When one studies primitive cultures, one finds they always believe that words have magic power, for example the idea of a True Name, or not speaking the name of God aloud, or whispering certain words so as not to tempt evil spirits, or the idea that the very act of writing is a form of magic; consider that the Egyptian Thoth was among the greatest gods because he invented writing, and the Germanic Odin was said to have crucified himself to induce the vision that led to the discovery of writing. We really haven’t changed much. Take offensive words, for example; any reasonably-polite person will avoid words that he believes might offend his listeners, but many people nowadays are so terrified of the magical power of words that they avoid using a “bad” word even in the context of discussing the word itself rather than using it offensively. And so we are forced to endure endless kindergarten formulations such as “the F word”, “the N word”, “the R word” (which I encountered for the first time this week), etc, as though the speaker or writer thought even spelling the word in question would summon Voldemort or Hastur the Unspeakable. But such asininities are ultimately futile; I mean, is there any English-speaking adult who doesn’t recognize “f***” as “fuck”? Of course not; the bowdlerized form merely becomes a synonym for the unholy combination of sounds. This is what is called the “euphemism treadmill”; any euphemism eventually becomes the semantic equivalent of the Forbidden Word in the brains of listeners, so that it, too becomes contaminated and must be replaced with a new euphemism. The process only stops when the negative associations do, and there is no shortcut. It’s why I use old, new, clinical, and vulgar terms for whores mostly interchangeably; slapping a nice label on a stigmatized group doesn’t make oppressive laws and ugly propaganda go away. For example, though many reporters are now using “sex worker” instead of “prostitute”, they might as well use the latter because the way they use it (ie the tone, accompanying adjectives, infantilizing statements about us, etc) is no different. The words aren’t the problem; bigotry, hate, and evil laws are. It’s the same for every oppressed minority group, and subjecting someone to the fucking Inquisition because sinful sounds slipped forth from his larynx will change nothing except to make the world a poorer, uglier, nastier place. So please, stop wasting your damned energy policing other people’s speech, and start using it to speak against policing others.
Unspeakable
February 11, 2021 by Maggie McNeill
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Have you ever taken the MBTI personality test? Idk why I never noticed this before, but this post is oozing INTJ energy & it was very much in my face right here.
Maggie strikes me as the kind of NTJ who’d say MBTI is bunk.
Amen to that
This example dates back to the 2004 Janet Jackson Superbowl performance and wardrobe malfunction, the Federal Communications Commission’s failed $500,000 fine against CBS, and its 8 year investigation into the televised event.
It illustrates the euphemism treadmill. Nobody can miss the meaning of the song title.
If that happened today I can already imagine the CNN, Buzzfeed, Vice and other Twitter headlines, calling the stunt ‘assault’, ‘racism’, ‘misogyny’, ‘an example of the sexist, racist patriarchy that keeps black women down’ and other such articles written by the breathless bloggers that keep the machine fed.
Countless YouTube reaction videos, twitter trends, Facebook groups.
Meanwhile there will be attempts to pass more laws to prevent such incidents online, bi-partisan as always, supported by Right and Left Media and a new Feminist NGO that claims to be about ‘Ending Sexism in Media’ suspiciously staffed by former Mormon or Christian members.
At the time, radio stations were afraid to broadcast the song, and very few did.
The rationalization was “the FCC could fine us for broadcasting forbidden words because everybody knows what FU means”.
The FCC was also solidly controlled by the fundamentalist religious right wing, and was seriously considering new regulations to forbid any innuendo or oblique references to their list of forbidden words and ideas.
Religious fundamentalists and soi disant “feminists” such as Catharine A. MacKinnon and (now thankfully deceased) Andrea Dworkin often team up to promote censorship, including censorship of innuendo or oblique references to words or ideas that they consider “unthinkable”.
Another tactic they use is to unhinge words from their meaning, so that the word “rape” can mean anything from some woman’s regret at some decade’s old consensual sexual activity to “eye rape”, or any man casting eyes on any woman in public if the woman decides she felt violated by the man seeing her.
All these loathsome political movements consider George Orwell’s novel 1984 and essay “Politics and the English Language” to be instruction manuals, not warnings about totalitarian government. They already have enough influence with the US Congress to cause passage of the FOSTA and SESTA acts to eliminate Sec. 230 of the Internet Decency Act.
