well yah. who likes the new background??? hehehe. i'm so bad. i know it's kinda hard to read but i'm still trying to find a good color for the posts. any suggestions? well, you can tell i've been procrastinating... i have to do my metacognitive paper for tomorrow.. uh-oh... haha... where did my 4-day weekend go?!? it's practically over already!!!!! ::sniffle sniffle:: :(
well, i was reading this book last night that lauren gave me for christmas. it's called "get your tongue out of my mouth, i'm kissing you good-bye!" by cynthia heimel. haha, greatest title ever! here's one of the chapters from it that i am going to type out b/c i'm the best procrastinator in the world.
I have this new job: Five days a week, during business hours, I fight about whether women should be called "ladies" or not.
"But why does John have to say 'Hello, ladies,' " I scream at Marco like my life depended on it.
"Look," Marco says, ready to strangle me, "for four years John has called the ladies! That's what he says, goddammit!"
"Marco and I work on a sitcom called "Dear John." You know, the one with Judd Hirsch. THe guys who work there are getting very tired of the great "ladies" controversy.
I don't care. It's like chalk on a blackboard to me; it's a feminist thing. I thought we had it all settled back in the seventies. Women are not ladies. The term connotes females who are simultaneously put on a pedestal and patronized. A lady is softer and weaker and more dependent than a man. Implicit in the definition is that a man must defer to her, take care of her, because she's not competent to do things on her own.
A lady would never fuck up her nails fixing a carburetor, a lady doesn't swear like a longshoreman during childbirth, a lady doesn't like to give head. At least that's what our mothers told us when we were growing up. They had a whole litany of things that "ladies," which we were supposed to become, were not allowed to do:
"A lady always sits quietly with her hands in her lap."
"A lady keeps her hair nicely combed and out of her eyes."
"A lady keeps her knees together at all times."
I despise this word! Call me a "lady" and I feel like I'm wearing a white dress and can't go splashing through mud puddles.
When women hear a guy say, "I want a terrific lady," we know we're dealing with someone with a different frame of reference and we talk slower.
"Okay, then," Marco says every day, "John walks into a room. Three women are standing there. What's he supposed to say? 'Hello, women'?"
There he had me. What's John supposed to say? "Hello, women" sounds really goofy. So would "Hello, men" like you're on a military mission or something. You want something informal, colloquial.
I've searched my brain and discovered something depressing. There is no word in our entire language to define a woman, or a group of women, that is nonjudgemental.
Walk into a room and say "Hello, girls!" and you're either talking to female people under the age of 21 or to plumpish middle-aged housewives in fussy dresses who are in the habit of saying to their husbands, "The girls are coming over for bridge."
"Gals" means the same thing, except that if the women are grown-ups they're not wearing dresses, they're wearing Bermuda shorts.
"Chick" is another term that diminishes women. It's like "girl" or "gal" only less respectful.
"Babe" implies that a woman is sexually appealing to men, as in "Is she a babe?" "Well, she's seventy-five percent babe, but her ankles are fat." Ditto the terms "fox" and "tomato."
"Slut" used to mean a slovenly woman. Now it means a woman who will go to bed with everyone. This is considered a bad thing in a woman, although perfectly fabulous in a man.
"Bitch" means a woman who will go to bed with everyone but you.
I want to know why we have no nonjudgemental words to describe us. I want to know why there are no female equivalents to "guys," "fellows," "dudes." I want to know why our language is so goddamned male, why everything is defined by how it relates to men.
Why yes, of course there are terms with sexual counterparts. "Spinster" and "bachelor" for example. "Spinster" means you are old and frustrated and unattractive and wear your hair in a bun and have too many cats and probably knit. The worst that can be said of a "bachelor" is he's probably gay.
Then there are those genitalia words. Men can be "dicks, dick-heads, pricks, putzes" and I think "schmuck" means penis too. There are so many male-genitalia words because men love penises. All these words mean "kind of a jerk." Whereas there is only one genitalia word for women, "cunt," and it is considered much more obscene than male.
Oh wait, I forgot pussy. A word applied to men. It means cowardly, wimpy, weak.
Why are only men "bastards?" Is it that women are considered so insignificant that it doesn't matter if they're born out of wedlock?
Linguists tell us that the language we speak defines the way we think. People whose language includes 32 words for snow have a lot more complicated thoughts about snow than we do.
Our language teaches us to think of women as less valuable than men. I hear the word "babe" and I think, "Am I a babe? And if I'm not, am I worthless?" I hear the term spinster and I feel a tiny stirring of fear and distaste before I think, "Thank God I've been married, I'm not a spinster!" I hear "cunt" and before I can stop myself, self-loathing trickles into my soul. I don't want to feel this way. It's unfair for my own language to betray me.
So I have a proposal. Let's make the word "guy" unisex. Let's everybody call each other "guys" so that everybody can feel equal, like they're one of the gang, like they belong. Women do this already, because we utterly refuse to call each other "ladies," but we feel a hint of self-betrayal. If it's made official, we won't.
Okay. We still need a nonjudgemental female word. I think "girl" is sometimes okay, but it's like: We can use it, you can't.
How about "bitch?" Too negative? I don't think so. A man will call a woman a bitch when he can't control her, when she won't do his bidding, when she's not compliant to his needs. I like this in a word.
