#julia penelope

[dworkin-dork]

Checking out shoes when looking for Lesbians is an elimination device, a negative marker. Lesbians wear sensible shoes whenever possible. Irene and I have learned to pass right by a woman who looks like a Lesbian from head to ankle, but wears flimsy shoes with pointed toes and heels. She is sure to mention a husband by her second sentence.

Julia Penelope

[haggishlyhagging]

I arranged to have lunch with an acquaintance to discuss her comments on a manuscript of mine. A couple of days after we'd made the appointment, the manuscript and her comments appeared in my mailbox with a note that said, "Thought I'd just send these and make it easier all around!" Because I wanted to be sure that I was accurately interpreting the meaning of her statement, I called her to confirm my guess that what she'd meant was, "I'm cancelling our lunch date!"

What factors do we consider when we choose to say something other than exactly what we mean? I can understand why men prefer the word "pedophilia" to saying "I rape children," why generals talk about "neutralizing the enemy" instead of how many soldiers were killed, why politicians prefer legislation that deals with "domestic violence" rather than "wife beating." Euphemism and other forms of oblique discourse serve the interests of the powerful. Any use of language that directs our attention away from the violence men do when they assert their power over other people enables them to deny their agency and responsibility for what they do. At the same time, oblique language enables women to pretend that they don't know what men are doing. If we remain "unaware" of male violence, we don't have to challenge them and, in this way, avoid the possibility of yet more male violence.

But what motivates us to use oblique language among ourselves, particularly in private situations where there is no audience to judge the relative merits of our behaviors? Why should those of us who are without social and political power perpetuate male forms of discourse? What is our investment in not saying what we mean? Using my friend's statement, I'll speculate. We don't say what we mean when we don't want to be honest. We don't want to be honest if we believe we won't like the results. Lying is a way of avoiding conflict. My friend didn't want to discuss whether or not we'd have lunch. As a discourse tactic, not saying what she meant was a way of exercising power over me without having to be responsible for her decision. She had decided she didn't want to have lunch with me, knew that she had to inform me of her decision without giving me an opportunity to ask her why she'd changed her mind, and was confident that I'd decipher her intention accurately. Being oblique gave her a way to inform me of her decision without discussing it; she made a unilateral decision that involved both of us without giving me an opportunity to argue whether we should have lunch. She reserved to herself all the power in the situation and invalidated any idea I might have had that we had a relationship in which we could discuss the pros and cons of having lunch together.

The meanings and results of her language are clearer than her motivations for it, but indicating some of the possibilities will illustrate why we have to say what we mean to each other. Two elements of her statement alerted me to hidden meaning: just, which downplayed the significance of her decision, and make it easier all around. With "all around" she suppressed explicit mention of the two of us. Her omission of explicit reference to her own agency was also important, but it didn't affect my interpretation. It was her choice of the adjective easier, because she didn't explain who her decision made "it easier" for, that told me she was trying to avoid saying something. Since I had had no part in the decision, I wasn't the beneficiary of easier. She was. How did her decision make "it" easier for her, though? Maybe she didn't want to have lunch on that day or something more important had come up and she didn't want to discuss the change in plans. Maybe she thought I'd be angry, disappointed, or annoyed by a change in plans, and she didn't want to deal with how I might feel about her decision. Maybe she doesn't like me and spoke obliquely to put me off; that way, she didn't have to be responsible for what she felt. Maybe she was angry at me about something l'd done or said and being oblique enabled her to cancel our lunch without discussing her feelings with me. Perhaps she thought I didn't want to have lunch with her, and using easier was her way of claiming that her decision was motivated by concern for me. Or, her self-esteem may be so low that she thought I didn't want to have lunch with her and, in order to avoid my hypothetical rejection, she cancelled our lunch before I could. Whatever her motivation, her goal was avoiding a situation she believed would be painful for her, and she succeeded.

-Julia Penelope, Speaking Freely: Unlearning the Lies of the Fathers’ Tongues

[haggishlyhagging]

[Hag’s note: The newly-created word “unalive” sprung to mind while reading the first paragraph of this section.]

Euphemizing what speakers perceive to be negative or repugnant aspects of the world is a familiar discourse tactic, and I've discussed it at various points in this book. Euphemisms pretty up people, objects, behaviors, and events perceived by members of a culture as bad, immoral, or terrible, and they allow us to distance ourselves conceptually from "them." We forget that we are "they." To gauge the degree of repugnance with which people perceive someone or something, we need only count how many euphemisms are available in the language. Death and dying, for example, aren't perceived as celebratory events in western cultures, and we have numerous euphemisms to avoid mentioning death explicitly: "pass away," "gone to one's reward,' "pushing up daisies," "gone to heaven," "meeting St. Peter," "crossed the final bridge."

