Image from Italian website Bioetica.
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Geoffrey K. Pullum of Language Log dispenses with one evident miscommunication… but raises another. First, the big news policy-wise.

The Pope has changed his mind about condoms: they can be used after all!

That’s what the world’s media has decided to splash over the front pages this weekend. (“Pope Benedict’s condom U-turn” said the headline over Andrew Brown’s blog piece at The Guardian.) They are being scandalously irresponsible as usual: the Pope has said nothing of the kind. Rather, he grudgingly acknowledged, in one answer during a book-length interview, that perhaps in some cases perhaps the use of a condom by a prostitute (una prostituta) might be “a first step toward a moralization… Absolutely no sign of a Catholic Church volte face on contraception there.

Source: Language Log

Pullum points out that the issue appears to be a mistranslation of gender in the term “una prostituta” in Vatican’s official Italian-language edition. The Pope, however, is a native speaker of German, as was his interviewer, and there’s considerable evidence that he was talking about condom use for male prostitutes. The Italian version strongly suggests he meant prostitutes who are women. Thus the misunderstanding that the Church might somehow be moderating its opposition to contraception. No such luck there.

But if the ambiguous gendering of una prostituta has been reduced to a problem of mistranslation. Or possibly a problem of euphemism if, say, some of the target languages are culturally less tolerant and/or more prim about the possibility of male prostitution, Pullum introduces another language speed bump when he says (emphasis mine)

[S]ome of the odd things about the foggy passage just quoted might be relevant to my linguistic puzzle. One is the fact that using a condom generally means putting one on one’s own penis, and if that is to count as an assumption of responsibility, Pope Benedict must be envisaging an infected male prostitute whose service consists of active penetration and ejaculation of a passively participating client. I know very little about the world of prostitution, but it is my understanding that it is much more typical for it to be the other way round, in which case the prostitute would not be using the condom, but asking the client to use it, and the motivation would be the selfish one of protecting the prostitute’s own health, hence not an assumption of responsibility at all.

In which case, as Language Log commenters such as John, Aaron Toivo,and other have hinted, we can still delve into the function of the word “use” in “the prostitute would not be using the condom, but asking the client to use it.”

I am so not a linguist, nor do I claim competency with language tools. And I don’t think Google page counts qualify as reliable for statistical purposes. That said, a quick check suggests “he used a condom,” “we used a condom,” and “she used a condom” are all used with some frequency.

Also, considering that just as it wouldn’t be unusual for a restaurateur to say “I used plastic wrap to cover the customer’s leftovers” it wouldn’t seem unusual for a prostitute to say he or she uses a condom to cover a customer’s penis. Thus while getting a condom on to a customer may be a problematic element for at least some sex workers, it’s not necessary to say “receptive sex workers don’t use condoms, their customers do.”

There are other instances where receptive partners are presumed to be condom users but the most glaring would probably be the controversial ordinance in New York Washington, D.C., that allows police to detain a woman on suspicion of prostitution if she has more than a certain number of condoms in her purse.

Final note: if I was a linguist I’d probably write a post about how the assumption that being the penetrating partner makes one the active agent conditions the way we employ the word “use” in “the prostitute would not be using the condom, but asking the client to use it.”

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p.s. you learn something new every day at Language Log, and in this case the commenters really came through. Even though I’ve been a fairly active sex blogger for years I hadn’t known that more same-sex customers seek penetration than seek to penetrate. Several commenters, including at least one former male sex-worker, set the record straight. Knowing that makes sense of a number of differences in rates of condom acceptance between those who are straight and those who are not.

Via all sorts of sources on the left, right-wing propagandist Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post correctly (correctly for a propagandist anyway) disregards reality and history in her possibly-successful attempt to frame President Obama as “feminine.”

Obama: Our first female president

If Bill Clinton was our first black president, as Toni Morrison once proclaimed, then Barack Obama may be our first woman president.

She said it here.

Parker’s pretty good at wielding feminist and gender-study language and theory

We’ve come a long way gender-wise. Not so long ago, women would be censured for speaking or writing in public. But cultural expectations are stickier and sludgier than oil. Our enlightened human selves may want to eliminate gender norms, but our lizard brains have a different agenda.

Women, inarguably, still are punished for failing to adhere to gender norms by acting “too masculine” or “not feminine enough.” In her fascinating study about “Hating Hillary,” Karlyn Kohrs Campbell details the ways our former first lady was chastised for the sin of talking like a lawyer and, by extension, “like a man.”

M’kay, nothing you wouldn’t hear in a 1st-year gender-studies paper, and also perfectly true. Not too surprising either since Karlyn Kors Campbell was a pioneering women’s-studies professor who focused on the rhetoric and reception of women speakers in American political history. She’s also the part-namesake of an academic prize in Rhetorical Criticism. So good call on Parker’s part!

Of course as with all good propaganda she uses two paragraphs to cite credible people and accurate statements in order to make you less-critically receptive to the first sentence in the sentence that follows. Which would be

Could it be that Obama is suffering from the inverse?

Well, nice try but no, Obama is almost archetypically male of a type well-understood, admired, and often feared by socially or hierarchically subordinate men. See “father, remote.” See also the myriad leaders among aviation engineers, software developers, biotech researchers, research university employees, merchant transoceanic shippers, bureaucrats and technocrats, career-military, and industrial-scale, export-oriented commodity-crop farmers for examples.

