AUDIO: Independence Day, 2008

On this, the fourth day of July, in the year 2008, we find cause to celebrate our vices:

We dedicate this day to that declaration which decreed the end of our subjugation to tyranny and the beginning of our addiction to war; we revel in all 232 glorious years, and it is in commemoration that we unleash facsimiles of rockets and missiles and mushroom clouds into the air above us, to the hushed awe of the crowds huddled in the summer darkness, shivering with explosive thrill at the seductive whisper of our collective power.

We dedicate this day to our addiction to the flesh and bone and blood of our Mother; to $4 a gallon gasoline from the luxurious view afforded us from the windows of our SUVs; to the labor and sweat and crushed souls of those who toil for our convenience across oceans and earth, where, if we cannot easily see, no knowledge of modern slavery will penetrate to trouble our serene national psyche.

We dedicate this day to our Berlin border wall, to the 1,952 mile stretch of desperation and despair, to blind nationalism and xenophobia, because no one born outside these arbitrary borders, truly, can be completely human; we relish our corporate addiction to cheap labor and union busting, to salmonella-laced produce and lead-based toys and always low prices delivered with a brilliant yellow grin.

We dedicate this day to warrantless wiretapping with bipartisan immunity from prosecution, to spying on citizens in the event they should commit thought crimes and rebel; we dedicate this day to American fascism, to Big Brother government with none of the perks, to the Red Scare, to Black Lists and Do Not Fly; we dedicate this day to busting down doors, shoot first ask questions later.

We dedicate this day to the spiritual vacuum left in the wake of postmodernism, pining for the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus and Satan; we gnash our teeth and wail and cry because there is nothing left to believe in except, perhaps, that through war and waste and endless consumption, through wage slavery and sex trafficking and industrial abuse, through blind faith that all is well and a refusal to acknowledge the possibility that anything can and should be different, we will find salvation and we will not rot in Hell.

On this day we find cause to celebrate the occasion of our dependence, and we call ourselves free.

AUDIO: A Call To Arms

This is the Great American Scream, this is the sound of one million disenchanted voices waking from their fairytale slumber to see the devastation laid before them, the havoc and destruction wrought upon us by our fathers and our mothers and their fathers and mothers and each successive preceding generation — back to ancient times when the first woman alive plucked knowledge of right and wrong from the Kabalistic concept they call the Tree of Life, shortly before Manifest Destiny was decreed and Eden was paved over to make way for a Wal*Mart Superstore and a McDonalds, so no one knew what right or wrong was anymore, ever, anyhow.

This is the agony of separation, imaginary friends behind bars like the common thought criminals they are and the real kind virtually imaginary; this is the sound of grandma’s funeral or a dead pet or unrequited love combusting in the ashes of the WTC towers like your own private Hiroshima and that of an entire generation; this is the girl crying out beneath her lover’s expert hands as he manipulates her, contorts her with pleasure and anguish in ways she did not think possible until now; this is the pulse, the breath, the heartbeat, the collective sob, the universal gasp for air underwater; this is the voice that is better seen and not heard; this is ecstasy in anarchy, order in chaos and chaos in order; this is the What Would Jesus Do and Follow the Rules collapsing beneath the colossal weight of their own bullshit; this is a rape victim sentenced to 200 lashes for speaking up about it, this is 70¢ to a man’s dollar, this is fuck-me heels and miniskirts and lipstick and upraised arms with hairy pits brandishing smoldering bras in defiance of the natural order; this is the raised middle finger, the turned back, the Fuck You mingled with ecstatic cries of Fuck Me; this is suicide bombers and Jessica Lynch and Tim McVeigh and Malcolm X; this is the vacant lot of the American Dream, and it has been condemned, boarded up, demolished; this is We Don’t Need No Education remixed by Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold; this is Yeats’ dream of WWIII slouching towards Iraq to be born; this is the thousand eyes of Moloch screaming without mouths, without words, and they are our eyes; this is the children of privilege being marched down the assembly line, realizing that the guillotine gleaming red with the life of every AIDs-infected starving Ethiopian child is still sharp and polished and hungry; this is a divorced single mother whose blood could stop cold in her veins and who could not pay a doctor to keep her from dying, while Congress issues orders to keep a woman who cannot drink or chew or swallow or move with no brain activity alive just in case, while a man’s teeth rot inside his face because nobody cares what happens to you if you don’t have a perfect white Hollywood smile, you might as well crawl into a ditch if you can’t find room at the inn or the shelter, you might as well die.
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Dearest Family,