Although I applaud your logical and reasonable philosophical post, Maggie, I feel it is more and more futile. We are now in the “Age of Magic Words”, where we have paradoxically the widest and easiest way of freely expression ourselves in the history of humanity, while terrorized constantly by the narrative that words are dangerous and must be banned, contained, changed, exiled, and otherwise erased from the books and the minds of those that dare speak them.
Maybe I’m reading too much news and ‘media’ but its becoming unavoidable even if one tries to avoid them, they still insert themselves into your life, even fiction is now a place where one must sit and be lectured.
Every part of our lives is now is invaded by whatever Twitter is trending today.
FUCKIN; A!
I’d have guessed that the R word is too many generations back in the euphemism treadmill to need its own name.
I wouldn’t say this post is ungood, but it’s not the double plus good I was hoping for.
I agree it’s silly to assume “f-word” isn’t going to be translated to “fuck” in peoples heads, but the intent goes deeper than that.
By saying “f-word” the speaker is subtly clamming that “fuck” is offensive.
If they didn’t euphemize it, people might realize that sex is fucking awesome.
And yes, the intent behind the words matters.
When I say “fucking whore” my intent is something good.
A non-fucking whore would be pointless — a fucking whore is definitely what I want.
But when other people utter the phrase “fucking whore” their intent is to invoke a negative response.
They’re trying to associate “fucking” and “whore” with “things-that-are-bad” (which I’ve always found a bit strange, but prohibitionists have always seemed horribly twisted to me).
The thing is, words do have power, and they are kind of magical.
Consider the magic spell we learned as children; “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.”
(ironic, since the first time we encounter this is usually after we have been hurt by words said by someone else.)
We chant this spell in the hopes it will protect us from hurtful words.
And who can forget the magic word “please”?
That probability altering incantation makes it much more likely you’ll get what you want.
The words we choose do invoke responses in people.
That’s why the phrase “sex worker” is important.
The slogan “If you don’t think sex work is work, you can go fuck yourself” works because it emphasizes an association between sex and work (there’s also a joke in it, which makes it more competitive meme).
I’ve heard people say “sex work” is a terrible phrase because it makes sex sound respectable — and I think they were being serious.
It’s no wonder people are trying to censor the words. Letting you say anything in any way you want means letting you have all that power.
The magic of “wrong speak” has deeply infested journalism, which has become little more that reality TV porn.
As both Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi pointed out in recent articles, journalists increasingly use their platforms to search act as hall monitors reporting on low level sex acts, private conversations and personal emails.
They are the middle school snitch everyone hated who now speak with a public megaphone.
When an Assange, Snowden, or Gary Webb perform real journalism that exposes government criminality and malfeasance, these snitch journalists turn on them and back the corrupt government instead. It’s incredible.
We’ve come a long ways from Seymour Hirsh’s “HUGE C.I.A. OPERATION REPORTED IN U.S. AGAINST ANTIWAR FORCES, OTHER DISSIDENTS IN NIXON YEARS in 1974
https://www.nytimes.com/1974/12/22/archives/huge-cia-operation-reported-in-u-s-against-antiwar-forces-other.html
To scumbag journalists obsessed with getting the illegally obtained video of Robert Kraft getting a hand job, or “Against Their Will, Customers Hiding in Plane Site” from public embarrassment as journalist Sasha Aslanian.
What is not being reported while they breathlessly perform tabloid journalism on the private lives of private citizens?
From Matt Tahibi:
“Stories about the expansion of official secrecy during the Trump years similarly did not interest mainstream news organizations much. We stopped worrying about the illegal use of counterintelligence evidence in domestic criminal cases, were uninterested in government assertions that American citizens do not have the right to know if they’ve been targeted for “lethal action” (I was one of just two reporters in the courtroom for a related lawsuit, in which the plaintiff was not even entitled to know what federal agency the government’s lawyer represented), and magically lost our animosity for Trump Attorney General William Barr, when his Justice Department refused to allow Twitter or any other company to reveal how many secret FISA orders they’d received.”
Stories like this are of no interest to the New York Times, NPR or The Seattle Times. They’re entirely focused on watching people through the hole in the stall next to them and dreaming up shocking ways to report what they see in the most sneering way possible.
“low level sex acts”? contrasting to what, kingpin-level pimping?
Poor choice of words on my part.
If it’s consensual, it’s low level. Rape is not a low level sex act.
Catching the ex cop Golden State Killer is newsworthy. Consensual sex, wrong words and wrong think of private conversations is not.
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