Mary Wollstonecraft's Open Salon Blog

Heather Michon, Can 'Slut' Be Reformed? Repost

Wed, 2 May 2012 04:05:53 -0400

Here is the link to Heather's editor's pick:

"We might as well own it, right?"

This is the new battle cry of Sluts Across America, a crowdsourcing website that wants to take the steaming cowpies dropped by Rush Limbaugh and his fellow travelers and form a "collective voice of the women and men in this country who use or support birth control, and are sick of being judged because of our desire to be responsible and safe about our sexual health."

"If protecting ourselves makes us sluts, then it's time to redefine what "slut" actually means."

Judging by the number of responses on the site, they have found large and willing audience. It's also on the verge of becoming a part of the wider efforts of groups like SlutWalk, which has made the reappropriating of "slut" a cornerstone of their movement.

Slut: A Linguistic History

Slut is an old gal, dating back well over a half a millennium old, and her meaning has changed in shape and form over the centuries.

Most scholars cite Thomas Hoccleve's poem "The Letter of Cupid" in 1402 as the first use of slut in English, but it got its start much earlier. Linguists find its roots all around the North Sea during the Middle Ages: among them the Icelandic slottr, the Swedish slata, the Dutch slodde and the Irish slaodaire.

Slut and its Germanic cousins originally meant things like lazy, dirty, idle, sloppy. It was not sexual, nor exclusively applied to females. ("Why is thy lord so sluttish, I thee pray," asks one of Geoffrey Chaucer's characters in The Canterbury Tales, wanting to know why one of the wealthy pilgrims was so slovenly dressed.) But around the time it arrived in English, it attached itself almost exclusively to women, usually kitchen or scullery maids.

The first known use of slut as a pejorative for a sexually promiscuous woman appeared around 1450. No mystery as to why; by the end of the Middle Ages, the basic Western views of women's sexuality had hardened into a form we might find all-too-familiar today. The veneration of the Virgin Mary and vilification of the sinful Eve defined the boxes into which all women were sorted.

So it's little wonder that slut was applied to women seen as morally, rather than just physically, dirty. This dual meaning walked hand-in-hand, right into the 20th Century, where its physical meaning fell away and its moral meaning flourished along with the sexual revolutions of the new century.

Reclaiming Slut

So slut has expanded a bit over time - but does that mean it can be turned into a positive?

Reappropriating derogatory words is not a new concept. From the Roundheads and sans-coulottes of the 17th and 18th Centuries to the queers and dykes of the late 20th Century to the Guidos of the Jersey Shore, there's almost no political, religious, ethnic or social group that hasn't attempted to take the sting out of hate language by turning it into a badge of honor.

Feminists have been intermittently trying to reclaim slut since at least the 1980s.

Oxford feminist linguist Deborah Cameron wrote about it in her 1992 book "Feminism and Linguistic Theory." While she was supportive of the goal of reappropriating language, she clearly saw the net result as futile. "We cannot simply change a word's meaning for the whole community by fiat," she argued. That's not how language works. The meaning is held in the intent of the speaker.

If you hurl the word slut as an epithet, it's a epithet. If you use it as a term of honor or endearment, it's a term of honor or endearment. But at the end of the day, it still means what it means to the person that's using it.

Slut is a particular challenge, both because of its longevity and its ubiquity. (A quick Google search alone finds 480 million hits for the word.) Strip away all the history and you're still left with a word which literally means "dirty." It's unlikely that any amount of protest signs or t-slogans or marches or websites can make it "clean."

This is not to say that the efforts to reclaim it are meaningless. Far from it: slut has spent the last six centuries being used as a rhetorical club against women, and finally women are able to use it to club right back. That is progress. Maybe we can't reform slut, but if we make it a useful tool in our feminist arsenal, maybe we can make all the pain and humiliation the word had wrought somehow more worthwhile.

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She Looked on Tempests and Was Never Shaken

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 14:04:34 -0400

My mom died April 9, 2004 at the age of 82.. My then 24-year -old daughter Katherine Hawkins wrote this amazing tribute to a feminist before her time immediately after her death.

