Foul words is but foul wind, and foul wind is but foul breath, and foul breath is noisome. – William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing (V, ii)
One year ago today I published “Pet Peeves”, a column which described five sex-related things that really, really irritate me:
1) Men yanking the pillow out from under my head during sex
2) Hitler moustaches (aka landing strips) in women’s pubic grooming
3) Misuse of the word “vagina”
4) Vulgarity
5) Misuse of the word “homophobia”
Readers with analytical minds probably noticed immediately that 60% of these involve words, and that should come as no surprise because at least 99% of my readers have probably noticed that I really love words. As a writer, words are my tools, and I cherish them and baby them the way a good mechanic cares for the tools of his trade. And just as a good mechanic always uses the right tool for the job rather than trying to make do with whatever happens to be nearby, so I insist on using the right word; if I can’t find it right away I’ll sometimes sit staring at the monitor thinking, or else typing and deleting a number of different ones until I’m satisfied. More often I’ll just continue on at full speed, then replace words which don’t quite work to my satisfaction in the proofreading process (fun fact: I proofread each of my columns at least three times, the third of which is immediately after I publish it). So by the time most of you read any given column, you can be reasonably sure that any word you see is the exact one I wanted to use, even if it’s one that you have to look up (as some of you are fond of teasing me).
And just as some mechanics are annoyed by seeing others misuse or abuse their tools, so am I annoyed by the misuse or abuse of words. I don’t mean mere imprecision; my vocabulary is freakishly large and I don’t expect most people to have quite so many words at their disposal for every nuance of meaning. No, what I’m talking about is the calculated and willful misuse of words by people who know better, which in turn influences others to use those words incorrectly (see my explanation about “homophobia” in last year’s column). Everyone picks up words and phrases from friends, family, television, books and other sources; I hope I’ve introduced some of my readers to some useful words and phrases (including my own coinages such as “neofeminist” and “lawhead”). Those who enjoy a particular show or writer or whatever will tend to adopt memorable or catchy examples of that source’s unique vocabulary, and if the source is very popular one eventually starts hearing the new word or phrase all over the place. Some of these words or phrases are useful (despite never having seen a single episode of Seinfeld, I have caught myself saying “yada yada yada”), while others are merely annoying counter-words (if I never hear “Where’s the beef?” or “Cha-ching!” again it will be too soon). But some really, really grate on my nerves, usually because I perceive them as vulgar.
It’s important to understand what I mean by “vulgar”; as I said in “Pet Peeves”:
I don’t meant honest discussion of sex; that is not vulgar. Nor is the use of one-syllable Anglo-Saxon words such as shit, fuck, cunt, cock, etc which were in normal usage until the Norman overlords of England turned their noses up at them due to their peasant origins. No, when I speak of vulgarity I mean leering, childish, dirty-sounding “euphemisms” for sexual acts and body parts which are actually much more offensive than just using the four-letter words. Even worse are juvenile masculine attempts at “humor” derived from describing sexual terms in the most disgusting way possible. As regular readers know I’m the farthest thing in the world from a prude, but this kind of filthy talk makes me want to slap the speaker and then wash his mouth out with soap.
I am absolutely delighted to state that in over 10,000 comments to this blog, I have seen only a tiny number of words or phrases I would deem vulgar; so few, in fact, that up to now I’ve completely ignored them. But recently, my refined sensibilities have been repeatedly jarred by the use of certain vulgar phrases which apparently originated on men’s rights websites; what makes these phrases particularly odious to me is that they trigger two of my pet peeves simultaneously, because they are vulgar permutations of the word “vagina”.
