So how is this done? Well, in a society built on thousands of years of patriarchy, the shortest path to punishment for the people who threaten this structure is to metaphorically criminalise the ways in which they fail to live up to its standards. For women, this presents as a deliberate and hostile undermining of our worth by reducing even further the limited currency we’re given in the world. The system works by controlling our value. Our bank balances rise and fall based on how fuckable we are, how polite, how docile, how deferential, how eager to please and how willing we are to pretend that this state of affairs isn’t just normal but actually desirable – and all of that happens before we even take into account the value meted out arbitrarily according to our skin colour, size, physical ability, race, biological sex and economic status.
Luckily for patriarchy and the people privileged by it, history is pretty much wall to wall full of women who conform to this bullshit. This isn’t because they’re stupid or because they necessarily enjoy being perceived as second-class citizens who lack any real comparative merit to men. It isn’t because women are okay with being essentially hunted creatures whose survival depends on figuring out ways to avoid the male violence and sexual oppression that exists everywhere but most often in their domestic environments. And it certainly isn’t because patriarchy, when stripped of all its illusions and negotiated benefits, makes women happy. How could anyone truly be happy being considered and treated as if the mere fact of your biology not only makes you weaker but also content to focus inwards rather than outwards?
In fact, women’s conformity to patriarchal power is partly due to the false (yet oh so insidious) ideas of ‘normal human behaviour and evolutionary biology’, and partly due to survival. In regard to the first, the status quo takes the view that men and women are different, there’s no point questioning it, we bring different strengths to the table, I like being treated like a woman, I don’t want to change a tyre, maths is hard! It succeeds by convincing men and women alike that while these gendered ‘skills’ might be different, they’re equally valued – as if women should happily accept being denied the same economic, sexual and social freedom as men (while being expected to satisfy the ego of the ever-present male gaze) because we might have a car door opened for us, gain a few free dinners and have some blowhard promise to ‘treat us like a queen’.
That this argument usually refuses to address the measure of value that these supposedly gendered traits are accorded is a fact not lost on feminists. That ‘free ride’ that women supposedly get at the expense of hard-working men? It’s fucking conditional, friend. We already know that the women who try but fail to fulfil their part of the contract are subjected to ridicule and judgment. But the women who actively go out of their way to burn the whole thing down are treated as public enemy number one.
Patriarchy is a controlling force which succeeds by implementing a series of rigid rules and regulations for women’s behaviour, and feminists have always been the loose cannons who threaten to sink the ship. No one can predict what we’ll do or what kind of womanhood we’ll occupy. We might not wear make-up! We might have hairy armpits! We might fuck other women, but not in a way where men are invited to watch! We might even be mean to men! We might have opinions that men don’t like! We might we might we might we might OH MY GOD WHAT MIGHT WE DO?!
Worst of all, we might convince other women to turn their backs on the whole thing. To step out of line and reject these age-old, bullshit mechanisms of control and realise their own power. And where would the men who enjoy patriarchy be then? Fucked, I’d say, and not in the way they’ve come to believe is their right.
This is what it largely boils down to: the power of men to fuck whom they like, when they like, and have the object of their fucking express gratitude for the selection. What happens when a culture that relies on women believing the only power we have is to be chosen by a man for mating suddenly encounters women who don’t want a bar of that? It doubles down on reinforcing the importance of that narrative. So it seems that the only (legal) recourse mainstream society has against the scourge of boiler-suit-wearing, clod-thumping anarchist man-women who’ve risen up to destroy civilisation is to persistently remind us how repulsive we are and how unqualified for masculine desire.
Although this might hurt initially – hey, we’ve all been raised in a gender-unequal world and it takes a lot to break those invisible chains – it soon becomes apparent how hilarious it is. I mean, come on! It takes an extraordinary amount of arrogance and stupidity to think that the same people who oppose the sexual objectification of women would be even remotely upset at the thought that bog-standard men were denying us the privilege of being sexually objectified. Oh no, my scary opinions made the angry man not want to do sex to me – WHATEVER WILL I DO?
Every time a man calls me a name, I feel more justified in my belief that I’m on the right path. Because if that man wasn’t so afraid of what my distilled rage might achieve, why else would he care so much? If it isn’t the desperate fear of losing their grip on power that prompts men to deploy every tactic they can to try to silence feminists, what is it? And if feminists are really an irrelevant throwback to the 1970s that ‘normal’ people have moved on from, why bother paying any attention to us at all? Why not just let us have at it in our supposedly small online echo chambers, slowly suffocating ourselves in semantic arguments, patchouli oil and the dreamcatchers we’ve woven from our own pubic hair?
If it’s really true that no one’s listening, why are they all so intent on making us shut up?
Ah, but see – people are listening. And that makes us dangerous. We must be stopped! And the easiest way some (most) ordinary Joes have conceived of doing that is with the liberal application of a paint-by-numbers list of insults. I’ve taken the liberty of collating some of them for you here.