I am aware that you are concerned about me and only want the best for me, in your limited sense of what “best” means. (Hint: what you accept as “best” is nothing that makes me happy, and, in fact, tends to be exactly that which makes my life most unbearable. See: trying to convince me to waste my time at a vocational school or community college rather than pursuing a degree at an excellent, if expensive, school, in an area which excites me. See: trying to break me up with my boyfriend, who is in fact the reason I am going back to school and who is demonstratively good for me by most objective measures…just not the ones you think are important, apparently.) I appreciate that you genuinely care about me even if you do not understand me and generally give poor, unsolicited advice. I love you anyway, even when I sometimes probably shouldn’t. (See: trying to break me up with my boyfriend. Assholes.)

However, I cannot help but notice the irony of the girl with the terrifying facial piercings and tattoo in a dead-end job with no professional or intellectual aspirations in life lecturing the clean-cut aspiring art and creative writing student about her unprofessional appearance due to her short hair. I cannot also help but notice that the coincidence when this conversation coincides with a recent transphobic diatribe about the aforementioned sister’s distaste for people who defy conventional gender norms and preference for “girls who are feminine” and “men who are masculine”. This, combined with the failure of Congress to recognize that, once again, trans issues are everyone else’s issues, and that gender-nonconformity is in fact a very real area of concern re: discrimination in employment for the cisgendered, results in lectures about my appearance being far more personally hurtful and infuriating than you can possibly realize.

Furthermore, suggested solutions to this issue — “buy a cheap wig” — are laughable.
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There is an amazing post up on the Feminist LJ Community detailing the poster’s childhood experiences growing up fat:

I was often physically assaulted for being a fat kid.

Boys would attack me on the playground, the bus, the classroom when the teacher had her back turned. They’d punch me as hard as they could in the middle of my back and then run away, laughing. I’d go home after school, my arms and legs covered in bruises from where the boys beat me. I’d get yanked around on the school bus by my hair. I would get told that I was fat, ugly and should just die.

I remember one beating, a particularly brutal one. A kid named Kevin told a boy named Scotty that I had written on the back of a bus seat Kelly + Scotty. He was so embarrassed a fat, ugly, “fucked up nasty piece of shit like me” did that, he attacked me in the school lobby and beat me for several minutes until a teacher was able to pry him off me. He screamed, he cursed, he told me how ugly I was, fat, disgusting, and in the principals office, he told me, “Why don’t you just die?”

Go read the whole thing.

Now that we’ve established that, on to a different reason why it matters which has been touched upon but which was tangential to the other point I was trying to make.

Beauty standards are a class issue. I can’t say it better than Winter did a while back, so just go read that post if you want in-depth analysis. It’s also a race issue, and the two are distinct but also connected enough that if I address one I must address the other. I’ll simply try to explain briefly:

American standards of femininity are constructed in a way to be accessible to members of a certain class and ethnicity because they are markers of precisely that. Women are expected to look, at the least, middle-class and As White As Possible, because that’s what has been constructed as attractive and acceptable. It’s a deeply classist and racist system.

Not everyone has the time or money to spend making themselves look acceptably “feminine” all the time. Debates about whether or not some woman is a “bad” feminist for getting a bikini wax are pointless because they ignore the fact that many women can’t afford to pay someone to rip their hair out of them on a regular basis. Good quality cosmetics are expensive. Being acceptably hairless takes time and money, and if you’re poor, that might not be something you can afford to worry about all the time, and if you’re not white, it takes even more time because you might have more hair or darker hair or you might be more prone to ingrown hairs or skin problems from hair removal.

And the problem is that these standards of middle-class, white beauty are spreading. They are expected of every woman, not just the ones who are easily able to attain them. This is deeply harmful to poor women, and women of color; these are not necessarily one and the same but tend to go together. And so, in order to keep her job, a waitress has to waste time and money on cosmetics which might be toxic because it’s not considered a legally undue burden for waitresses to be expected to be “pretty” even though as long as they are clean and pleasant, it should have no impact on their ability to perform their job. This woman might lose her jobs if she doesn’t conform, a very real and negative consequence of how beauty standards are socially enforced. And so we have African-American women frying their hair flat in an effort to avoid social rebuke, Asian women having surgery to make their eyes rounder and more white-looking, and women of color all over the world being permanently poisoned and scarred from the use of chemicals intended to bleach their skin.