The dark-haired girl in the photograph, wearing her first communion shawl and holding her prayer book, looks to me like she can't possibly be only eight years old. She also can't possibly be only eighteen in the high school yearbook picture--she's much too grown up looking.

And she certainly can't have been younger than I am now when this wedding picture was taken:

This is partly because she was always tall for her age, and an earlier developer than I was. But I think it's mostly because the girl in these pictures has the same face as my grandmother. Grandma Mary as an eight year old girl, a high school senior, or a twenty three year old bride, just does not compute. She'll always look like my grandma to me

The same thing happened when I started writing this. I know that Mary Virginia Nolan Koch was one of the most generous and strongest people I've ever met. I know how much all of, and especially me and my mom and my sisters, owe to her. But when I try to come up with specific memories to show these things—I knew it wouldn't be possible to do her justice, but I'm not even coming close. Instead I'm coming up with stories about oddly shaped Christmas trees with plastic disco ball ornaments, shelves full of "No Frills" brand products, and a series of cats named "cat." And what set me tearing up was not seeing her in the hospital--Grandma struggling for breath in a hospital bed does not compute any more than Grandma as an eight year old computes--but seeing a bright orange volkswagen bus on the Massachusetts Turnpike last Tuesday. (For many years my parents took the orange camper all over the East coast.)

I can't possibly describe the woman she was, so I'll leave that to someone else. I knew her as my Grandma, and I knew her best when I was a kid or a teenager, and that seems to be the only way I can write about her. So. Here is the best composite sketch I can come up with:

She enters the room, and calls out “greetings, greetings.” (Or, if it’s our house in Baldwin, she shakes her head, says “chaos, chaos”, and promptly misplaces her purse.) She is always, always moving—that’s the first thing you have to know about her. This occasionally verges on the absurd--she used to do laps around McDonald’s by the side of the highway on long trips, and I remember Aunt Sherry once whispering to me “right, no more coffee for you”, as Grandma completed her fourth circuit of the kitchen and stairs on a rainy day in New Woodstock. And when she breaks more bones in the course of a year than the typical casualty rate of a Koch ski trip, or you’re trying to pack up your college doom room, it’s downright unnerving.

But for the most part it’s a very good thing. I don’t know how many countries she went to, or how many lobbying trips to Washington D.C., but I remember our trip to France together; and her descriptions of how Ted Kennedy’s new wife seemed to be doing him good, and which Congressmen were decent guys in spite of being Republicans. And I’ve more than lost count of the times she took my sisters and me to the pool, or the beach, or to visit one of our relatives.

She also took us into New York City a lot, but the trip to Manhattan I remember the best was the least successful. I was in eighth or ninth grade, and Molly was in fourth or fifth. Grandma took the two of us and my sister’s best friend into New York for Patricia’s birthday. We were going to Central Park and a museum, I think—I’m not sure because we never got there.

The Long Island Railroad was too expensive, and parking in Manhattan was right out, so she would drive to a municipal parking lot in Queens where you could park all day for $2, and then walk ten minutes or so to the subway—I don’t remember which station, somewhere near the end of the E line. This time, though, our meter was broken. I suggested we move to another space, but she was not willing to waste those quarters, so she wrote a note and taped it to the parking meter. Unfortunately, in the confusion, she left her car keys sitting on the driver’s seat—she realized this somewhere under the streets of Manhattan.

We turned around, and no one had broken the window or stolen the car. But here, I thought, was an object lesson for Grandma—moderation in all things, including frugality. She’d have to pay for a locksmith, which cost much more than the extra quarters or, God forbid, a train ticket.

She did no such thing. Instead she asked a rough looking young man on a nearby sidewalk to help her break into her car. He was happy to assist. When he could not get the door open, he called over a friend. Who said, after a few more unsuccessful attempts to pick the lock, that what they really needed was a crowbar, but since he didn’t have his around and Grandma was not crazy about that, they’d better ask another friend. Who said, and I quote, “what we really need is a Puerto Rican.”

I don’t know whether they found a Puerto Rican, and I don’t remember how long we stood there, Grandma smiling encouragingly and offering occasional advice, or how many neighborhood kids were debating the best way to break into a Toyota Camry by the end—it’s probably somewhat exaggerated in my memory. I can tell you that in the end, the simple yet elegant coat-hanger-through-the-window-to-pull-up-the-button-technique did the trick.

