female – I am not a terrible person, I am a terrible woman – most of what they hurl at me from their safe anonymity are gendered insults. Because I am not a person, you see, I am an object to be possessed.

Read the quote in context here.

Yes, I’m aware of various etymological and linguistic support for the inevitability, and even, I guess, desirability, of using attribute-denigrating language. That plus various “recovering meaning” initiatives for words like “slut” and “queer.” And the whole “but you n-words say ‘n-word’ all the time” business.

I don’t think Kimberly’s interlocutors have any of that in mind when they call her the words they call her. Instead they call her those things because they believe it specifically, descriptively identifies her as precisely those things. Which, they believe, are the shittiest, crappiest, lowest, most worthless, things they’re capable of imagining: characteristics “of or peculiar to” something with a vagina.

My point in saying it’s hard to be sex-positive and still use those words wasn’t because I thought it’s just naughty to use un-PC words because they might hurt someone else’s feelings. Nor was it because I think there’s a real problem with people using dead metaphors without considering their once-living implications.

Instead I mean what I said, in my usual starchy way, in my first post ever on this site: “it’s hard to use cock-sucker as an epithet once you’ve met someone who knows how to do it.”

It’s not that calling someone a cunt, a cocksucker, or a slut might hurt their feelings. If you want to hurt their feelings go for it — if you pick a really scummy degrading one maybe it will hit home and they’ll feel really bad and you’ll win! It’s just… it’s hard to use those words as insults once you have an actual sexually positive understanding of their “technical” meaning.

Call me naive but I’m pretty sure none of Kimberly’s comments come from particularly sex-positive individuals.