This is not okay. A woman forced to choose between spending her money on actual necessities and cosmetics in order to keep her job is not okay. A woman being forced to iron her hair in order to keep her job because “ethnic” hairstyles are considered “unprofessional”, because somehow her body is unacceptable the way it naturally is, is not okay. Being forced to choose between the pursuit of an ideal which is unrealistic and based on the income and often race of a totally different group of people, therefore often unobtainable, and the ability to make a living and live a decent life is not okay.

That’s why the hell it matters.

I’ve been sitting on this post for awhile. I just didn’t have the heart to finish it or post it, but I need to. So, not quite as timely as it could have been since it’s been a little while since the events I address, but…still worth saying.

I’ve been too depressed by recent events in the news to even feel like writing about them — even though these are things which need to be talked about — but what is there to say? Between the recent violent attacks on young girls in my country (I refuse to call them “school shootings”; I’m from Colorado, and this is no Columbine) and our national legislature’s decision to legitimize the Bush administration’s war crimes, I feel too hopeless to even try. Why bother? No one seems to listen or care; things keep getting worse despite the work of all the amazing activists I know. But that’s just temporary burnout talking. Anyone who actually cares, anyone who actually tries to make the world slightly better, will feel like that sometimes. That doesn’t mean I can stop trying; of course, I can’t. Not standing up for what one believes is right makes one complicit in the whole mess.

If nothing else, here’s what I have to say: the fact that, in 2006, in the fucking United States of America, little girls are being killed by grown men simply for the crime of being born female, should tell us that feminism is still necessary. The fact that, in the US, religious conservatives keep pushing their agenda to prevent women from having any sort of control over their own bodies and health — and hey, people, you realize that women take hormones reasons other than the perverse joy they feel at preventing the implantation of possibly-fertilized eggs, right? to treat PCOS and endometriosis and such? and that by denying them their medication based on your moral principles you’re causing them extreme pain and agony for reasons which have nothing to do with your moral objections, not that your moral objections have any legitimacy anyway? — should tell us that feminism is still necessary.

And, of course, it’s not just here. The other day, I heard a report on the radio about how children in Afghanistan attending co-ed schools are receiving death threats, how little girls have been killed for going to school…go ahead, tell me feminism isn’t necessary. Just try to look at that and tell me that we can’t specifically promote the rights of women as human beings, that women and men are equal, that we should be “equalists” instead of “feminists”. Oh, but of course, I forget: we’re not like “them”. This is the US, not the Taliban, and anyway, we’ve liberated the people there, haven’t we…right?

But the people who would point to that as an example of a place where feminism is needed and then claim that US feminism is misguided, misplaced, useless… The way this place is headed, I can see that kind of future as a distinct possibility.* We’ve already fallen too close for comfort. And damned if I’m going to quietly allow myself to be put in a place where I can’t control whether I give birth or how many children I have, where I risk being killed on a daily basis simply for being born female (or not-white, or queer — but then, aren’t we there anyway?).

Those are only the worst extremes of what I’m afraid of. There’s smaller things, more insidious: I live in a place where girls being discouraged or prevented from developing their abilities in certain areas is said to reflect their inherent aptitude; where woman and girls are encouraged to endanger their health or kill themselves in pursuit of an impossible vision of ideal beauty (which seems, by all accounts, to consist of not-exisiting); where if women are not sex objects, they have no value, and if they are sex objects, they have no value. Where women and people of color and everyone who’s just not lucky enough to be born a straight, cisgendered, white male is considered by many to be responsible for their own oppression.

For all these reasons and many, many more: feminism is necessary.

1. I don’t mean this to come across in a “oh my god I don’t want to be like those poor brown women” kind of way, but in a “oh my that’s terrible, I want to help, and I also need to protect my own interests” kind of way. Just in case there’s any confusion.

