Feminism

Why Is It Still Okay to Call a Woman a Slut?


Call a gay person a faggot and it’s hateful. Sling the n-word at a black person and you are a racist. But call a woman a slut? Follow it up with slander about her sexual appetites and put in a request for YouTube videos of her “banging it five times a day”. That’s just …? What exactly is that in America? Business as usual? Lately it seems so. But whatever you call it, no one is likely to call if sexism – though clearly it is. Few will see it as hate speech though if you ask a woman how it feels to be called a slut for using birth control, she is likely to feel degraded and vilified for the “crime” of exercising her right to self-determination or merely just taking legally prescribed medication for a physical ailment.

Rush Limbaugh‘s recent slut problem is hardly the first time the shock jock has taken gratuitous pot shots at the female gender for the sake of pandering for a living. He’s a misogynist. A lot of men his age are. I would even go so far as to say that it would be difficult for men of a certain age to not take their preferred gender status for granted and have incorporated the tenets of sexism to such an extent that they truly don’t really most of the time that they really have no respect for women. That’s not to excuse them. Racists of the pre-Civil Rights era were blind to their racism to some extent as well, but it doesn’t make their participation in it innocent.

Thanks to the recent Komen backlash and the even more recent birth control versus the Catholic Church and Rick Santorum uproar, women of social media means near instantly ignited the public’s fury, which has resulted in Limbaugh’s rather predictable non-apology and the less predictable disavowal of him by his advertising sponsors, who are dumping him in droves. It’s heartening to see women uniting and demanding that sexist rhetoric have consequences in the same way that anti-gay rhetoric provokes outrage or racist diatribe earns the rebuke it deserves.

But I fear, that gender slurs where females are concerned is still not seen as too big of a deal. It’s 2012 after all. Did women win their freedom back in the 1960’s? They got the pill and burned bras, right? Or maybe it was when the government deigned to allow us the vote barely 80 years ago and only after they bad publicity of beating suffragettes and force feeding women on hunger strikes made Uncle Sam look too evil to do anything else.

No, wait. It was in the 1970’s. There was Title IX, which allowed little girls to play school sports and the Equal Right’s Amendment. Didn’t Helen Reddy sing something about roaring women to celebrate that victory?

Except there was no victory. Female collaborators like Phyllis Schlafly barnstormed the country with stories about housewives turning lesbian and little baby fetuses piling up in the gutters and people like my Dad voted against ERA and the Constitution remained blissfully male oriented.

But man means “woman” too.

Except when it doesn’t and that’s most of the time.

When I graduated from college in 1987, North America was firmly entrenched in paying lip service to the notion that “women could have it all” but only the most foolish of my gender went out into the world and didn’t soon discover that to be completely untrue. And twenty-five years later, it’s just as untrue. Our so-called equality is as shallow as an episode of The Housewives of Beverly Hills.

Sure, we can have it all as long as we stay thin, don’t appear to age past 40, bring home our share of the household income and do more than our share of the housework and childcare. Be sexually attractive but never appear to enjoy sex or discuss it or anything else to do with our “naughty bits”. Don’t ask and don’t tell and if anything “down there” needs looking after, be prepared to cover the expense ourselves. At that includes pregnancy and wellness checks and contraception. Don’t ask and don’t tell. If you ask, we’ll know you are not a “good girl” and if you tell, we’ll know for sure you are a slut.

You can’t call a gay person a faggot or a black person the n-word. But you can call a woman a slut or a whore or cunt or a bitch. You can sing it even while barely clothed young women grind poles (or each other) in the background on a YouTube video. You can expect a woman to make a video of herself for your “entertainment”. You can do this because of men like Rush Limbaught and Rick Santorum. It’s possible because of collaborators like Pamela Gellar and Angela Morabito. You can do this because the Catholic Bishops have a long history of female suppression (almost as long as their support of priests who like little boys). You can do this because everywhere in the world, women are universally seated in the back of the metaphorically bus and we’ve accepted it or been brutally suppressed when we didn’t.

Rush is taking his lumps for being caught with his old school pants down, and it may or may not cost him his job – I’m going to say “not” – but the essence of the problem has not changed. Women stopped fighting for their rights much too soon. We settled for crumbs and we are paying the price of it.

Why is it still okay to call a woman a slut? Because we’ve allowed it to be.

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On Not Going Quietly Into the White


FatesI allowed my hair to revert back to its natural color, which at this point includes a fair patch of very white hair. Not gray. White. And this pleased me enormously because two of my great-aunties were blessed with snow-white hair that was thick and simply gorgeous. When I was a young girl, I prayed that when old age struck, it wouldn’t curse me with hair the color and texture of steel wool. I wanted to be as white as a snow owl’s down feathers.

As the whites multiplied, I was content. For a while.

Here’s the trouble with pigment loss, unless you are a character in a Stephen King novel, it’s unlikely that your hair will go white overnight. It’s a fairly slow process when that doesn’t make you look as old as it does washed out, tired and hallow-eyed, and after a while, I’d had enough.