Not only will you know what to expect, but you’ll have ample time to practise not laughing as some irate neckbeard with spittle pooled in the corners of his mouth yells that you’re a ‘fucking ugly virgin lesbian with a gaping cunt the size of a small shipping container’. (That’s MISTER fucking ugly virgin lesbian to you.)
Here, in no particular order, some wah-wah words you can work on getting over.
Feminazi: Feminists advocate for the liberation of women from patriarchal dominance. Feminism is literally defined as a movement that seeks political, economic and social equality between the sexes. Feminists protest rape culture and argue for a world in which both women and men can be unshackled from the gender stereotypes that underpin violence. Feminists have never started any wars, launched any missiles, imprisoned any dissenters or tried to eradicate an entire race. I’m a little rusty on history, but I’m also pretty sure that feminism didn’t invade Poland and then attempt to establish a fascist empire across all of Europe.
On the other hand, feminists have devoted a lot of time and energy over the decades to winning the vote for women; fighting for reproductive healthcare access and rights; challenging workplaces to institute equal pay for equal work; building refuges for women and children escaping violence; protesting governments that turned a blind eye to the practice of child marriages; agitating to be represented in political governance; pushing for the rights of women to own property and live independently, and; marching for the rights of young men not to be conscripted and sent off to battle. So yes, given all that, I can see perfectly how it correlates with Nazism, a genocidal political ideology that sought to eradicate an entire race from the world and establish a Third Reich based on white power.
FeminISISt: I’m called a feminISISt or feminISISist about once a week. In terms of logic, it’s really no different from being called a ‘feminazi’ – it’s just that the conspiracy theorists banging it out on their keyboards are a smidge more racist. I guess the accusation being levelled here is that feminists want to kill all men and then install a caliphate. Which, I don’t know, maybe some of us do. It’s a broad movement.
The thing is, you can waste time ge
tting offended or upset at being likened to a fundamentalist terrorist or you can laugh it off. Let’s face it, only a massive toolbag with a bale of hay where his brain’s supposed to be would think that either of these words had the capacity to seriously wound anyone.
Bitch: Bitch is one of the most standard go-to insults used against women regardless of whether or not they consider themselves a feminist. While most people don’t literally think of ‘female dog’ when they call someone a bitch, that meaning and everything associated with it is buried in there all the same. A bitch is a woman who doesn’t play nicely – a bestial horror who can suddenly turn on you and bare her teeth in an aggressive manner. But the word ‘bitch’ has been employed to denigrate women so routinely that arguably it’s been sanitised to some degree. It’s barely even considered a swear word anymore, and it’s acceptable to use it as a noun, a verb or an adjective. Women are bitches. Women bitch about other women. Women are bitchy.
On the rare occasions ‘bitch’ is used to describe men, it’s with the intent of emasculating them. Men are told to ‘stop whining and acting like a little bitch’ – the implication being that they’re humiliating themselves by behaving like women possessed with weak and pathetic anger. At the heart of this is the idea that women are not only incapable of disagreeing or asserting ourselves in a strong and/or convincing manner, but that our very existence is one that needs to be tempered and rendered accommodating in order to earn us a conditional entrance ticket to the broader hallways of life.
As commonplace as it may be, ‘bitch’ is still covertly used to put women in our place. But when someone calls you a bitch because you had the nerve to exist on your own terms rather than theirs, you can really only feel sorry for them given all the unique challenges they’re facing. I mean, fancy making it all the way to adulthood when you still possess the social skills of a toddler who’s three hours overdue for a nap and doesn’t have their favourite teddy bear. This kind of behaviour is excusable in a two-year-old but, honestly, some of these man-babies really need to grow up.
Fat: If you’re a feminist, accept right now that you will frequently be called fat regardless of your shape. This is because the world is full of literal walking arsebags whose genetic material somehow managed to survive the gross ineptitude that otherwise characterises their life and make it not just past uterine implantation, but bafflingly sent them all the way through the birth canal and into what we know as ‘life’. These people have an imagination so limited and colourless that they actually believe ‘fat [insert other insult]’ is some kind of sick Wildean burn.
‘Fat’ is probably one of the most asinine and predictable insults ever conceived, yet it’s remarkably effective at scaring women into silence. The ‘why’ of that is easy. We live in a society that is deeply fat-phobic, and doubly so when you invite misogyny into the mix. Poor body image is at staggeringly high levels in women, particularly young women. We are instructed to be afraid of fat and all that it’s supposed to represent. In women especially, ‘fatness’ is treated almost like a shameful, contagious disease.
A woman who is fat bears the visual, physical evidence of one of two possible personality maladies. The first is her inability to adhere and/or conform to social notions of attractiveness, a failure which is further reinforced by ideas of greediness, laziness and gluttony. But the second is considered to be a threat rather than mere ineptitude. A woman may have become fat despite the cultural pressures which demand that she minimise and reduce her body, and she may choose to remain that way because of sheer indifference to them. To wit: she may be fat while giving zero fucks what men have to say about it.