1. Why is liking to cook a gendered behavior and why is it unfeminist to take care of my house? Because, really, these are practical life skills and something that needs to be done by someone. This isn’t abstract theory. I’d be lying if I claimed there was no pressure whatsoever to take care of my house, but when I’m the only one with the free time to do it and I don’t actually mind, and if my siblings do their chores also and the boys do as much if not more housework than the girls, what exactly is the problem? Christ. You’d think wanting to eat decent home-cooked food or not wanting the kitchen to be buried in dirty dishes was some sort of crime against feminism. (And I’m not even supportive of so-called “choice feminism”!) I mean…really, people, it’s just something that needs to be taken care of, preferably by someone who doesn’t mind taking care of it.

Now when everyone else refuses to clean the litter box, that’s what pisses me off. Which reminds me…ugh.

2. Why are there no decent candidates running for…well, anything? The gubernatorial election in Colorado is specifically what I’m talking about. So there’s the Republican candidate, terrifying in most every way, and the Democrat who, true to the party line, is less evil and doesn’t seem to actually stand for anything without scowling about how he disapproves personally first (see: stance on abortion), and then there’s the Libertarian who is great on women’s issues and gay rights but is, well, Libertarian, and thus whom I cannot vote for in good conscience as the commie I am.

Okay, that’s oversimplifying. Her stance on immigration terrifies me, as does the general Libertarian philosophy regarding social welfare programs, which she definitely supports. Which brings me to the big point: all the candidates have fairly inadequate platforms regarding immigration. This is a big deal to me. I get to hear people using “immigration” as a thinly-veiled pretense for their racism every single day. “Immigration” as an excuse to ignore the complex race and class issues that are actually at the core of the matter. “Immigration” as a front to promote hate speech against not only undocumented workers, but pretty much anyone who vaguely resembles what they imagine lurks south of the border (where everything is Mexico), which includes anyone with darker skin, a Spanish-sounding last name, and/or a funny accent — because if you’re not white you must be “illegal”. No other explanation for it.

And I’m sick to death of this. Beauprez’s the worst; his website from what I’ve seen (and I didn’t linger very long) seems to be fairly tame compared to the propaganda his campaign’s been plastering all over Denver. It’s all xenophobic, reactionary hate speech. That’s all it is. At least Ritter’s only committed to enforcing the laws we already have, punishing companies who hire undocumented workers and the like, which I can support from a legal perspective even if it isn’t particularly useful or humane. (My personal opinions and proposed solutions? Maybe another time.)

I hate feeling these split loyalties. I can’t find a candidate who seems anywhere near decent on all the issues personally important to me: gay rights, women’s rights, immigration, and a general commitment to helping people in poverty you know, not starve or die from preventable illnesses and that kind of thing. The one that’s okay on the first two is terrible on the others. The one that’s more moderate on the last two is not that great on the first two. There was recently a post on the feminist community on LiveJournal urging people to vote for Winkler because she’s unabashedly pro-choice…without realizing that, for some of us affected by other issues, that’s not enough on its own. When I hear people talking about how “Mexicans are less than human” (actual quote) and about what they want to do to “those Hispanics”, you know what? Whether I, the queer Latina girl who mostly doesn’t like guys and isn’t sexually active, can get an abortion is the lesser threat to my immediate wellbeing.

3. If you have to preface a statement with “I’m not racist…” whatever comes out of your mouth next is almost certainly racist, and if not, it’s at the least going to be ignorant, poorly thought-out, problematic, or insensitive. Ditto for “I’m not sexist”, “I’m not homophobic”, etc. I know it’s been said before but it bears repeating.

3. a) If you feel the need to include someone’s race when talking about them in a situation where you would never think of attaching a racial slur if they were white, you’re racist. Sorry. (Or not. Yeah, not sorry.)

3. b) If you don’t want to be around me because you feel “judged” because I think you’re racist, maybe you shouldn’t say racist things. No, I’m not going to feel bad for leveling judgement after you just said something horribly offensive about the ethnic group I happen to, um, belong to. Especially if by “horribly offensive” I’m just trying to be polite about the fact that you just told me you want to commit what would legally constitute a hate crime.

4. Okay, I think I feel better until something else comes to mind.

5. Oh yeah, and I’m going to see the Dalai Lama speak tomorrow and that’s going to be really, really awesome. This isn’t an annoyance…unless maybe we start talking about how I feel about Tibet. I guess that’s another discussion for another time.

