Author: Ophelia Benson

David Thompson did a post telling me off for saying ‘pussy’ is a sexist epithet. He also, very oddly, emailed me to tell me about the post, as if I would be pleased and interested. This is odd because as far as I’m concerned we’ve been on non-speakers since another post he did last July, a rather unfunny one about jokes about women. I was alienated because (having been as it were invited) I commented on that post, somewhat acidly, and was rewarded with three pages worth of sexist garbage. Want a sample? (Relevant, your honour; goes to the question of sexism.)

“Obviously Ophelia is on her period. Now have a seat and let a big, strong man bring you some cold water and a towel to deal with your bad case of the vapors.” That was probably the stupidest, but there was plenty more of the kind of thing. David Thompson has a policy of not interfering with comments, so there they all still are, demonstrating that there is no such thing as misogyny, or something. I concluded that I would not be reading David Thompson’s blog any more – not just because I think people should get rid of personally insulting comments of that kind, but also because the comments were nearly all so unpleasantly stupid and truculent, so as if the commenters all aspired to be Rush Limbaugh. It’s interesting how comments can ruin a blog. That’s why I don’t have a policy of not interfering with comments; I think that’s such a mistake.

So, as I say, David Thompson emailed me to tell me about this new post, which is another one about the non-reality of sexism and how it’s all in my mind. And just to make sure there is no uncertainty about that, there are more of the – erm – slightly crude comments (and backtracks to even cruder posts by other people). The next-to-latest is “Why do we give a shit that some cunt-flapper is offended?” Now why would I think for a second that there is such a thing as a sexist epithet? I can’t imagine, and I’m sure you can’t either.

But, ironically, in the post David Thompson said something (I assume inadvertently) that gave me a hint as to why there is confusion about the word ‘pussy.’

On the very rare occasions I’ve used the word – ironically and with a terrible American accent – I’ve used it to denote a kind of feebleness. Naïve soul that I am, I took the intended meaning here to be that Allah appears to be a sissy, coward or weakling, perhaps rather pampered, like a house cat; not that Allah in some way resembles the female genitals…

You see it? With an American accent. That indicates to me that he has picked up the word from American movies and cable tv shows, without knowing what it means, and without knowing he doesn’t know what it means. That’s easy enough to do. Traveling in the other direction, I’m pretty sure that very few Americans know what ‘wanker’ means. I used to think to plotz was to flop down on a chair or other comfortable spot, and I used it that way, and finally someone gently informed me that it means ‘explode.’ This happened just a few years ago. I didn’t know what it meant, and I didn’t know I didn’t know what it meant. Fine – but then when someone told me what it meant, I realized that I had had it wrong. It’s not completely clear to me why David Thompson and others can’t manage to draw the same conclusion. DT says in the post, and told me via email, that he assumed it derived from pusillanimous. Understandable; but it doesn’t. It means female genitalia, and people who think it means something like kitty kitty are making an understandable mistake but still a mistake. People who make that mistake, and rebuke people who point out the mistake, and call them cunt-flappers – are being what David Thompson told me I was being: presumptuous.

(By the way: I looked it up in Webster’s Third at the library; one definition is female genitals, esp. vulva.)

If only this were true.

“In a dramatic development in Islamabad Pakistan, a little girl who was slapped by a Mullah Abu Jahil on the street ran into her school crying only to run out again with some forty girls between the ages of 6 and 10. The girls captured the Mullah and dragged him to the Square area outside the Faisal Masjid, where the Mullah was whipped. Unable to bear this public humiliation, this Mullah has asked for asylum from the British High Commission.

However, the leader of the Mullahs R Us support group for Mullahs – Maulana Fazal Ur Rehman has denied this report. He has suggested that some foreign element is behind this to malign them in public and the little girls were just playing when the Mullah fell at the Faisal Masjid. The only Jew in Islamabad Rabbi Someone Oranother has denied helping anyone or being involved in any underhand activity against the Pakistani state or any Mullah.

However, the girls have promised that from now on they will be the one who will be flogging men in public who tries to misbehave with women.”

Pervez Kambaksh is hanging on to his hopes.

“I want an Afghanistan where the mothers of this country and the daughters of this country have the same rights that you and I have as men,” he said in an interview inside the Walayat prison where he has languished since June. “They should have the right to education. They should have the right to work in any organisation they want, and they should have the right to live as human beings in this society.”

They should have the right to live as human beings. Yes they should.

Back atcha, Pervez (if I may – I think of you as a friend). We want an Afghanistan where you have the right to live as a human being too.

