slings and arrows

So last night I'm having dinner with my folks--my father's birthday, and my younger brother just clear of a year of college--and we're reading the news in a slow spot afterwards.
"Oh," says my mother, with venom. "I'm so glad Paris Hilton is going to jail."
"Yeah," echoes my brother, generally a sweet kid, but hanging out lately with a few too many macho-men. "She's such a whore."

It gave me pause, but of course I jumped in: "Is your problem that she was driving drunk, or that she has sex?" Spluttering from both about her obnoxiousness. "Yes, but is it good she's doing time because she's a rich, entitled person who thinks she can do whatever she wants, or because she doesn't wear much clothing?" My mother notes, quietly, that we could be using 'the dreaded c-word.' At that point, I really had to hold myself back, while my brother insisted that, no, he has no problem with people having sex, I mean, no problem with women, you know, it's just that--

So I look him right in the eye. "Then say what you mean. If your problem with her is that she has a sense of entitlement, criticize that. If your problem is that she's committed a crime, criticize that. The sex she has and the way she dresses have nothing to do with it. Precision of language. You get yourself into trouble otherwise."

At this point there's more spluttering about 'just kidding' and an evasion joke about, ha-ha, what's the world coming to when a guy can't down a beer and call some woman a bitch, and, god, hearing about this and that all the time, so I finally remind him, "Look, is she the problem, or the media machine that pays attention?"


I am not a fan of Ms. Hilton, myself. I think she represents a great deal of what is wrong with our society. But she herself is not only not the problem, she is beside the point.

Precision of language.
How many times a day do I hear unpleasant things or undesired qualities called 'lame,' for instance? Is your problem that your taste in music can't walk, and is similar to a person who can't? Frankly, I've heard that one thrown around, even in feminist circles, over and over, and had to work to purge it from my own daily vocabulary. But it's not saying what you mean. Criticisms and arguments work better when they're well-aimed; language like 'lame' is a scattershot, hitting nearby scenery you'd best leave alone. It weakens your point and does harm--even low-level harm, harm you'd like to ignore--to people to whom you should be an ally. Yeah, the hipster cred for your thumbs-down and 'laaaaame' plays well to the audience, but it won't hold.

An entitled rich white woman who drives drunk with a suspended license--there's a lot to aim at, there, accurate things, valid criticisms. Shooting at her sex life is not only irrelevant, it's insulting to the intelligence of you and your audience. You can do better. You can find ways to get your point across--even a vicious, hardcore point--without, say, using "whore" and embarrassing yourself while reinforcing a nasty cultural notion of women's sexuality at the same time. Trust yourself to come up with something scathingly accurate. Trust the people listening to get it.

It goes on and on. When someone does something vile, you serve nobody by dismissing them as a nutjob. Calling them crazy not only absolves them of responsibility for their actions, it lets every mentally-ill person in earshot that somewhere in your head they're equivalently dangerously unstable. You may not mean it at the time, but that's the point. You get sloppy with your language, you reinforce plenty of ideas you (hopefully) would rather not, you devalue innocent people, and, meanwhile, you let your target off the hook. You didn't mean it? Well, good. Say what you mean, then.

I just get so tired of this nonsense. I get tired of giving Michelle Malkin ammunition to pretend that liberalism is racist by pointing out the people who criticize her racist, fascist, eliminationist ideas by making cracks about her sex and her heritage--and not just because I'm a Filipina who really can take about a minute of the 'ruv you rong time' before I start making fists. Don't hate 'Usama bin Laden for being Arab, hate him because he kills lots of people and thinks that's an okay solution to the world's problems. Don't nail George Bush for being an alcoholic, nail him for implementing disastrously shortsighted, imperialist, profit-first policies abroad and ignorant, theocratic, authoritarian ones at home.

You can do better. You can do much better. It's not about tiptoeing around and being "PC." It's not even about avoiding offending people, which is quite the bugbear anyway--then folk get to dance around pretending that this is all about oversensitive folks with hurt feelings, instead of real concerns and critiques. It's about aim, among many other things. Get people on their actual crimes. When you waste your words on nonsense like "whore" and "lame" and "bitch" and "psycho," you fail to aim your criticism at the actual problems, all while doing harm to bystanders. You let the offenders off the hook and elbow your neighbor in the face while you're doing it. You know better than that.