Okay, I normally avoid jumping on the feminist blogosphere drama bandwagon, but seriously. It’s so “nice” to know that no matter what kind of work you’ve done, how intelligent you are, or how well-respected, if you are female, you are not allowed to be taken seriously or treated with any amount of dignity:

You know, I was psyched to be invited to this lunch and was feeling pretty honored. But then things like this remind me that no matter what I do or accomplish, because I’m a young woman all I’m good for is fodder for tacky intern jokes and comments that I don’t “represent feminist values” because of the way I posed in a picture.

Pretty much. Unfortunately, it’s worse than that. If you’re an attractive young feminist you can’t be taken seriously because you’re attractive and young. But if you aren’t attractive you also can’t be taken seriously since you’re an ugly man-hating feminist, and you must only care about women’s rights because you’re not pretty and assumed to be insecure. If you’re not pretty enough you’ll get flack for not being good eyecandy no matter how thought-provoking your ideas, and if you’re too pretty you must not have anything valuable to say since we all know intelligent women are never attractive. And so on and so on.

I think someone must really have to hate women in order to think like that. I do.

PS: Since it’s my area of concern at the moment, I think I’ll post some stuff about feminism and fiction writing soon, okay?

I want to live in a world where abortion is just another medical procedure, about as morally-charged as treating a cold or getting your wisdom teeth removed.

Does a tumor have a right to life? It’s the same thing. It’s a clump of cells that siphons off your body’s resources so it can grow. Sure, sometimes a fetus is a wanted parasite, welcomed, even, and I have no issue with that. That’s great. But even when it’s wanted it can take a toll. The body sees a baby as a foreign invader and does everything it can to try to kill it off. Plenty of fertilized eggs don’t even implant. (If we take conception as the moment life begins it means lots of sexually active women have a miscarriage without even realizing it.) A tumor is alive. It has human DNA, even.

The fact is, especially early-on, it’s something that happens all the time, purposely or no. And the baby’s not really a living, thinking thing in anything other than the strictest sense — a glob of cells the size of a pencil eraser. Can you tell me removing an unwanted embryo at that stage is comparable to murder? (As an aside, I think that comparison really minimizes the gravity of murder. A person who has lived years of life is different from something that’s existed for a few weeks or months and hasn’t even experienced anything yet.) It’s not a big deal at this stage. I really believe this.

This is not a “callous” attitude and it’s not disrespect for life. I have an immense respect for all life, which is why I’m anti-war and against the death penalty and try to buy cruelty-free meat and won’t kill a freaking mosquito if I don’t have to, for god’s sake. I have respect for the life of the woman carrying the fetus. I have respect for that woman’s autonomy. And that is why I say it’s not a big deal. People kill bugs all the time and I wish they wouldn’t and it’s something I don’t do, but it’s not a big deal so I don’t try to pass legislation telling them that killing living things just because they’re “pests” is wrong and they can’t do it. Because if you don’t swat that fly, a spider will eat it or something anyway. Everything dies. Small lives are not worth more than large lives, and the converse, respectively. All life is worth immeasurably much. But it’s also not the end of the world when something dies, either, though it can feel like it.

Death is not the worst thing that can happen. Our fear of our own mortality is what makes us feel it is. If we accept that all things die, that we will die, one more death upon the billions this world is built on doesn’t seem so awful. Torture concerns me. Disregard for human rights concerns me. Destruction of the environment concerns me. Injustice concerns me. Rape concerns me. Abuse concerns me. Oppression concerns me. Genocide and murder concern me.

Against those things? A woman deciding she doesn’t want to dedicate the rest of her life to caring for another creature doesn’t really phase me. Some people can’t or don’t want to take care of pets. I respect that decision and encourage them not to purchase one. Having a child is a much heavier and deeper responsibility with lasting repercussions that impact generations of lives. I strongly encourage some people not to have kids, ever.

Mind you, I know it’s a slippery slope, and that’s why I’m not placing conditions. I don’t think one can be pro-choice with conditions or caveats. As long as the thing is still in a woman’s body, I support her right to do whatever the hell she wants with it. I don’t care how far along she is. There are circumstances that sometimes prevent a woman from getting an abortion until it’s too late, until after the point when it’s no longer legal, when their intention was never to carry it to term. I think these women should not be punished due to factors which prevented them from aborting sooner. Some people will cut off at a certain date, when they think abortion is no longer permissible, and I think this is usually arbitrary. It’s often based on exactly when that particular person thinks an embryo is human enough for its death to qualify as murder.

