Daniel Dvorkin's Journal: Schumer and "bitch" -- on words, and the meanings of words

Most of my writing these days is scientific, and in scientific writing, and academic writing generally, we try to be as detached as possible. Scientists themselves are anything but detached -- we're not Frankenstein, neither are we Spock -- but that's the way the journal game is played. And this is probably a good thing.

I'm also an occasional writer of fiction, and there of course the rules are different. A good fiction writer doesn't try to load every word with emotion, since "purple prose" is not a compliment, but the emotion is there. A story that doesn't make the reader feel something is a lousy story. I'd go so far as to say that a journal article that doesn't make the reader feel something is a lousy article, too; the author just has to be very careful about how those emotions are evoked. In my academic writing, I try to bring my skills as a novelist to bear, but in a muted way.

All of which boils down to this: I spend a lot of time thinking about words. Not just the definitions of words, but their meanings, which encompasses what you'll find in the dictionary and a whole lot else. What we mean when we use a word is more than the sum of its parts.

Recently, Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) used the word "bitch," and he wasn't talking about a female dog of proven fertility. This Salon article describes the affair nicely (and Googling for "Charles Schumer" brings up a large number of stories if you want multiple perspectives) and it drew the predictable anti-PC PC response: "Stop whining! 'Bitch' isn't even an insult any more! Women get to call men 'dicks' all the time, so turnabout's fair play!" Etc.

My letter, written before the flood really began, also drew the inevitable ire of the anti-PC PC crowd. It's a fairly short letter, and please go read it if you want to, but the key line is this:

If a black person makes you angry, do you say "nigger?" If a Jewish person makes you angry, do you say "kike?" I'm guessing not.

A number of responses pointed out that women use the word "bitch" all the time, often as a point of pride. Yes, they do, and that's where we get into meaning. Personally I'm not fond of this usage of the word ... but I'm a man, and my opinion on this matter really doesn't carry that much weight. It is, in fact, almost precisely analagous to the black use of "nigger" or the gay use of "queer." As a straight white man, I don't get it, but it's just not my business. And a straight person who calls a gay person "queer," or a white person who calls a black person "nigger," or a man who calls a woman "bitch," is still pretty much an asshole.

Men call each other "bitch," too, but the use of this fact as a defense of Schumer is just bizarre. It's an insult between men precisely because of its female meaning; the idea is that the worst insult you can apply to a man is to compare him to a woman. The implied threat of sexual domination comes in there too -- "in prison, you'd be my bitch" and the like. It manages to combine sexism and homophobia in a perfect storm of macho stupidity.

What about "bitch" as a verb, as in "bitching and whining," which was also offered as a defense? This is an example of how bigoted insults become absorbed into our brains without us even realizing it. Anyone willing to expend a moment's thought can figure out the origin of the phrase above, and what's wrong with it ... which doesn't keep a lot of people from saying it anyway, presumably while they're describing their experiencing of jewing someone down while buying a nigger-rigged used car. Hey, at least the guy selling it didn't welsh on the deal!

And yes, we have "dick" and "cracker" and "breeder" and "bible-thumper" and a host of other insults which can be applied to men and white people and straight people and Christians, and these insults are bigoted and ugly and the people who use them are ugly bigots. Fine. But anyone who claims that these words carry the same weight as the words discussed above, that they carry the same level of power and threat, is living in a fantasy world.

Words have histories, and their histories are reflected in their meanings. There was a time, well within living memory in my family, when on almost opposite sides of the world "yid" and "nigger-lover" were serious declarations of intent to do harm; both may seem kind of archaic now, but people died over those words. The people using the words didn't have so much to fear. Who uses the word, and in what context, matters just as much as the word itself.

Schumer strikes me as being, all in all, a pretty decent guy in his political life. In his personal life, he may in fact be a raging misogynist and it doesn't really matter -- to almost everyone in the state of New York, and in the United States as a whole, what matters is what he does on the Senate floor. But he has a brain, and an obligation to use it before he speaks. As do we all.

FWIW

[stoolpigeon]

I agree with you. Very well said.

My opinion on him

[zogger]

He's pretty much an anti anyone who isn't a big city hard left urbanist, an israel firster, pro police massacres and disarming the US people (if you ever saw the hearings about the waco massacre and his comments you would see what I mean) and so on. Visually he gives me the creeps every time I have seen a news clip of him..just..hard to put it...seems sorta slimy to me and has an underlying streak of extreme violence in there, anything to get his way, sociopathic sorta. Very similar to the creeps I get when