The reasonable-sounding way Parker sets up her assertion, though, you could almost agree that his distant-father routine might… somehow… um… be feminine. Incredible reframing if she could pull it off, yes. Maybe she’s bucking for an award in rhetoric herself.

You wanna know how much of a stretch this is, by the way? Karlyn Kors Campbell didn’t just study women’s political speech, she’s also written about male Presidential rhetoric. And possibly since Campbell is still alive, Parker acknowledges a… slight problem with her attempted spin

Campbell’s research, in which she affirms that men can assume feminine communication styles successfully (Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton), suggests holes in my own theory. She insists that men are safe assuming female styles as long as they meet rhetorical norms for effective advocacy — clarity and cogency of argument, appropriate and compelling evidence, and preempting opposing positions.

Ooh, that’s gotta hurt your thesis! Barack Obama’s “feminine” just like… um… Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton? Oh yeah, that’s going to get you an award, but only if you can make that one stick. In the next paragraph Parker wisely relies on the rhetoric of uncertainty to express confidence.

I’m not so sure. The masculine-coded context of the Oval Office poses special challenges, further exacerbated by a crisis that demands decisive action. It would appear that Obama tests Campbell’s argument that “nothing prevents” men from appropriating women’s style without negative consequences.

Yeah, masculine-coded contexts that evidently weren’t in place in those crisis-free, no-need-for-decisive-action years when Reagan was President (1980-1988) or when Clinton was (1992-2000) but magically are today. Oh, and speaking of crises that demand decisive action, how ‘bout My Pet Goat boy from 2001-2008?

But suddenly Parker’s saying President Obama somehow will finally be the guy who finally gets hit with the consequences? Of being to “womanly” as opposed to, say, too male-professor/remote-father-figure aloof?

Give her credit for trying. And give her credit, as well, for her women’s studies bone fides… which, incidentally, I think really are bone fides!

Parker’s pretty clear throughout her piece that while she’s criticizing Obama for… well… obviously like a lot of her peers she’s just throwing shit on the wall and seeing what sticks… but while she’s critical of Obama’s “femininity” she doesn’t actually see anything wrong at all with “womanly” leadership styles or, indeed, women leaders!

Indeed, negative reaction to Obama’s speech suggests the opposite. Obama may prove to be our first male president who pays a political price for acting too much like a woman.

And, perhaps, next time will be a real woman’s turn.

She’s not talking about Hillary Clinton. But only because Clinton is a Democrat, not because she’s a woman. She’ll support, campaign for, and might would outright prefer, a Sarah Palin to a Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney for President, and prefer a Nikki Haley to a Haley Barbour for Vice President.

Don’t underestimate the significance of this.

The patriarchy is alive and well, and women like Parker, Palin, Haley, Bachmann, Angle, and others are utterly committed to its maintenance. But this is not your father’s patriarchy!

Update: Oh cool, and professor Mark Lieberman of Language Log has a technical takedown of Parker’s factual assertions about “feminine” vs. “masculine” language usage at Rhetorical testosterone and analytical hallucinations

So anti-feminist darling Kathleen Parker of the Washington Post just won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary.

The editors at The American Prospect blog TAPPED posted a reminiscence of Parker by TAP’s Kerry Howley from last November’s print issue. (Emphasis mine.)

Save the Males, Kathleen Parker’s 2008 polemic on sexual permissiveness and libertinism, contains the following euphemisms for vagina: “inner sanctum,” “familiars,” “you know what,” “very private parlor,” “sacred vessel,” “vestal vestibule,” and “hirsute abyss of God’s little oven.” We will be, laments Parker in her obligatory chapter on Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, so “awash in vaginaism,” that we are nothing beyond “vaginas on the plain seeking out other vaginas with which to hold hands and gaze unlongingly into the silky night of a manless moon.” We have abandoned a better, gentler America, a place where women were “above this sort of thing,” a nation where men did not “talk about vaginas in public.”

Read the quotes in context here

Funny. Just yesterday a friend asked me about unusual vaginal discharge and I told her what I knew about it. Worse (from Kathleen Parker’s perspective, I suppose) I grabbed a couple of medical reference books, did some follow-up research on Google, and we talked about that too.

Here’s where it gets tricky. Because I’ve been in intimate relationships with women for a number of decades, and therefore I’m relatively familiar with different kinds of discharges, I briefly considered suggesting I take a quick look at her vagina. I balked, however, because in order to do that I’d have seen her vulva as well. We’re not on those sort of terms, however, and so I don’t think either of us would have been comfortable with that.

While I feel Parker should feel reassured by my reservations I have a feeling she wouldn’t be. I expect she’d be appalled that I’m familiar enough with “inner sanctums,” “familars,” “you know whats,” “hirstute abyss of God’s little ovens” (though statistics suggest these days they’re actually hirsute only about half the time), and “down theres” that I can distinguish vaginas from vulvas.

Meanwhile I’m embarrassed that Parker doesn’t make the distinction.

And speaking of distinctions, what’s the difference between “talking about vaginas in public” and writing about them, disparagingly no less, in the pages of the Washington Post?