I think an embryo’s always human. (Now, when it becomes a person, that’s debatable.) To deny that would be silly. And abortion is always killing a living thing, but I don’t see why that’s a huge issue given the undeniable realities of physical existence — living things always die. (We cannot live without killing. Even vegans eat plants. Even if we could invent a machine to synthesize food that’s never been alive, chances are it would have an environmental impact. There’s no way around this. As far as I’m concerned, there doesn’t need to be. Curing any disease is killing something, usually millions of microscopic somethings.) Life isn’t perfect and it’s not lasting and it’s really not as huge a deal as people make it out to be. Life at all costs is a short-sighted philosophy that ignores, I think, the impact of what’s really important: quality of life.

Living life by a rigid standard of ethics, denying relativism and pragmatism entirely…it may survive some philosopher’s purely logical standard of what is absolutely morally acceptable, but what is right is not always what is Absolutely Good. Nothing can ever be perfect. Utilitarianism isn’t any better a standard than this, either, and neither is hedonism, so I’m not endorsing either. I just think what is right depends. It depends on the situation, the circumstance, the people.

All we can do is what causes the least suffering, if in fact such a thing is feasible or practical. If not, we’re not perfect and we’re not all-powerful. We just are. We’re animals with an inflated sense of self-worth and our impact on the universe around us. If a God existed, would ze care, really, what we do and do not do? Does ze care about morals and ethics, if ze is really all-knowing, unconditionally loving, all-powerful? I doubt it. Everything can be forgiven. Better yet, mistakes in an absolute moral sense don’t need to be forgiven. There’s nothing, in a great cosmic sense, wrong with them.

We participate in and condone killing every day and it’s not in the sense of cold-blooded murder, it just is. Why is this any different? There is no reason it should be different that doesn’t buy into the idea that humans are inherently superior to animals, plants, bacteria. And I honestly don’t think we are. This attitude of mine is only a disregard for life if you accept that smaller lives don’t matter. As I don’t…what’s the problem? Where is the moral dilemma?

As for my unconditional support of choice, don’t give me that I-support-abortion-but-not-as-birth-control bullshit. What else is it? It’s a form of birth control. Did you mean to say “in place of contraception”? And if so, why? What about women who can’t take hormonal birth control (my sisters, my mother, me)? What about women who can’t afford it (again, were I in a position to be having penis-in-vagina sex, probably me)? What’s the litmus test here to see if a woman is deserving? If she used multiple forms of birth control perfectly and they all failed? It’s okay then? Is it only okay once? If birth control fails twice in ten years is that okay?

You can’t know another’s circumstances. Don’t judge. It’s not up to you to decide. The choice, in all likelihood, has absolutely nothing to do with you. Keep your nose out of it.

And if it is because a woman just didn’t take precautions…just because she doesn’t want a child, even if she could afford to care for it… So? Why is a woman obligated to become a mother? Why is anybody who does not want a child for any reason obligated to have one? Aren’t there enough people in the world? Do we need more? Why is this an issue, other than as a form of control over women’s bodies, women’s lives?

I want to live in a world where a woman’s decision to have an abortion is nobody’s business. I want to live in a world where anti-choice attitudes are not the accepted norm and are instead a radical fringe philosophy that normal people find horrifying. I want to live in a world where abortion is cheap, easy to access, and available whenever a woman needs one.

That is not the world we live in now, no matter what the anti-choice propaganda says.

I’m not in a good mood, and I’m just musing and venting. I do not want to debate this, and this post is not an invitation to debate. Thank you.

Whenever the topic of using non-offensive language comes up, someone invariably objects on one of two grounds:

1. I’m somehow impinging upon their freedom of speech.

This one is ridiculous since making suggestions about how to more politely communicate their points, especially to people who claim to care about anti-oppression work (which is really who my writing is targeted at — if I realize someone doesn’t care I’m not really going to bother explaining why racism, etc. is bad), is very different from me somehow forcing them not to use those words, which I clearly don’t have the ability to do. And I’m not threatening violence on someone who disagrees with me, which is more than I can say for some of the anti-feminists who’ve left comments on my blog. I’m also not going to go and actively harass other people online with whom I disagree until they change their opinions/language, which is also more than can be said for some people. They can say things if they really want to. I just don’t necessarily respect that choice of words. Just because I think everyone should be allowed to express an opinion doesn’t mean I have to agree.

