I wonder if Jay Z’s explanation would be as thorough as Jack’s in that clip. I think he might just go with the same explanation many women use to justify listening and supporting artists that use bitch, “He’s not talking about me.” I could easily see him saying, “It’s okay princess because I’m not talking about you or your mom. Other women are bitches.”

My understanding is that both Jay-Z and Beyonce are pretty into traditional notions of gender.  Since I disagree with them, I expect to . . . disagree with them.

Well, exactly. I think I say something like that on the podcast. I mean, that’s still a thorough explanation. But like Samhita said, Jay-Z has bent himself into some remarkable pretzels trying to rationalize saying it while somehow being sprung from being perceived as the kind of guy who calls women names. God knows that it’s used to mean “all women” as often as “bad women” in pop culture.  But that’s always been true. See, the Rolling Stones.

Also, the point of the video falls in neatly with one of the above-linked articles. By far,the largest group of people buying hip-hop albums, like it or not, are young, middle class white men. And while a lot of what sells hip-hop is that it’s good music, it’s also true that the audience uses it for vicarious power fantasies, which is why shitty “gangsta” rappers like 50 Cent can do so well (there are goog gangsta rappers, mind you, just not him), whereas far better rappers who don’t play that game and/or are female sometimes struggle to move product. Thus, the video. Jay-Z doesn’t hide that he’s got an eye on the bottom line, and keeping it high means using the word “bitch”. That’s something to keep in mind. That he, unlike a lot of other rappers who gets rich and moves into producing others, invests in women’s careers complicates the picture somewhat for me.

Sorry to be clueless but the post title is confusing me.  What is the British excuse?

People defend using the word “cunt” on the grounds that it’s really popular in Britain. Somehow this is supposed to convince us that it’s not sexist.

Aha I live in Britain so I haven’t come across that excuse before!

Do you think I meant country matters?

I still remember “Me give my heart to a woman?/Not for nothin’, never happen/I’ll be forever mackin’”

The Romance equivalent of the c-word (IMHO that word is not to be used by non-women) is even more widely used to mean “asshole” and “idiot”. Someone conversant with colloquial French or Spanish, please tell me it can be trivially avoided in that sense.

(And yes, I wish the word was neither obscene nor insulting. It’s a word with a perfectly good, non-obscene history, but usage and misogyny has rendered it as obscene as the n-word and k-word.)

I wonder if Jay Z’s explanation would be as thorough as Jack’s in that clip. I think he might just go with the same explanation many women use to justify listening and supporting artists that use bitch, “He’s not talking about me.” I could easily see him saying, “It’s okay princess because I’m not talking about you or your mom. Other women are bitches.”

Yeah, this thing is pretty common among misogynist men.  That’s why I get infuriated when men tell me that I’m not like other women, and expect me to take it as a compliment.  It’s also why I will never consider it a good thing to be put on a pedestal and worshiped, because it’s long way to fall if I step out of line.

Cunt isn’t that popular in Britain, at least not the way some foreigners seem to believe. Certain working-class (I can see some businessmen from the City adopting it too, the way many of them like to imitate features of w/c masculinity, but typically) men in certain regional areas of a certain age like to use it as a quasi-affectionate term, but they are dying out. Contrary to what some seem to think, I’d say the general age group is something like 30-50. Not teens and young adults, but grown men who buy Jeremy Clarkson’s books and phone into radio shows to complain about PC going mad. I’ve never ever heard it used by any working-class north-west youth or middle to upper-class southern university students*, if that anecdata is worth anything. In fact my fellow northerners are actually real weenies about the word. Many of my acquaintances think the likes of “fag” and “slag” are tickety-boo, but “ooh I hate that word, don’t say it, it’s nasty” is the typical response to cunt. It’s still broadly recognized in popular discourse that calling someone a cunt in anger is shocking and offensive, and for the vast majority, that’s extended to not wanting to hear it even in jest.

Of course the “it’s just in affectionate jest” is a stupid excuse anyway, and you all knew that. I just don’t see any real evidence that the word is popular here in that sense.

*I suspect it’s more to do with maintaining an air of respectability, but the people I’ve encountered at university usually keep away from homophobic and hard misogynist slurs. My friends there do so because they aren’t assholes, but I know for a fact (since people like to stand outside my room jabbering) that some others merely stick to dogwhistles and words that the current moderate middle-class don’t take as seriously, like “tranny”.

Cunt isn’t that popular in Britain, at least not the way some foreigners seem to believe.

one of the reasons “foreigners” believe that is that every time there is a conversation about why the word is sexist and should be avoided, some Brit (occasionally also some Australian) will get all indignant and claim that it’s a commonly used non-sexist word that he uses with his male and female buddies all the time.

