Since when is the feminine form of every single obscene noun bitch?
Can we please be a little more creative and a little less reflexively sexist? If you can call a man who is the object of your ire an asshole or a jerk or a fuckwad, why can’t you offer the same consideration to a female irritant?
I get really tired of seeing words like “bitch” and “skank” and “whore” in every single Pit thread referring to a woman. By using such words you subtly include the person’s gender in your insult; might as well refer to their race or their sexual orientation, IMHO.
Okay. Not to hijack or anything (you know I’m about to), but this anti-gender-language thing really, really pisses me off.
Why the hell do my professors want me to write “he or she” in my papers? It’s clunky. I get away from it by using “one,” but a lot of people don’t use this trick and have to use “he or she.”
And people who use “she” just to avoid offending women. God, I hate that. Those who alternate between he and she in academic papers should, IMHO, be flogged. It’s confusing. Pick one.
Those people who get offended by the use of the word “he” piss me off, too. Get a life. It doesn’t hurt you, and it’s not predjudiced against you. Christ.
Hmm genderless language. I don’t like it. Shall we just revert to newsspeak?
Nonoffensive insults seem about useful as a glass hammer.
And, personally, I try to be all-embracing in the scope and magnitude of my insults. I like to consider everything I know about the person, race, gender shoe size, fast food preference, eyebrow thickness, the whole deal. That way when I insult the person, I insult them as a gestalt. I insult the whole person in their totality.
By seeking to insult the whole person I show that gender is not an issue, because I feel free to address it. It only becomes an issue if I’m unwilling or unable to.
Finally, what makes a good insult is not the deliverer, but how it is perceived by the receiver. If a person is not sensitive about their gender, by making your insult gender specific you’re wasting effort. However, if the person is gender sensitive, than insulting them in a gender specific way makes for the more effective insult.
Fishbone said it best:
It kind of tells a story that isn’t there without the gender specificity.
I disagree with the analogy. When you use an insult that consists solely of race or sexual orientation, you are using the very fact of race and sexual orientation as the insult, thereby insulting all members of that group. By contrast, the term “bitch” does not apply to all women - only to a small subset that contain qualities that you consider negative.
I honestly believe no degrading words would be used except it seems to be “expected” in the pit.
Perhaps the pit itself tends to make the word prevalent.