Contrary to what some seem to believe, I highly value freedom of speech. Believe me, as someone who wants to pursue a professional career in writing, I appreciate the ideal probably more than most people will ever have a real reason to. (Being locked up or killed for publishing something the government doesn’t agree with? Yeah, that would be pretty bad and I’m glad that I’ll hopefully never have to deal with that. Being told by some random person on LiveJournal that you’ve offended them? Not so much.) But freedom of speech is not freedom from criticism, and freedom of speech is also responsibility for the words that one uses. I will call people on offensive language, language that hurts or demeans or perpetuates harmful attitudes and stereotypes — including my allies. People need to take responsibility for their actions, and that includes their words. Words are a powerful tool and people are sometimes entirely too careless with them. I “misinterpreted” you? That’s “not what you meant”? Say what you actually mean, then. Or try to, and if I still misinterpret you, clarify.

I have a firm belief that people need to actually say what they mean, rather than resorting to slang and curse words and hoping that people understand their intent and sympathize with it. It’s lazy at best, and that’s my non-judgmental assessment of the behavior.

2. There are no other words in the English language that will suffice except for those which are horribly offensive.

I’ve heard it all. Apparently “if we took out all the words in the English language that people find offensive we wouldn’t have any useful adjectives, adverbs, or nouns”. (Not an exactly word-for-word quote, but paraphrasing a sentiment I’ve seen more than once on various forums.) Besides being totally hyperbolic, I think that if people’s vocabulary is so limited that they can’t find any other words to describe a woman they don’t like besides “bitch”, that they either don’t have a very good grasp of language (which is unfortunate but not an excuse) or they aren’t particularly imaginative. Expressing this judgment has hurt some feelings, but I stand by it, because the English language has lots and lots of words in it. Use them.

You don’t need to call someone “crazy” and further stigmatize the mentally ill. There are already words which connote that someone is making an illogical argument, or a fallacious statement. You don’t need to call someone a “bimbo” or a “slut” since those are value judgments quite often based on someone’s appearance or dress and thus shouldn’t be relevant anyway. Et cetera. Lather, rinse, repeat. There are probably hundreds of different ways to express your ideas in equally powerful language that doesn’t have the side-effect of insulting others or expressing misogynistic, racist, etc., attitudes.

The other side of this argument is really what I want to get at: people argue that they simply have to insult people in order to adequately express themselves. You see, they have a need to assume that a woman is a “slut” or has an eating disorder just from looking at her. It’s absolutely integral to their argument against Ann Coulter that they make assumptions about her physical sex (namely, implying that she’s post-op MtF, because being trans is the worst thing in the world or something); it’s not enough that she’s a hypocrite who doesn’t bother to actually research anything she talks about. Similarly, one simply cannot discuss Hillary Clinton’s politics without bringing in unfounded assumptions about her sexual orientation. It’s totally central to the argument. It is, after all, impossible to actually discuss a person based on their ideas or actions. No one can do that. We need those words. We need to be able to make unfounded judgments and insult people rather than encourage critical thought.

Also, some people seem to argue that they need to be able to use “gay” or “retarded” as a synonym for “stupid”. Actually communicating why you disliked a movie, perhaps found it dull, is impossible. There’s this ephemeral quality to something that makes it “gay” that merely saying “this subject doesn’t interest me” doesn’t quite capture. Something transcending mere disinterest, dislike, or frustration.

People have an unalienable right to be insulting for no reason, with no actual relevance to the sentiment they’re expressing, just because they can, without being questioned about it. This, truly, is the American Dream. The ideal the founding fathers meant to capture when they penned the US constitution was obviously that people be able to make insulting and pejorative remarks at any time with no repercussions, because the only way to actually communicate is through direct and indirect ad hominem attacks. Freedom of speech isn’t about protecting those who disagree with the government or popular ideals. It’s just about people’s right to be insulting.

Uh huh. Okay. Forgive me my lack of sympathy for the fact that already put-upon people would like it if you stopped making their lives and identities synonymous with whatever negative concept you’re trying to express. Somehow I think you can survive.