In Espanol, pendejo is a good one to use, pinche is Mexican Spanish slang for stupid, it can sometimes be 10 to 25% of a conversation, especially if in a situation when there are apparently no other Hispanophone around a given conversation.

Post it on reddit: it’s so hard to do the right thing celebrities deserve all the credit.

The song Tip Drill never uses the word bitch, but it’s pretty much one of the most misogynist songs ever.

Thank you veggiegirl2. Now in a round about way I know that a very misogynist graphic novel I read is even more misogynist than I originally concluded. In it a character wears a band-aid on his face throughout the whole thing over a time period for months. It’s a reference to Nelly.

I will always remember and I will mentally puke harder every time the book crosses my mind.

“Cunt” being OK because Brit’s use it (as a slur), is about the same level of convincing as the “blackface is not offensive in countries that don’t have a history of institutional slavery. This is why Japan isn’t racist.”

LOL—total apostrophe fail after derailing a previous thread over proper punctuation.

Ah! That C-word ... I somehow thought of cancer which got me really confused.

The word cunt is of course one of the most banned words in British media ... and probably for the wrong reasons (as in cunt-as-a-body-part not cunt-as-an-insult). For a very brief period (late 1980s-early 1990s) I remember it being used as a gender-neutral insult, but probably amongst a peculiar social group. And it’s not generally used as such today I believe.

Still used as a sexist insult (although I can’t remember the last time it was used around me), and of course as a body-part label.

Sometimes I wonder why cunt gets so much attention when there are so many other gender-specific insults - slag, slut, prick, etc. Except of course that prick is a little ... limp!

Except of course that prick is a little ... limp!

I always thought the word “prick” described Rudy Giuliani almost perfectly.

Also, the use by rappers of the word “bitch” as a synonym for “female” is one big reason I don’t listen to most hip-hop that came out after, say, 1992. The other big reason is the use of the N-word as a synonym for “myself, my friends and most other people in my neighborhood who are not bitches or faggots” (“faggot” being another word that gets thrown around rather too casually). And it makes me want to puke when I overhear 20-something white hipsters in Brooklyn using the b-word to describe their girlfriends and female friends, sometimes directly to their faces.

Well, exactly. I think I say something like that on the podcast. I mean, that’s still a thorough explanation. But like Samhita said, Jay-Z has bent himself into some remarkable pretzels trying to rationalize saying it while somehow being sprung from being perceived as the kind of guy who calls women names. God knows that it’s used to mean “all women” as often as “bad women” in pop culture.  But that’s always been true. See, the Rolling Stones.
Comment #3: Amanda Marcotte on 01/22 at 04:56 PM

I wonder how he feels about White people calling Black people the N-word, but only if they’re bad Black people.  Somehow I don’t think he’d consider it justified.

@13 Fair enough. No need to get butthurt about “foreigner”, though. What other word is there? “Non-Brits”? “Internationals”?

@20 This is obviously just conjecture, but I think it’s because “slag” sounds sort of silly and light-hearted (like the slang words for female genetalia that aren’t “cunt”, like fanny/minge). It could be to do with the phonology of the words, when they refer to the same thing. Also, it always seems to me like there’s some sort of subconscious agreement that prick/dick/knob aren’t as powerful purely because what they refer to isn’t seen as an inherently bad thing.

There are Brits who say “cunt” all the time, but for shock value and precisely because it’s so rude. I was at a play last night where the line “Harry, please, you’re being a massive cunt” from an otherwise well-spoken female character provoked one of the biggest laughs of the evening because the word retains that power to shock.

What it doesn’t have, or not in the places I’ve lived, is the slur-on-a-woman sense in which it’s synonymous with “whore” or “bitch”. But the UK is linguistically diverse, so maybe it has that meaning as well somewhere. It’s still sexist that the worst thing you can call a man is part of a woman, of course.

On the other hand, “tickety-boo” is an awesome expression, and should be used more often.

Tickety-boo? I should coco!

I’m glad this came up. It’s my chance to ask the question:

“What insult words are proscribed to describe men?”

Answer: none.

So how is that not a double standard?

@KingElvis: there are no words which mean the same level of hatred and dominance as the insults for women.  The double standard is that there simply exist no words as foul as “bitch” or “cunt.”

The Romance equivalent of the c-word (IMHO that word is not to be used by non-women) is even more widely used to mean “asshole” and “idiot”. Someone conversant with colloquial French or Spanish, please tell me it can be trivially avoided in that sense.