Poverty and aging are also aspects of the real world speakers euphemize. In a society that boasts of the wealth only a few actually enjoy, poor people are a repugnant embarrassment, and expressions that suppress explicit reference to the people who live in poverty proliferate apace with superficial attempts to provide them with better living conditions: "the poor," "the poverty-stricken," "the homeless," "the economically disadvantaged." These descriptions make both victims and agents invisible as people and hide the fact that the structure of u.s. society perpetuates poverty. Poverty itself is an abstraction made purposeful agent in poverty-stricken, in which the human agents and victims are suppressed, as though the condition "struck" the unnamed. Because PUD values youth, or the appearance of youth, especially in women, English provides euphemisms for aging that hide our underlying fear of the process: "the elderly," "senior citizens," "advanced in age," and "over the hill." Many people believe that whatever they refuse to talk about doesn't exist or is less real and euphemism is one device for avoiding whatever realities they wish to deny.

Neil Postman has maintained that "euphemisms are a means through which a culture may alter its imagery and by doing so change its style, its priorities, and its values" (1982, 262), but, as the editors of Time magazine observed, "the persistent growth of euphemism . . . represents a danger to thought and action, since its fundamental intent is to deceive" (1982, 256). But western culture perceives some aspects of reality as so horrible that euphemizing them is virtually impossible, and the descriptions that follow these negative concepts dehumanize the people victimized by them. One of those things-that-cannot-be-euphemized is the idea of being incapacitated or disabled in some way. The words and phrases that describe physical limitations reflect the negative attitudes we've learned. We think of being able to do something as normal, and being incapable as inherently negative. Mobility is positively valued; immobility is negative. Conceptually, able/not able are fixed in a binary, either/or relation in which ability to perform is assumed. The way we conceptualize abilities focuses our vocabulary negatively on what we cannot do, on what we lack, rather than what we can do. When all or part of our bodies can't perform in ways thought of as normal, we are described as disabled. There are no positive ways of thinking or talking about the abilities of people who have physical or anatomical limitations; what they can't do becomes their only identifying characteristic and their many other qualities are conceptually suppressed.

People who cannot perform one physical activity or another are thought of as "defective" or "deformed." They are "disabled," "crippled," "handi-capped," or "physically-challenged." We have no positive ways to describe something we cannot do. There aren't even any neutral terms in the English vocabulary. The only phrases that point us toward a different way of thinking about the range of human abilities are "differently abled," and the acronym T.A.B.s, 'temporarily able-bodied', which reminds the able-bodied that an automobile accident, a fire or disease may make them suddenly unable to perform acts they take for granted. Being able is good; being unable is bad, and the idea that there are events in our lives we cannot control frightens us. Yet, there are areas of our lives over which we don't have control, and some disabled people consider the phrase "differently abled" to be a ridiculous euphemism because there are things they cannot do and this fact is a reality of their lives they have to deal with every day. Euphemizing their reality doesn't change their lives; shifting the focus away from what they can't do to what they can is a useless pretense. As Catherine Odette has commented, saying that she is "differently abled" suggests that she's able to perform differently, that, instead of walking up a hill, she can fly to the top.

-Julia Penelope, Speaking Freely: Unlearning the Lies of the Fathers’ Tongues

[haggishlyhagging]

Men have, however, appropriated for themselves positive references for the female-specific reproductive process in metaphorical extensions of the vocabulary that they attribute to thinking and learning. Given the fact that men have cherished for millenia the idea that they alone are capable of thinking, it is ironic that they should preempt birth as a vehicle. Men say that they"conceive ideas" and "give birth" to inventions. For example, in his Introduction to the Oresteia, Robert Fagles (1975) described what he called "the pregnancies of Aeschylus's style" and characterized the language of the play as "giving birth to a new drama and a new poetic voice" (36-37).

In spite of this appropriation of the birth process, other common metaphors simply extend the cultural asymmetries of mother and father as verbs. Although some countries are called "the motherland," others, like Germany, are "the fatherland," and the primacy of fatherhood is emphasized in numerous expressions so common we forget that they're figures of speech. Once men "conceive" of ideas, they are described as seminal. Men disseminate information to students attending their seminars. There are no "ovular ideas" and we don't "ovulate information," even though the [- male] metaphor would be more accurate. In those long genealogical lists of the old testament, only the males who "begat" and their sons are named; the women and daughters who must have participated remain nameless and invisible.