The lock suffered some damage from the good samaritans’ enthusiastic efforts, but you could get the door open more often than not. And from then on, we parked in the driveway of a high school friend of Grandma’s—10 minutes further away from a subway station even further down the E line, but $2.00 cheaper than the municipal lot and much less risk of a break in.

(As I was writing all of that, I realized---it’s not quite accurate to say she was always moving. I just remembered the nights in Henry Street when she would tuck us in, and tell us to lie still and imagine we were floating on a cloud. There were also her “yoga,” excuse me, "yoger” exercises. But if I ever want to finish this, I should move on, so….)

She was incredibly smart, and incredibly interested in the world around her—whether it was the history of the China lobby or when any of her nieces, nephews and grandchildren would finally, in her words “find yourself a mate>"

She also had the strongest faith of anyone I’ve ever known. Maybe it was that combination, that fierce intellect and that certain belief and trust in God, that made her so strong. Much more often than not her beliefs coincided with the Catholic Church, but when they differed she was not shy about saying so…On most of the many nights I slept over at the house on Henry Street, I wore a polyester blend, 1970s issue T-shirt that said in glittery bubble letters “When God Created Man, She Was Only Joking.” And I remember her telling me about sneaking in inclusive language in her frequent readings at St. Martha’s, much to the new parish priest’s chagrin.

And on the much more frequent occasions when her children and grandchildren did something she disapproved of—she let us know in no uncertain terms, but there was never a single moment’s doubt that she loved and accepted us anyway. I’ll always think of her when I read these lines from Shakespeare’s 116^th sonnet:

“Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken.”

I know, it’s a love poem—and a truly bizarre choice for a description of one’s grandmother. But—getting back to photographs, and with apologies for the embarrassment this may cause certain unnamed relatives of mine--I defy you to find a better or funnier illustration of Shakespeare’s words than this picture of Grandma Mary, Grandpa Joe, and their wayward offspring in 1974:

She was in many ways a third parent to me. I think I’ve spenmore time with my husband at this point, but I’m not at all sure of that. She was someone who could be counted on absolutely, without question or condition. She looked on tempests and was never shaken, and I’m not only talking about my uncles’ hairdos when I say that. I don’t think I’ve ever owed as much to, or cared as much about, anyone to whom I expressed it so little. But she was not the most demonstrative person either, so maybe she knew. I lack her certainty about God and heaven, but I hope very much that she knows now.

Mary Joan Koch

Resurrecting Mary Wollstonecraft

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 14:04:46 -0400

Mary Wollstonecraft has been silent for two years. Feminism, sexism, misogyny, misandry (male bashing) dominate the news more than they did two years ago.

So I am trying to resurrect Mary once again. MW is a group blog. If you want to be a contributor, private message me or email redstockinggrandma45@gmail.com for the login and password.

Interviews with OS bloggers were the best part of this blog. Please let me know if you would like to be interviewed.

I will be asking writers for permission to repost their excellent writings on these subjects. Please give these posts another chance to be appreciated.

Mary Joan Koch/aka Redstocking Grandma

Open Call--Feminism and Motherhood

Fri, 11 Jun 2010 06:06:31 -0400

I am working on a book that I have been thinking about for 37 years, since I gave birth to my first child--Feminism and Motherhood. I would love to interview other mothers who consider themselves feminists. It would be even better if you write your own post on the subject or interview your daughters, nieces, granddaughters..

In the heady days of early Manhattan feminism, when I was a Redstocking, very few leaders had children or planned to have them. If they were mothers, would child care have become even more crucial an issue than abortion?

Please email redstockinggrandma45@gmail.com or private message me on my Redstocking Grandma blog if you are interested in being interviewed. Don't private message Mary Wollstonecraft. Since she is everyone, no one responds to the private messages here.

I know motherhood changed everything for me, but I have always been and will always be a feminist. Rather shockingly, the highly educated, professional women of my 4 daughters' generation often feel we live in a post-feminist era until they have their first child.