In Quebec, the primary meaning of “con” (the French word for “cunt”) has been completly lost. Knowing what it used to mean actually makes you a language nerd. The only reason I know is I read de Sade in the original French, where it was used a lot and always to refer to the female organs (not as a derogative). That usage is now archaic. It’s basically an interesting trivia. I think thus that in this case it’s pretty much recuperated fully and I have little qualms about using it. Nobody in Quebec would ever connect it to a gendered slur (plus, it now has a feminine form for usage to describe a female idiot: “conne”). A few cultivated people might remember what it once used to mean but they wouldn’t associate usage with that meaning.

I’m not sure about France or the Spanish countries.

Punditus: My wife works in a big dept store with lots of women (makeup floor) and they have this formulation:

“She’s not a bitch - she’s an A$$hole!” - meaning that A$$hole is worse.

I think “asshole” might be seen as “worse than bitch” in that context, KE, because it’s trying to say that’s she’s meaner than the average mean woman (i.e.: the average bitch)- she’s up there in aggression with the best of them, and dudes are normally seen as the best at being aggressive.

I think you knew what Punditus means anyway. It’s easy to grasp that different curses have subtle nuance of meaning to them, and that most of the women-specific ones are seen as more insulting.  “Asshole” is gender-neutral and lacks the nuance of the more gendered insults, giving some sort of vague “inconsiderate and mean” impression. “Dick” has a somewhat reverent facet to it, even though its describing a self-serving, rude, mean dude. If you don’t believe me, go watch the speech at the end of Team America, when it’s explained that dicks (America) are needed to protect pussies (liberal nations) from assholes (dictatorships). A dick is arrogant, he’s annoying, but he gets what he wants, and he can come off as kind of badass in the process. A “bitch” is both weak and aggressive at the same time, a rebel against the natural order of things (either an uppity woman or an unusually weak man). A “pussy” is merely weak.

The worse term my mother had for men and women was “dumb shit”.

Treefinger:
I will simply register the fact that there are no proscribed pejorative words to describe men, and seemingly the majority of pejorative terms for women are being framed as off limits.

I’m not here to say we should embrace profanity and hatred.

But this speaks to a central question of contemporary feminism: what kind of “Equality” would still preserve chivalric rules for men, but give women carte blanche to go after men hammer and tongs, at least rhetorically?

I respectfully submit that this is a question that feminists should consider more carefully.

I will simply register the fact that there are no proscribed pejorative words to describe men, and seemingly the majority of pejorative terms for women are being framed as off limits.

So you register that you completely ignored everything Treefinger and others posted about the subject, and are as cluelessly arrogant as you were before. You’re about as useful in a discussion on feminism as Ben Stein on evolution. You have nothing to contribute and will learn nothing from anyone else. Please accept my cordial invitation to piss up a rope.

Junk Science:

It’s not convincing to say that pejorative terms for men have a good and bad side. The same could easily be said of ‘bitch.’ 

Consider that feminists have to make the case not to each other (preaching to the choir) but to people outside the tribe. Particularly if the objective is create a new set of rules that everyone (not just feminists) is expected to observe.

what kind of “Equality” would still preserve chivalric rules for men, but give women carte blanche to go after men hammer and tongs, at least rhetorically?

What the fuck is “chivalric” about not calling people by terms that bring up the person’s past and present as a second-class citizen? So knowing the actual motivation behind chivalry, I guess that means it’s time to have sex out of gratitude with whoever refrains from that.

You might as well go after a black man for calling someone a cracker. I’m not really in the business of using male genital insults all the time anyway, but please, if you want to stop people using “dick” to refer to an over-privileged arrogant dude, stop being overprivileged arrogant dudes, just the same as a white guy who gets all butthurt about being compared to a slave-driver needs to stop engaging in behaviour that harms black folks if he wants that honour. Notice how these terms that denigrate the more powerful in society are based on their current abuse of privilege and power-mongering behaviour, rather than some trait that apparently makes them genetically inferior.

Particularly if the objective is create a new set of rules that everyone (not just feminists) is expected to observe.

We don’t create rules for anyone to follow. We’re not your mother or your kindergarten teacher. We’ll judge you for the stupid shit you say, but we’re doing that anyway. If you want the people you respect to respect you, you have to start engaging them honestly and providing real arguments instead of bringing up ridiculous non sequiturs like chivalry. I have a sneaking suspicion you can do better.

Notice how these terms that denigrate the more powerful in society are based on their current abuse of privilege and power-mongering behaviour, rather than some trait that apparently makes them genetically inferior.

As Hans Eysenck pointed out in Genius: The Natural History of Creativity:

A more likely reason [for greater male creativity, as opposed to fewer family obligations] is psychopathology. Psychoticism (Eysenck, 1992a) is conceived as being a dispositional trait underlying schizophrenia and manic-depressive illness; males usually score twice as high on it as compared with females. As we shall see in a later chapter, psychoticism is also closely related to creativity, so that the lower creativity of women may be due to their lesser psychopathology.