Men talk about 'the fathers" of a country, wax eloquent about building on the "wisdom of their fathers and forefathers" and living by "the rules set down by their fathers." They honor each other's "brainchildren" by saying so-and-so was "the father of American parasitologists" or "the father of the Cocktail Age." Although the predicate semantics of English treats the verb as a single, instantaneous event, the noun extends metaphorically throughout the social structure. The fathers become the creators, like Zeus, who bring forth and define ideas and objects for all time, whereas the verb mother is socially defined as a nurturing activity that takes place within the limited, localized context of the female domain. Rarely, if at all, is an outstanding woman similarly hailed. "Necessity may be the mother of invention" but invention, according to PUD, belongs to men. The male domain, in contrast, isn't only global, it's cosmic. C. S. Lewis (1964) admired the novelist George MacDonald because he learned from his father that "Fatherhood must be at the core of the universe" and taught that "the relation of Father and Son is of all relations the most central" (5).

-Julia Penelope, Speaking Freely: Unlearning the Lies of the Fathers’ Tongues

[haggishlyhagging]

English speakers have a set of [+ male] predicates for penile activities and what can be done to the penis: father, sire, beget, impregnate, penetrate, ejaculate, castrate, fertilize, deflower, inseminate and emasculate. There is no semantically symmetrical set of predicates for activities performed by or to the clitoris, labia majora or minora. Male perceptions and activities dominate the sex-marked predicates, which is, perhaps, the structural reason they are a fixed set, closed to women. The semantic structure reflects social reality: men take over whatever they like from the women's sphere with impunity. Indeed, they think of such acquisitiveness as their right and prerogative.

Shut out of agency in sex-marked predicates, women must rely on nouns and multisyllabic phrases to describe our experiences. What we have are nominals—clitoridectomy, infibulation, excision, and hysterectomy (since women's genitalia are categorized not as sexual parts of our anatomy but as reproductive "equipment," "plumbing")—or phrases in which the predicate is one of the helping or semantically empty verbs: to get/be aroused, to get/ be excited, to get/be hot, to have an orgasm. But none of those phrases is uniquely [- male]. If anything, they are sex-neutral, and both sexes use them. I would suggest, however, that as women have acknowledged they have sexual feelings and decided they want to talk about them, they have borrowed already available, formerly [+ male] terms. Thus, lacking a female-specific word like ejaculate, women have begun to use the noun orgasm as a verb: "I orgasmed all night."

In fact, a woman's sexual experience and feelings are nonexistent if we believe that the English vocabulary describes reality, because there are no [- male] words for sexuality. There are hundreds of words and phrases for male sexuality and what men do to women; the slang vocabulary of English reflects the male's obsession with his penis and its "'personality." Men even name their penises and talk about them as though they lead an independent existence. Men's obsession with their penises and its structural centrality in PUD is a given, rarely worthy of comment. Men are "supposed" to be obsessed with fucking women. (Men who aren't are deviant.) One can say of a woman, "She's oversexed," but we rarely hear that adjective used to describe a man. Instead, the categorial dichotomy—men have the predicates, women get nouns—again applies. There is a predicate for describing the male activity of fucking lots of women, "womanize," and a noun, "womanizer." A woman obsessed with letting men fuck her is a "nymphomaniac," not a "*mannizer." There is no such [- male] agentive noun; it would be a semantic contradiction because PUD assumes that agency is inherently [+ male]. Womanizer and nymphomaniac both express negative judgments, as Gary Hart, Jimmy Bakker, and Jimmy Swaggert could testify, but unless a womanizing man lives in the public arena, his "weakness" is more likely to be overlooked or tacitly condoned. A woman, however, once branded as a "nymphomaniac," is condemned to a more marginal life than most heterosexuals.

To the best of my knowledge, women have not shown the exaggerated regard for their clitorises men give to their penises. When women talk about their genitals, they say "'down there." Whereas men's genitalia are objects, women's are described as a location. In contrast to the penile vocabulary [- male] words and phrases focus on the place where men stick their penises or the end result of heterosexual coitus for women, having babies. An exception to this is the verb menstruate, which is intransitive (there is no object) and requires a [- male] agent. Other female biological processes, however, can be talked about only as states, as nouns. Women "go through menopause," we "have a climacteric," even though menopause is a process that continues for years, sometimes a decade or more. And, to avoid using the one verb we do have, women have an extensive vocabulary of euphemisms: fall off the roof, be on the rag, Aunt Jane is visiting, red Herbie has come, to be unwell, have a period, be on the mattress, it's that time of the month, and have the monthlies. Women do not act; we have a function: reproduction. PUD describes our lives as nouns, nouns, and more nouns.