When I was a lass, one rarely heard the word “vagina” outside of a sex-ed lesson or gynecologist’s office; in everyday speech we used “pussy” (or other terms like “cunt”, “twat” or “coochie”) to mean either the vagina or vulva. But that started to change in the past decade; feminists (possibly due to the influence of the play The Vagina Monologues) started to use the word colloquially (and confusingly) to mean either “vagina” or “vulva”, which is rather like everyone suddenly deciding to use the medical term “esophagus” in place of common words like “mouth”, “tongue”, “lips”, “throat” and even “windpipe”. Once women in the general population started doing this men followed suit, and then the term even seeped into non-anatomical slang uses (such as a gutless man being called a “vagina” rather than a “pussy”). So it’s absolutely no surprise that the once-sterile term has now begun to sound vulgar, particularly when used in such ugly constructions as “mangina” (a male feminist or lap dog) and “gina tingles” (the entire female sexual experience reduced to a mere physical sensation). And since (as detailed above) I find this sort of vulgarity deeply revolting (you don’t know how hard it was for me to type those terms), from here on out I’m going to replace them wherever I see them in comments. Please, by all means use “vagina” to mean “vagina”, but let’s not have any more of these vulgar, quasi-misogynistic, “cute” distortions, OK? I’m not upset with those of you who’ve used them in the past, nor am I trying to insult you or make you feel bad; every person is different and you may not see those terms as icky or off-putting, which is exactly why I’ve written this post. I just wanted to let everyone know how I feel in the gentlest, nicest way possible.
Maggie,
I do have to interject a bit on the “Misuse of the word “homophobia” peeve. The term itself wasn’t coined until 1966 by psychologist George Weinberg. As HE coined the term, HE set the definition to be the “fear of or aversion to homosexuals.”
You are incorrect. Weinberg was merely the first to misuse the term in that way; it existed as far back as the 1920s (that I’ve been able to ascertain) in its proper meaning, “a morbid aversion to monotony or sameness.” One can’t simply use a common prefix to mean a whole word; that’s linguistically absurd (as I explained in last year’s column). And even if one could, the current usage goes far beyond the idea of a clinical syndrome.
There was at one time a proper term for “fear of male homosexuals”; I want to say “uranophobia” but I know that’s incorrect. Unfortunately, due to Google’s non-Boolean “or trumps everything” search algorithm, it’s impossible to find any references to that among all the “homophobia” entries.
Ah Ha! Proofead Win. I think you meant last year’s column rather than last ear’s column. 😉 Not that I’m in any position to stow thrones. I mean throw stones. I routinely do the 3 times read on a comment and then realize, after hitting the “post comment” button that I missed something.
My next question. Lawhead. Is that what you describe the forfeit coerced from streetwalkers by dirtbag cops?
See what I mean? That should be proofread win. Egads!
Yikes! Fixed it!
No, that’s called “rape”. A lawhead is someone who believes that laws actually have the power to define reality; for example, lawheads believe that a legal minor is actually a child in a real sense, and that someone who breaks an arbitrary law is truly a “criminal” in the same sense as a murderer or thief is.
I know a few people like that. “The Law is The Law” as if being tautological about it somehow gives the arbitrary greater force. We have a local talkshow host that trots that out every time someone challenges the moral basis for a law. He’s Jewish but was raised Catholic. I’ve tried to get through his phone lines when he’s ranting like this and ask him if the Nuremberg Laws were the Law in this sense, or the Fugitive Slave Act. And if not, then, why not. It might actually make his head explode, though.
I’ve long recognised that ‘fear of sameness’ was the literal meaning of ‘homophobia’, but I’ve never once encountered it used in that way. It’s good to know that the logical definition actually does exist.
As a math nerd, I have the same reaction to –hedron used as meaning ‘polyhedron’; the most common offender is probably permutohedron, considered barbaric by its coiners!
I once proposed an alternate nomenclature for the four-dimensional analogues of the Platonic solids, which are sometimes called pentachoron, octochoron, hexadecachoron, icositetrachoron, hecatonicosachoron, hexacosichoron (having 5, 8, 16, 24, 120 and 600 cells); in my scheme, adapting the ancient assignment of the Platonic solids to the elements, they become pyrotetron, geotetron, aerotetron, xylotetron, cosmotetron, hydrotetron, where tetron means a hypercell. (xyl is ‘wood’, arbitrarily importing one of the Chinese elements for the figure that has no three-dimensional analogue.)
