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Originally Posted by brianwspencer
I absolutely get the basis for what you're saying, and I got it before my original post -- I just don't agree with it all.
All that does, I believe, is continue to give those words power...the power that we so much abhor them having.
Call me a ******. I don't care. The word holds no power in my life and it puts me in no place of subordination (though the person using it may certainly be trying to create that effect). It only holds power because people let it, and because they are afraid of saying it for fear of offending someone who still gives that word power. I'd just as soon have nobody using the word at all, but if some people are going to continue to use it as something derogatory, I hold the belief that it is only offensive if I let it be...if I choose to let that word make me "less" than another.
I dont. So it's not.
I know we just approach it from different viewpoints, you're looking at it more sociologically and societally (which i'm familiar with), and I'm just looking at it on a person by person basis. An entire group can only be chained by a word if they allow themselves to be.
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And I absolutely see that viewpoint, too, but on some level, I also see how, by making racial and sexual epithets unacceptable to say, we are passively saying that having racial and sexual prejudices is unacceptable.
And honestly, Brian, I hate to say it, believing as strongly as I do in equal treatment for all of us, but it's different if you're a woman. If a straight man calls you a f*****, you probably stand a reasonable chance of being able to kick the sh*t out of him, being male yourself. We don't. A man calls us something we don't like, there's not much we can do because physically, nine times out of ten, he can beat the crap out of us. And I'm quite muscular and strong, but men are just physically stronger- my first boyfriend post-college was only 2 inches taller than I and maybe 20 pounds heavier, but he could pretty easily wrestle me to the ground. It's the way men are made and there's nothing I can do about it. And so, by calling me a derogatory term for my vagina, a guy is asserting that he's in a more powerful position than I am because ultimately, I can't do anything about him calling me those names, other than not sleep with him, and if you come down to it, he's strong enough to make that happen too if he wants. Ergo my non-issue with women using it, and my big issue with men using it. Make in unacceptable to use the words, and you make the inclination behind the word unacceptable too.
(Which is not to say a group claiming the words for themselves should substitute for actual attempts to make things better. I think it can be an easy substitute for working within those groups for real change.)