If fuckability is manufactured as femininity’s primary goal, the label ‘fat’ only serves to strip women of any value and worth they might otherwise have. So it is that calling a woman fat has become easy shorthand for calling her disgusting, repulsive, a space stealer, foul, inhuman, unwanted. It is to suggest to her that her body is unfuckable and therefore her life and everything she stands for is utterly pointless.
But what does it really mean, when you break it down? Why is it that women of such varying shapes and sizes can be dismissed with that one word, whether or not it’s factually applicable or not? The simple explanation, as always, is that the person calling you fat is a fucking twit who lacks the intellectual capacity to argue against your political ideas and so tries to deride you by telling you that you’re too fat to fuck. Boohoo. I’ve taken to agreeing with men who call me fat. ‘Yes, I am the fattest person in the world,’ I say, ‘and I am going to sit on you until you suffocate and then I will eat you.’ It works a charm.
Hairy: In addition to being thin, women (particularly in the west) are expected to maintain the illusion of hairlessness. Any sign that puberty might have bestowed upon us a spray of fuzz beneath our arms or a thatch of fur between our legs has to be eliminated immediately. Waxing, shaving, plucking, electrolysis – women have to fork out precious financial resources just to achieve what is then laughably passed off as a ‘natural’ state.
For men and women similarly invested in maintaining patriarchal notions of gender performance, hair on women seems to be oddly terrifying. It’s been a long time since I was afraid of going out in public with three-day-old stubble on my legs, but I know there are still far too many girls and women who feel crippled by the anxiety of hair. I used to be one of them. When I was twenty-seven, I took a guy home one night in the dead of a New York winter. I liked him, and was excited to have him in my house. We took our clothes off and he pointed at my hibernation armpits, sneering, ‘You should shave those, that’s disgusting.’ I wish I’d had the confidence then to kick him out, but I just sat there mortified and ashamed. Then, humiliatingly, I tried to make it up to him by giving him a BJ.
NEVER AGAIN.
Newsflash. Women grow hair. It is not unnatural. It is not unclean. It is not offensive. And it certainly isn’t anyone else’s goddamn business. Who the hell cares if you have hair or don’t have hair or sometimes have hair or can’t grow much hair or grow so much hair that you occasionally even cultivate it into beautiful sculptures of horticultural majesty?
Answer: dickheads. Dickheads are literally the only people who care about whether or not women have hair on their bodies.
Lesbian: The only thing more terrifying than a hairy fat bitch who men don’t want to fuck is a hairy fat bitch who doesn’t even want those men to want to fuck her. How can he control her if she doesn’t even feel sad at not being objectified by him? In most mainstream popular culture, lesbians are only acceptable if they: a) conform to mainstream codes of feminine beauty, and b) are totally cool with men watching and maybe even joining in. Other lesbians are just, like, gross and stuff.
Lesbians are a little difficult to navigate for a society invested in male dominance. If we are so fervently sold on the idea that not only is it natural for men to be in control but natural for women to want to be controlled by them, then applying the lesbian tag to ‘difficult’ women remains an effective way to shame them.
Why does this fear of a realistic vision of lesbianism exist? It comes down to the fear of superfluity. If we can live independently, make our own money and maintain functional, satisfying sexual relationships with other women, where does that leave men? If women are expected to aspire to men’s sexual approval – and we absolutely are – then consciously existing outside of that contract is like a form of social heresy.
But here’s what it comes down to: women who assert our own right to self-determination pose a threat to men’s power. And if misogynists weren’t so dim and so obsessed with trying to shut women up, they would realise there is a deep and intense irony in trying to insult feminists by accusing us of not needing men. Like . . . no shit, dingus.
Ugly: When it comes to shutting down a woman’s voice, her detractors have very selective vision. Not even the most objectively attractive women in the world are immune from the tag of ‘ugly’ if they dare to say something that someone (usually a m
an) doesn’t like. It is used to invalidate a woman’s contributions, and works on the premise that women only become entitled to interact with other people (again, usually men) when we can demonstrate support for the toll of womanhood. Or, to paraphrase the writer Erin McKean, to embrace the idea of beauty as the rent women must pay in order to live in the world as a legitimate human being and not merely as a thing that can be ignored or pushed aside once its words become inconvenient.
It is necessary to keep repeating this, because perhaps repetition will convince the unconvinced of how insidious this feeling is: the pinnacle of women’s value is placed not just in her beauty, but in her willingness to work eagerly towards that beauty.
In a patriarchy, it isn’t enough simply to be aesthetically attractive; a woman must also show commitment to the idea of what it means to be attractive. She must be polite and deferential when necessary. She must be agreeable. She mustn’t inspire feelings of anger or resentment, or challenge the status quo. And above all, she mustn’t threaten masculine power. Women who do these things aren’t just fat bitches. They aren’t just hairy monsters. They aren’t just recast as desexualised lesbians (which is a completely ludicrous premise in the first place). They’re also slapped with one of the most definitive labels you can apply to a woman to disenfranchise her opinions and right to speak: they are ugly, and to be ugly means they serve no purpose to men.
Fight Like A Girl Page 18