I found a website that replaced the tetron in my names with choron and, worse, attributed these bastard names to me. On a relevant forum I discussed the difference between compounds like airman (a kind of man) and compounds like airhead (not a kind of head), and why I objected to xylochoron. The only reply to my essay, if memory serves, went something like “I see, that’s very interesting. So let’s go with xylochoron.”
Some of my sex/work related pet peeves:
1. Expecting me to take you someplace you’re just not physically suited to go. If you’re short, overweight, and not at all flexible, we just aren’t ever going to get into that position, it’s just not physically possible for you, no matter how much you demand or whine. Look, we just tried- It didn’t work, and you haven’t changed body type since then. Let me show you something that will work.
2. Sudden after climax remorse. You know, those men who are having a fine time up to and through the climax, then they get all sad and “OH, I Shouldn’t have done this, I’m cheating, it’s a against my religion, blah, blah, blah. You wanted this, you called me, now just relax and enjoy it.
3. Those who, again, after the main event want to ask me weird questions and psychoanalyze me. DO NOT ask me if I was sexually abused as a child, and that’s “why I am like this”. I wasn’t, but I am certainly not going to discuss it. Talking about child sexual abuse just disturbs me too much, it’s one of those things I have intense, strong opinions on. I don’t care what the current trendy psychological theory of whores is. Were you abused by numbers as a child, is that why you’re a chartered accountant?
4. Expecting me to be all things, at once. So there we are, after a blazing intense hardcore PSE session, you’re panting and exhausted, and you say: “Occasionally I see Gina Girlfriend, she’s a great GFE… Why aren’t you like that?” Why isn’t my aunie a tea-cart? Because the character I’m best at, have developed over the years, is that of the ready for anything rough-girl slut. I’m not as good at being the “girl next door.” If that’s what you want, fine, I’ll do my best, but why not let me know before hand?
5. Men who see girls I know, or me, seem perfectly happy with the service then leave awful reviews. “I saw so and so, she’s fat, and lazy.” You fool, she’s beautiful. She advertises as “Rubenesque” (Go look it up) and a slow, sweet GFE. I’ve done two girl session with her, and she’s wonderful. Sure, her sessions are a low slower and less physical than mine, but that’s exactly what she promises. No need to trash her. Or me. (One of my bad reviews: European, (Is that supposed to be bad?) former porn whore, stretched out pussy from all the mileage.) Hey, I squeeze my muscles quite well, too bad you were tiny)
I’m with you on all of these. The idea that a girl can be GFE and PSE at once is the height of absurdity; I’ve actually seen that sort of thing in men’s online profiles or signature lines, i.e. “I prefer GFE/PSE type providers…” Make up your damned mind, fool! That’s like claiming to prefer dialogue-heavy, romantic action movies with lots of fight scenes. And the idea that a lot of sex can “stretch a woman out” permanently is the probably the most male-narcissistic, biologically-ignorant bit of twaddle in the entire lexicon of sexual tropes. Sorry, guys, but not one of you has a cock anywhere near as big as a baby, so the idea that your mighty organ (or anyone else’s) can do any permanent damage to a grown woman’s vagina is nothing but adolescent masturbatory fantasy.
What is a PSE? I’ve been trying to figure it out, but I can’t come up with anything.
“Porn Star Experience”. A bit showier, more physical, and action oriented than the average session. Willing to do more things.
Hah. I’ve told them the same thing. The vagina is very flexible, and you aren’t as large as all that.
In talking about the bad reviews above, the GFE woman they were describing was someone I’d done “Sugar/Spice” two girl sessions with, and she was absolutely beautiful. Her body was lush, curvy, and wonderful. I adored her. But these days men see any woman over a size 0, and she’s fat.
Odd thing is I never advertised myself as GFE. My website in no way gave that impression. Yet I had men call and ask if I could do that. Sure, but why not call someone skilled in that?