-Julia Penelope, Speaking Freely: Unlearning the Lies of the Fathers’ Tongues

[haggishlyhagging]

Once we recognize the rhetorical potential of prenominal passives, it comes as no surprise when we find them in familiar phrases that direct our attention away from the men who rape, batter, and maim women and children. Phrases like "battered women" and "abused children" force us to interpret the agentless passives as defining characteristics of women and children, as though men battering women and abusing children are inherent properties of being a woman or a child. Other contemporary phrases, such as "liberated woman," are no less suspect, because we have no way of identifying the missing agent. Can women liberate ourselves, or must we wait upon the benevolence of men or the agency of male control euphemized and abstracted as "society"? The contemporary media equation of "liberated woman" with 'heterosexually active' doesn't encourage optimism, either. In "Chatter," one of People magazine's regular features, Peter Castro equated liberated with wanton when he contrasted Andrea Evans with one of her roles: “Despite her character's wanton ways, Andrea herself isn't as liberated” (100). Women who allow men to fuck them are liberated; those who don't, aren't. Using liberated in this way is a typical PUD description that perverts and trivializes our desire for freedom by turning the participle into a pejorative. Just as housewife pejorated into hussy, men use liberated instead of promiscuous because the latter adjective is now treated as an archaic attribute that represents unenlightened eras when men had to marry women before they could fuck them and a woman who didn't wait for marriage was "promiscuous," ergo bad and immoral. Men's attitudes haven't changed. They're adapting what originated as a rebellious description among women to lure them back into the heteropatriarchal fold. If women say they want to be liberated, then men equate liberation with fucking, and the women whose minds they seduce linguistically have changed their lives, but for the worse. Men detest the women they fuck, whether they say liberated or promiscuous.

-Julia Penelope, Speaking Freely: Unlearning the Lies of the Fathers’ Tongues

[haggishlyhagging]

Like many be-passives, get-passives are useful when men want to deny their responsibility for or involvement in specific events, especially pregnancy. Unlike a be-passive, a get-passive describes pregnancy as though it were something women willed upon themselves without male participation. The following example from a 1976 episode of the television series Maude (brought to my attention by Susan J. Wolfe) indicates how the reflexivity inherent in the get-passive shifts responsibility to victims, a popular PUD tactic. The father of the pregnant woman made the statement.

"Why is marriage the first thing everybody thinks of when a girl gets herself knocked up?"

Because Maude was marketed as a "liberal" sitcom, this description was probably intended to show how "progressive" the male character was: just because a woman is pregnant doesn’t mean she has to marry the man responsible; she could raise the child by herself! Ironically, even a get-passive is preferable to the pseudo-active version we hear more often, "She got pregnant," in which the woman is the only individual responsible and makes it sound as though the fetus is something she bought on sale at a mall. Got in such statements means 'obtained', "She got a new sweater," "She got the flu," so we interpret "She got pregnant" as parallel to other sentences in which got signals purposeful action on the part of the woman.

-Julia Penelope, Speaking Freely: Unlearning the Lies of the Fathers’ Tongues

[haggishlyhagging]

Like any other kind of PUD [Patriarchal Universe of Discourse] description, agentless passives claim to be accurate statements about events in the world. More frequently they tell us the conceptual framework within which speakers perceive and comprehend actions, people, and events. A line from one of George Michael's hit songs illustrates how an agentless passive reveals the speaker's perspective.

9.5 "Sometimes love can be mistaken for a crime."

In this example, the male perspective dictated even the choice of the direct and indirect objects: love is the direct object of mistake, crime the indirect object. There is no agent. Because the description occurs in a song about a man wanting to be some woman's "father figure," crime hints at rape or incest, and tells listeners, many of them girls and young women, that describing forced heterosexuality as "a crime" is a "mistake." If we accept the proposition as a true and accurate description of what forced heterosexuality means, we come to believe such false descriptions, remaining unconsciously loyal to them even when we consciously reject them.

In PUD, agentless passives conceal and deceive when it doesn't suit speakers' or writers' purposes to make agency explicit. This simple structure makes it easy to suppress responsibility and forces hearers or readers to supply the missing agents from a range of possibilities that is often too broad. These less-than-honest motivations for agent-deletion fall into several rhetorical categories: (1) appeals to various kinds of authority as defined by male societies; (2) protection of the guilty and denial of responsibility; (3) the pretense of objectivity; (4) laziness, ignorance, or intellectual pretension, based on familiarity with motivation; (5) the victim's stance; (6) exhortation (urging an audience to some action); and, (7) trivialization. . . .

Agentless passives hinder readers from inquiring further into the implied authority behind questionable declarations. Any sentence that begins with it as the topic of a truncated passive, such as "It is known," "It is hypothesized," "It is understood," should be a signal to us that whatever follows is something we don't want to file away without careful, thorough examination. Whenever someone says, speaking about a relationship, "It's meant to be," as though an omniscient deity or personified destiny had nothing better to do than monitor our lives and make our choices for us, we have to wonder WHO intends for this relationship to exist or continue? Questioning such fundamentally empty assertions is unlikely to increase our popularity, and we run the risk of alienating those we dare to challenge, but people will persist in mouthing inanities unless (and until) each of us takes responsibility for improving the substance and quality of our talk, however casual it is.

-Julia Penelope, Speaking Freely: Unlearning the Lies of the Fathers’ Tongues