I’m curious about something. To the best of my knowledge, a sexist epithet is a sexist epithet. There’s not generally a lot of ambiguity about it, although there’s always room for ironic uses in private conversation and so on. In public discourse, a sexist epithet is what it is. Yet – I keep encountering people who dispute that, in places where I wouldn’t expect to, such as comments on Jesus and Mo. So I’m curious about what other people think.

A commenter said ‘the god of Islam is such a pussy. He is unable to do a thing to protect himself or his reputation and must rely on his minions to do his dirty work.’ I took exception, and someone replied by quoting one of Julian’s Bad Moves from here, on the fact that many words have multiple meanings. True enough, but is there more than one way to understand ‘pussy’ in that comment? Not that I know of.

What’s interesting is that I think that’s pretty widely understood, even by people who pretend or believe otherwise. One reason I think that is that I don’t know anyone who uses the word that way in conversation or correspondence with me. I don’t think that’s an accident; I think it’s because no one who knows me thinks it would be welcome – and for all I know this includes people who do use the word in conversation with other people. The point is that if people avoid the word with (at least) certain audiences, then the meaning is probably pretty clear. Am I wrong?

Certain epithets just are not really ambiguous; they can’t be. ‘Nigger’ is the best known in the US and maybe elsewhere; kike, raghead, kaffir are a few more. Queer and dyke have been reclaimed, and there is a school of thought that ‘bitch’ has but I think on the contrary, ‘bitch’ is more viciously misogynist than ever. And so are, as far as I know, pussy, twat and cunt. It is my considered opinion that no one who comments on Jesus and Mo would have the gall to call the barmaid any of those things, and that if I’m right about that, they should stop using them at all.

Madeleine Bunting takes a minute to remind us how stunningly predictable, how jaw-droppingly selective, how risibly but irritatingly woolly she can be and pretty much always is.

Increasingly, one hears a distaste for the polemics of the New Atheist debate and its foghorn volume, and how it has drowned out any other kind of conversation about religion.

Does one? Does one not rather rush about attempting to create such a distaste one’s very own self? Much of this putative distaste comes from Bunting herself, so it’s a little sick-making to see her pretending to be too modest to mention her own energetic campaign. And then of course the drowning out is completely ridiculous – witness Bunting herself, and all the people she quotes, and Tony Faith Foundation Blair, and the archbishops and bishops filling the Telegraph with their complaints and the apologists of Islam filling the Guardian with their rationalizations – ‘drowned out’ indeed! Apparently she confuses addition with drowning out, and not being silenced and closeted any more with ‘foghorn volume.’ Apparently she thinks that religious conversation about religion should have undisputed monopoly of the discussion and thus interprets any disagreement as Much Too Loud and Drowning Out. Excuse my bluntness, but that is stupid.

Ask a philosopher like John Gray or a historian of religion like Karen Armstrong and they are simply not interested in the debate; they bin the invitations to speak on platforms alongside New Atheists. Gray dismisses them as offering “intoxicating simplicity”; Armstrong is appalled by their “display of egotism and arrogance”.

So she doesn’t mean a philosopher like John Gray or a historian of religion like Karen Armstrong, she means John Gray and Karen Armstrong – but putting it the way she did conveys an impression that there are lots of philosophers like John Gray and historians of religion like Karen Armstrong, without having to offer any. But the views of John Gray and Karen Armstrong are highly contested; neither is typical, and both are considered exceptionally tendentious.

Belief came to be understood in western Christianity as a proposition at which you arrive intellectually, but Armstrong argues that this has been a profound misunderstanding that, in recent decades, has also infected other faiths…”We need to get away from the endless discussion about wretched beliefs; religion is about doing – and what every faith makes clear is that the doing is about compassion,” she argues. To try and shift the debate about faith into more fruitful territory, Armstrong came up with the idea of a global Charter on Compassion for all faiths (and none), which she is drafting and planning to launch later in the year.

Yes, she argues that, and thus we can see how and why her views are so contested. That would be because it is nonsense, and vicious nonsense at that, to say that ‘what every faith makes clear is that the doing is about compassion.’ She can’t say that without simply blowing off what is happening in (you know the dreary list) Swat and Afghanistan and Brazil and Iraq and Nicaragua and Somalia and the list goes on. It’s just not true that every faith makes clear that the doing is about compassion.

At times of crisis – such as the economic recession – the brittleness of a value system built on wealth and a particular conception of autonomy becomes all too apparent, leaving people without the sustaining reserves of a faith to fall back on.

That’s interesting – she talks a lot of wool about compassion but when it comes to practice she resorts to insult, claiming that non-believers build their value system on wealth. That is both stupid and rude.