Maggie,
I read last year’s column on pet peeves and homophobia and have a rather funny story to tell.
When I was in Japan, I was rather aggressively pursued by a gay Japanese man. I thought that this was generally against the Japanese stereotype of diffidence and since my interactions with him were strictly public – not personal – I do think that it was against the norm. It is also possible that since I was a gaijin, (foreigner) that the same rules of diffidence didn’t apply. Back then I was also kinpatsu, literally, goldenhaired to an absurd degree, and that seemed to fascinate Japanese of both sexes. Though, interestingly enough, not nearly as much as my hirsute friend, who had hair everywhere except his palms, soles of his feet, forehead and nose and looked like bigfoot in a bathing suit (since he was also a weightlifter) but I think that was more along the lines of ‘horrified fascination.’ We actually had a nurse run out of the room and call her colleagues to come see the hairy foreigner (kebukai gaijin – literally – full of hair) when he took his shirt off so the doctor could examine him.
But I digress. This Japanese fellow stalked me through train stations and along public streets and so on. Whenever we “chanced” to encounter him, I would speak to him politely and indicate that I really had no interest in him in that manner. It didn’t seem to matter, but after about 6 weeks of this behavior, his passion apparently abated. At least, I didn’t seem him again.
In Japanese, the colloquial word describing both homosexuals and homogenized milk is the same – it is a borrow-word written in katakana and is pronounced ho mo (long O sound). (There are original Japanese words for both, but they aren’t used. gyunyu (cow liquid) for milk and several variants of seiko (sexual intercourse) for the other.)
A few weeks later a couple of other guys who knew about this incident came across a bus bench that was advertising homogenized milk, brand name, Morinaga. Coincidentally, that was also the surname of my stalker. So they sat on the bench, leaving the words, Morinaga Homo visible, embraced and had a passerby take a picture. Which they then, very considerately, sent to me.
I thought it was funny and a fairly odd coincidence as well. I’d never connected his surname with the milk brand and since I’m terribly fond of puns…
The first time I heard the word mangina was in a Margaret Cho skit and it had a very different meaning. She used it to describe what happens when a man’s cock and balls contract after contact with VERY cold water. The situation was this performer on a Jackass type of show covered himself with chalk for some silly stunt then afterward, Margaret had to hose him down with cold water. Then it hit that area and, as she said, “All their equipment just goes up in the treehouse!”
So that was my understanding of the word. Still a misuse of vagina, but otherwise just a comical description of major, cold water related shrinkage.
I disagree with you here. “Mangina” has evolved into a word that connotes a specific type of man — a kind of apologist for feminists. I’ve seen a lot of vulgarities in the manosphere, but I never considered this one of them, probably because a word like this (IMO) needed to be coined. I’m easily put off by profanity and vulgarity, but this never bothered me. Then again “man up” bothers me, so maybe our dislikes are a male-female thing.
As for “‘gina tingles,” that was developed in response to the constant berating men get from certain females for “only thinking with their dicks.” I’ll admit that’s true, in certain circumstances, but the reverse is true as well — and that phrase came about because of it. The constant bad choices of some women — and their lack of understanding as to why they make those choices — justifies that word, I believe. At least men know we’re pigs at times. Women seem to rationalize away their choices and this phrase helps hone in on why they do that (another one is “rationalization hamster”).
I think there are worse examples of vulgarity and word perversion than this, although you probably don’t see them on this blog. The one that springs to mind is “va-jay-jay,” which was popularized by Oprah and used everywhere now. This is just a dumb nickname, though, as opposed to the above two words (or phrases), which I think, now have specific meanings and are likely to stick around for a while.
As I said, I know some may not consider them vulgar, but I do, and this is my place, after all. I totally agree with you about “va-jay-jay”, but I already talked about that (and said I’d replace it if I saw it) in last year’s column on “Pet Peeves”.