The fact that most creative geniuses are men (and this seems unlikely to change in the future) could be seen as a kind of genetic superiority.

You might as well go after a black man for calling someone a cracker. I’m not really in the business of using male genital insults all the time anyway, but please, if you want to stop people using “dick” to refer to an over-privileged arrogant dude, stop being overprivileged arrogant dudes, just the same as a white guy who gets all butthurt about being compared to a slave-driver needs to stop engaging in behaviour that harms black folks if he wants that honour.

That’s opening a pretty big can of worms. In South Africa, blacks didn’t defeat apartheid by saying they would simply turn the tables and abuse whites if they had political power.  There had to be a new order that would ‘let bygones be bygones.’

This argument seems to have it both ways: White Men can be insulted for ‘the sins of the fathers’ and ALSO they have a residual arrogance because of history and deserve all this opprobrium. What its essentially saying is that white men are inherently sinister and evil and all non-whites can insult them - and they can’t return with any kind of epithet. It’s like ‘white men’ must disarm unilaterally.

What are going to be the rules of this new, better and more fair society? That’s the question that needs answering. Splitting hairs and nursing grudges just takes feminist eyes off the prize.

Seneca the Younger said:

Whether we believe the Greek poet, “it is sometimes even pleasant to be mad”, or Plato, “he who is master of himself has knocked in vain at the doors of poetry”; or Aristotle, “no great genius was without a mixture of insanity”; the mind cannot express anything lofty and above the ordinary unless inspired. When it despises the common and the customary, and with sacred inspiration rises higher, then at length it sings something grander than that which can come from mortal lips. It cannot attain anything sublime and lofty so long as it is sane: it must depart from the customary, swing itself aloft, take the bit in its teeth, carry away its rider and bear him to a height whither he would have feared to ascend alone.

I will simply register the fact that there are no proscribed pejorative words to describe men, and seemingly the majority of pejorative terms for women are being framed as off limits.

I disagree.  There are many words that are off limits as perjoritive terms for men, it just so happens that most of them have to do with comparing them to women, famale body parts or homosexuals.  As most common, I offer up the following: cunt (UK associated), twat (mostly ditto), pussy, “...like a girl”, fag.  Apparently the worst thing you can call a man, in our culture, is something that compares him to a woman.

Donnereiche - Hans Eysenck?  You really want to use someone German who supported the validity of racial IQ differences and did work for the Pioneer Fund to support a pretty much discarded idea about women and creativity?
Is it too early to call stick rule?

He’s the same guy who tried doxing a few commentators, and was banned both times for his pains.
I sent an email to Amanda about him, so she’ll get around to him sooner or later.

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

Helen WH:

I see your point about calling men effeminate - but does anyone ever say that these kind of insults are off limits?

The irony is that ‘fag’ is proscribed…but really just for actual homosexuals.

I’m not looking for a world where we can all compare each other to “santorum” - that’s not my intention.

These insults are most certainly called out as often as “bitch”, and no, calling someone “fag” is not just considered wrong if the person so called happens to actually be homosexual.  At least not anywhere that people object to bitch, cunt and the like.
Seriously, where do you live so I can avoid it?  If these insults are used and no one calls them out, it’s not a place I want to be if I can avoid it.  Just like places where bitch are bandied about are places I generally don’t want to be.

helen w. h.: That’s some troll who was on a previous thread, he posts with a different crypto-naziesque name every time about how the powerful are inherently evil, and also inherently white men. So we’ve known for a while he is a stick.

What its essentially saying is that white men are inherently sinister and evil and all non-whites can insult them - and they can’t return with any kind of epithet. It’s like ‘white men’ must disarm unilaterally.

How is being okay with someone pointing out when someone is being oppressive because of their privilege suddenly akin to saying “I hate white men in general, they’re sinister and evil”? Despite my defence of calling a dick a dick, and implication that men are more likely to be dicks because of their socialization (controversial!), I don’t think all men are inherently dicks and ought to be called as such. I thought that was obvious, but apparently you need to be told that I don’t think there should be a daily hour of flagellation in the schedules of all people born with penises.

Also, I really don’t care if my attitude is too vinegar-y to catch flies with. It’s not my job to coddle people who refuse to get it. I thought this was one of the few things Internet Feminism had established. You’re a cis dude, right? Maybe it’s your responsibility to bring men who are too ascurred by the politics of language to recognize the personal benefits of gender equality around to the cause, since you don’t already have to spend 90% of your life humouring them during life outside of activism.