So last week when I went in for my thrice yearly haircut, I had Stylist put the highlights back. She’s new to my hair. I’ve only had her cut it once and as a result there was that moment when she realized that my hair likes being a yellow gold. It quite naturally lightens up to a colour that most women pay quite good money to achieve through dyes. The gods of beauty showered me with precious little at birth, but they gave me great hair. Even the coarse texture with its tendency to poof and curl can’t fully undercut the colour luck I have.

Stylist oo’d and aa’d as the morning slipped away. Foiled, shampoo’d, cut, thinned and blown out straight, I left the shop a lighter version of me. Not one I wasn’t accustomed to because I have been lightening my hair for close to 30 years. I have been more blonde. Much. But as I mentioned earlier, it’s been a while.

One of the reasons for the long blonde-less stretch was my reluctance to play too much into the idea that women of a certain age – my age – should fight like cougars to hold off time. Artificially influencing the colour of our hair is the most common way that this is done because it works and it’s easily accessible. I know personally every few women under the age of 70-something who don’t mess with the locks Mother Nature gave them. Even women my mother’s age, and she will be 80 this spring, colour their hair though not as much as the under 60 crowd does.

And the effects are startling. I’ve stopped counting the number of times a woman will turn to face me and I am thrown off by the fact that her hair doesn’t match her face, and even if she’s Botox’d, the neck always gives her away.

There is just too much pressure and unrealistic expectation. Women are supposed to grow old, travel the path from maiden to crone. It’s not something that needs correcting because aging is not about anything but aging and if most of us stop doing that – we do our daughters and granddaughters a disservice. I don’t want my daughters to think that middle age and beyound is anything to fear or fight against.

But I got impatient awaiting my milky mane, so back to highlights I went.

The reaction?

“Your hair looks fantastic. I didn’t recognize you.”

Um, thanks.

Didn’t recognize me? How crone-ish did I look exactly?

I am not vain or terribly interested in foo-foo fluffery. I haven’t willing applied make-up since my father’s funeral back in the fall of ’09. My wardrobe is yoga based and aside from deodorant, I steer clear of perfumes – cuz they are poisonous.

But I have always been a bit weird about my hair. Love/hate to be sure because it curls willfully and never cottoned to any style that has ever been popular or trendy. Colour was all that was left to me once I slipped my parent’s yoke and grew it long*, and it didn’t take me long to realize that while my natural red shade set me apart from the herd, being blonde suited me on more levels than simply attention seeking.

I will, therefore, maintain the highlights until such time as my head deigns to grow me stark white tresses. As interventions go, it’s barely extreme. It’s certainly not pulling a Demi Moore, dieting to anorexic proportions with the help of Red Bull.

*My father had this odd thing about our hair being short when we were growing up, which is made stranger by the fact that for a long time he insisted that Mom wear hers long.

On Snooki’s and Former Prom Queens


2012 Republican Presidential Candidates

Image by DonkeyHotey via Flickr

If there is one thing I hate, it’s defending the less defensible of my gender from sexism. In the wake of the apparent upcoming tug of war for the hearts and minds of conservative leaning voters that pundits feel certain that Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann will wage, the stereotypes fly about in the thick and annoying manner of mosquitos on an Alberta late May evening.

The Huffington Post referenced it as “the battle of the Snooki’s” and I stumbled across a blog whose author believes that both Sarah and Michele are hot enough to settle their differences in bikinis and a mud pit.

A friend posted a reference to their combined, and supposed, brainlessness to her Facebook status that elicited a lot of yuks, but I just cringe and sigh.

Why?

Because even though there are easily just as many male politicians with batshit crazy ideas in the GOP, they are seldom the butt of jokes that infer that their gender is to blame.

It’s a given that women in the public spotlight, and especially those that dare to seek political office, can be taken down via their appearance, attacks on their single, married, mother or not choices, and by insinuating that their extra X exerts a difficult for them to control influence over emotions and their ability to think. Men are seldom, if ever, held to such stringent accounts. And so even if Palin and Bachmann are intellectually deficient, and I don’t believe that based on their levels of success, unless the same measures of fitness are applied to male candidates as well, this is not a good plan of attack for those opposed to either woman making a showing in the coming 2012 primary season.

The reason I feel this way is simple. Whatever modus operandi is sanctioned for use against them will be used again and again in the future. It will deter women from entering politics and marginalize or sink those that do.

And Palin and Bachmann are credible threats even if you don’t think much of them, their politics or the religious, conservative and very white-power oriented views they represent. What they are pushing sells and given the dire straits of many Americans – particularly the white working class which feels increasingly left behind and victimized – allowing them, Palin especially, a legitimate access to playing the victim role, is bad strategy.

Underestimating women seeking power roles, in my experience, nearly always bites back hard. Make no mistake that both Palin and Bachmann are in politics for what it brings them and not what they can do for their country, and people like that should be taken seriously.

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