Funny enough, all this talk about GFE and PSE is offensive to me because it comes off as arrogant — meaning arrogant from the point of view of guys that expect that. Sure, they may be paying, but all experiences between people — business and personal — are the result of interaction. You can’t expect to sit back and have someone “give” you anything unless you have some sort of connection. Even a great rock band will play poorly if the crowd is not enthusiastic.
Plus, there’s a level of objectification in those acronyms that creeps me out. It’s fine to consciously know you’re thinking of women as objects (all people do this on occasion) but the unconscious level of inhumanity present from people who use those terms leaves me cold. So there, I’m offended, but it took a different brand to do it, so to speak.
Feel free to tell us why anyone would pull a pillow out from someone’s head. My focus has never been on pillows during any intimate encounter.
It’s just a convenient shorthand to describe different ways of working, and different types of experiences available. The trend was for workers to gravitate to one end or the other, depending on what they were comfortable with, and helped the client know what to expect. Probably a good thing.
In the old days, before the internet, you basically called up a service, described the kind of woman you wanted, and hoped for the best. Now days, there’s more information available.
It does put more pressure on the worker, though.
I can’t say the possibility that the client thought of me as an object ever bothered me. That’s how it works. The doorbell rang, and I put on my character, the one I had developed, and kept in that mode for the time. Sure, there were men I saw regularly, and they saw a bit behind the character. But they weren’t hiring the real me, they wanted the character. They wanted what they had seen, and it was only fair to deliver.
I understand. But I still think one man’s GFE can be another man’s cold, difficult evening if the man in question doesn’t show some decency to the woman. You get back what you put in. The whole thing Maggie wrote about the guys yanking the pillow out from under her made me think a lot of men in general have no manners and then expect the world in return. It rarely works that way, unless you’re, like, Rod Stewart or something.
That’s what “YMMV” refers to.
Yeah. I was going to ask about the pillow thing, too. Is that really common enough to have on the list? It sounds like a horrible thing to do.
Read my description of it in last year’s column. Yes, it really was that common, and no, I have no idea why they did it.
One of my favorite authors once worked up a whole paragraph on the theme of how persistent striving to get to the right word – instead of an OK word – was the thing that would get your stuff read thru to the end.
Another pretty good writer wrote that the difference between the right word choice and something else was a bit like the difference between Lightning and a Lightning Bug.
The first was Hunter S. Thompson. May he RIP… eventually.
The Second is Mark Twain.
Guys have trouble with the notion that the phrase “gina-tingle” is some kind of a put down of female sexual interest/attraction. Since guys always know with great clarity when their manly bits are tingling it does not seem to them like an insult towards women to imagine that they might feel an analygous sensation when guys are dingo the job right. .. In wooing her and in bedding her.
It’s definitely a put-down; it reduces a complex psychological and emotional interaction to not just a physical sensation, but a passive and superficial one. It’s one of those terms which is a roadblock to understanding (like “sin” or “prostituted woman”), in addition to being vulgar.
I’ve never encountered “gina tingles” used to mean anything analogous to “gives him a stiffy” or anything like that. It’s always, at least as far as I’ve ever seen it, been a put-down. It’s always used to indicate that a woman is (more often that women in general are) stupid, turned on physically by being treated badly, and so caught up in the physical arousal that she forgives anything and everything so that she can feel it again. Any and all reasons a woman might make a bad decision are reduced to the fact that she has a pussy instead of a cock.
She’s not just a stupid woman, but she’s stupid because she’s a woman. It’s not so much an accusation that she’s thinking with her cunt, but that she is a cunt.
That’s why I find it offensive. There are women in this world I happen to respect.
Thank you! That’s exactly it!
“doing” the job right
I am rarely drunk but my eyesight has sucked for a while now.
What was it again that sex was a distant second to as an urge? 😉
I worry that the imagined integrity of le seul mot juste leads to nothing more than a grimly mincing fastidiousness. A loss of the golden thread of feeling.
How else could one condemn the obviously fine and raw coinage of “mangina?” an excellently harsh word and insult, and no vulgarism.
