The other day I saw a boy on campus drop his phone, watch it bounce off the sidewalk, and exclaim “balls!” It struck me as weird, because if you think about it, he’s saying “I am comparing an unfortunate circumstance to a part of my anatomy!” Most people have issues when a word that they identify with is used as a negative – “gay,” for example. But there’s a large difference in the attitudes regarding such language across the genders, and I’m not sure why.
Most girls I know bristle at derogatory phrases that use our gender/sex as an insult – to show ineptitude at sports is to “play like a girl,” to be without courage is to “pussy out,” and we can’t forget the (still very offensive) c-word. We don’t like to see our bodies or our identities used against other people, with the implication that to be us is to be inferior.
Boys, on the other hand, seem entirely comfortable translating masculine nouns into negatives, like “dick” and “prick” and “balls,” none of which elicit the reaction that different words for female anatomy might produce. Why?
One theory put forward by some male friends is that boys are socially indoctrinated to see themselves as the less sexualized gender – women are beautiful and desired, while men are not constantly pursued the same way females are. Men are more likely to accept negative comparisons to their sexuality because it is already portrayed in other spheres as less attractive and wanted.
Another theory, more endorsed by the girls I talked to, is that we are more sensitive to hints of oppression because we more sharply experience it daily. We are easily threatened by sexism because we are accustomed to a world in which we tend to come under attack just for being women, and so we are less inclined to allow any sort of unflattering associations with our gender lest they make us more vulnerable than we already are. This may be comparable to how racist terms for black people are highly offensive, while white people don’t usually respond as strongly to slurs for them.
It could also be that female-centered language is more specific. To say that someone “is acting like a girl” directly attributes whatever bad behavior they are engaging in to all of womanhood. Conversely, to say that same person is being a “dick” does not as strongly link the penis to bad behavior. It’s only semantics, but it does highlight a difference between the two sets of terms.
What do you guys think? Are girls being hypersensitive, and should we ignore anti-female language with the realization that negative masculine terms don’t seem to be hurting men, and that language only means what we allow it to mean? Or, do we have a responsibility to raise the male sexuality up to the standard of ours, to reframe them as beautiful and admired, and thus to eliminate all negatively gendered (male and female) terms from our vocabulary? Or are things okay the way they are now, with anti-male terms socially accepted by both genders, but anti-female ones less so?
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