For my book I hope to interview my daughters, my nieces, and their friends. I still have the journal I kept from 1971, when I dropped out of Columbia Law School, to 1973, when I got pregnant with my first daughter. I have started to reread the feminist classics that shaped my generation.

Mary Joan Koch

Hatred of Men II

Fri, 2 Apr 2010 22:04:39 -0400

Matthew DeCoursey

Cross-posted from my own blog, here.

Since writing about misandry in marywollstonecraft a couple of months ago, I’ve been watching the news on the Internet, and, you know, the situation is worse than I thought.

Consider the flap over Sandra Bullock and the supposed Oscar curse. If by some insane chance you missed it, the general idea is that women who win Oscars supposedly lose their husbands very soon. There was commentary on this saying, appropriately enough, that this looks like a way of discouraging women from trying to be successful. But consider how it portrays men! Apparently, we have no consideration or loyalty, but respond to women’s successes as if we were four years old, jealous because the other kid got the red crayon. I suppose we do have irrational envy sometimes–we are men, after all, and not angels–but nothing obliges us to act on such feelings. Feelings like that enter into a complex, existing structure of feeling and thought. We are not rats in a maze.

One Amy Jenkins, writing in The Independent, comments on a new film about a female assassin. Under the heading “The Fantasy that is Violent Women,” she writes, “women really don't go around murdering people.” It is certainly true that a huge majority of women never murder anybody–but the same is actually true of men. She remarks at the end of the article that “only 5 to 15 per cent of violent crimes against the person are committed by women. That's a tiny proportion.” All right, if .01 percent of men commit a murder, and .001 percent of women, what conclusions can we draw about the sexes? Well, none, really. The male figure may be ten times the female figure, but both are so small that no generalizations about the sexes can be drawn from them. Ms. Jenkins seems to be objecting to an image that conflicts with her self-image as a woman. This would be fine, except that she is implicitly slandering men to make her point.

The stereotype of men as violent depends considerably on the view of testosterone as simply, always and forever promoting aggressive behaviour. There’s a problem, though. This is only problematically true even of rats. With human beings, it is not clear that it is true at all. Some men, and some women, will say, “Men just are that way, because of the testosterone, so live with it.” But that is not an answer. If we are reduced to the supposed aggression in our blood, we are not human beings. The men who use this defence must, I think, be self-hating, defeatist people, willing to destroy social respect for them as human beings in the name of a freedom which, in the real world, would be lonely and destructive. They are living a life of appalling fantasy. They feed into women’s fears and gain nothing worthwhile from it. Women who say the same are living in a world of fantasy too, potentially condemning themselves to isolation from half the human race.

Once again prominent in the US blogosphere is a perennial image: A girl gets drunk at a frat house party and is raped, or claims she has been raped. There always seem to be endless discussions about the girl’s responsibility or otherwise for what happened to her. This is true even when the point is raised as hypothetical, as in a recent article in the student newspaper of American University. A now-famous Alex Knepper writes,

"Let’s get this straight: any woman who heads to an EI party as an anonymous onlooker, drinks five cups of the jungle juice, and walks back to a boy’s room with him is indicating that she wants sex, OK? To cry “date rape” after you sober up the next morning and regret the incident is the equivalent of pulling a gun to someone’s head and then later claiming that you didn’t ever actually intend to pull the trigger."

(I gather EI must be a fraternity.) The portrayal of men in this anecdote, as in all versions of the frat-house-date-rape thing, is problematic. The man appears as driven by his nature (testosterone?) to want sex with a girl who is apparently barely coherent, on the point of passing out at any moment, and who might throw up on you during the act. This also is defended–even by men!–as just arising from male nature. This is the same direct nature-to-act link that makes it seem as if men have no conscious decision-making power.

So men want sex with women, regardless of the circumstances. They respond aggressively at slight provocation. They have tantrums if their women are more successful than they are. And, though I haven’t got into the examples here, it appears that men are driven by evolutionary psychology to have sex with as many women as possible, and men who stick to one woman are just eunuchs.

All of these things have in common a direct link from the supposed “animal drives” to action, and in effect an assertion that men are unable to make decisions for themselves.

That is hatred of men.