“Gina-tingles” is, indeed, a disgusting euphemism for what is rightly called a wet cunt.
Why is sloppy Balzac finally superior to the constipatory Flaubert?
If you don’t like certain words make your blog so interesting that no one would violate its excellence with any vulgarity real or imagined.
And “icky” is worse even than “gina-tingles” as far as truly noisome babytalk goes.
But all in all I enjoyed this testily bragging post and its lapse into slightly censorious goofiness.
That is: I love schoolmarmish hectoring from a svelte whore coy beneath her red umbrella.
I cannot deny a tendency toward pedanticism. However, I must object to the characterization of personal preference as “censorship”. Contrary to what feminists claim, the personal is NOT political; usually it’s just personal. Saying “I won’t have that book in my house” is not censorship; saying “you can’t have that book in your house” is. I don’t allow cocaine or cop shows in my house, either, but I don’t care if you do and neither should anyone else.
This blog is my online “house”, and I have the right to control what is left on my own floor. So please, by all means track whatever filth you like into your own house or the houses of others who don’t mind. But since I’m the one who has to “live” here, I don’t think a little respect for my personal idiosyncrasies, however prissy you may find them, is too much to ask.
I have a little respect for your sometimes ability to think and write clearly; I have no respect, and neither should you, for a prim fastidiousness and admitted pedantry that may subtly hamstring your otherwise well-knit thought and feeling.
But I duly appreciate a forked-tongue that spits cocaine and cop shows on cue.
It might be said of you, Maggie, that you don’t miss a trick. 😉
I find the Sanskrit word Yoni to be a beautiful one. Not only is it euphonious, it refers to the whole shebang, from lips, clit, vagina and uterus. There are also separate words for labia and the clitoris. Clitoris sounds extremely dry and technical to me. There’s no life in the word, it’s just anatomy. It’s easy to think of metaphors like pearl or love button. I’m a little silly so I propose Princess or Queen.
One reason I don’t care for the term “homophobia” is because I have a real live phobia. And I can tell you, shouting at me, scolding me, or shaming me will not make it go away or make me less subject to it. Insofar as I dislike homosexuals, it’s because I find a lot of their political stances highly distasteful and consider their efforts to be accepted in religions that have always forbidden homosexuality misguided, at best.
Thank you. I too have a phobia, and referring to a mere attitude as a “phobia” is insulting both to those so labelled and to true phobics. The “gay rights” movement as a whole lost my support when it turned from securing rights and fighting for tolerance to devising social engineering schemes. People’s attitudes will change with time; they can’t be forced to change, nor should they be. I know some people will always dislike and disapprove of whores, and that’s their right; what is unacceptable is that they can oppress me for their dislikes.
Who the hell yanks the pillow out from under your head during sex?
Bad scene!
“Homophobia” has never meant fear of homosexuals or homoerotic behavior per se. The term actually comes from a study in the seventies, (at UC Berkeley if I recall correctly), in which people of different belief systems were shown films of various types of sexual behavior while wired to polygraph-like equipment. If you believe the study, social-conservative men were more likely to get hard-ons watching homoerotic activity than other straight men were.
The study authors drew from this the inference that men who oppose gay rights are not merely obeying rules from their upbringing or religion — they are actually afraid that if gays were not discouraged from publicly displaying affection (even in ways now legal in all 50 states), they — the conservatives — might try it and like it, and might go to hell as a result.
So when A calls B a homophobe, A is accusing B of having that fear, and thus of being a “latent gay” himself. Naturally, social-conservatives find this implication quite insulting.
I have no idea if the theory is really valid.
So I may have been on to something when I suggested that the meaning of “homophobia” might well be “he’s afraid he might be a homo.” Thus the replicant test.
Phobia: is the hydrophobia of rabies really a “hatred” of water? Is the photophobia of meningitis a “hatred” of light? I looked in Chambers, where it says a phobia is a “hatred, fear or aversion”. So, is say homophobia a hatred or a fear of homosexuals? Bit of a weasel word, phobia.