Quite a few comments have been left on other posts concerning my foul mouth, so I thought the conversation deserved its own post because I wanted to first address a few points of my own and secondly, allow the debate to take place on its own space rather than high-jacking another thread, which I hate.
OK, so for this to take place, I am going to address a few comments left by a couple of readers.
This was the first one:
Fred says:
Interesting post, some good points. One bit of advice: drop “for fuck’s sake” from your vocabulary. It’s crude, grammatically incorrect, and makes you sound like a foul mouthed little tramp.
You seem to have a brain in your head, but using phrases like this makes you sound like a teenager.
Now, my BIGGEST CONCERN was the phrase “foul mouthed little tramp.” Tramp is a gendered term in our culture. It implies a woman who is loose or not classy. And the “little” just makes me boil. If you want to condescend to someone, put them at the level of a child. Christ.
So that was the first one. After my response, which I also pointed out that dismissing my opinion because of my language was just another attempt to control me and the ideas for which I stand, Fred responds:
So it’s sexist to point out bad grammar? I think your comment says a lot more about you than it does about me.
Congratulations. You have made my point for me far more convincingly than I could have done it myself. Well done, my angry young feminist, well done. The feminist movement is well represented.
Oh, and by the way, lose the caps lock key. It makes you sound shrill.
No dear Fred, it is NOT sexist to point out bad grammar. It is sexist to patronize me and put me at the level of a child. And it’s very sexist to use terms like “tramp” and “shrill.”
The final comment in this trio stuck in my craw a bit less, mostly because he didn’t call me a shrill tramp, but it was important to address non-the-less:
It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. Obviously, it’s your blog, and you can say whatever you want. But if you want people to seriously consider your points of view and opinions, be it on this blog or in real life, you’ll have a much better chance of being taken seriously if you write like an educated adult rather than a foul mouthed teenager, and I would say that whether you are a man or a woman.
“Asshole”? “Dumbfuck”? “Fuck you”? Inspiring language indeed from an aspiring teacher.
My first point is to address that unnecessary jab at the end. And it is this: all of us bloggers have lives outside of our blogs and our blog persona may not be the same one we present in other situations. We all wear different masks at different times. So I really think that my language on my blog has little to do with the way I act at my job which happens to be teaching. We cannot (and should not) all be the same in every situation. That is not to say I am untrue to myself at my job or on my blog or whatever. It IS to say that we cannot let how we act in one situation define the way we act in all. There are varying degrees of our true selves and what we choose to present to any given audience will not necessarily predict what we present to the next one.
Phew, glad I got that out. Now to the real meat of the problem. Cursing, in both these (and others I don’t really feel like posting) comments and in other instances seems to take on gendered, classist, and maturity bends. It’s low class, shrill, trampy, slutty, unintelligent, crass, and unladylike to curse. I actually had a pretty foul-mouthed boyfriend in high school and one day I dropped the f-bomb when I lost a rousing game of DDR and he gave me a significant look and told me he found that pretty unattractive because ladies don’t curse. I think that sums it up pretty nicely. When a girl curses, it is so much more shocking and needs calling attention to than when a guy does. Even at the age of 15.
I still stand by my original point that people (namely men because, surprisingly, all of these commenters are male) would rather criticize my language, or grammar or spelling or word choice or hair-do or age or relationship status or weight or even my blog layout than they would MY ACTUAL IDEAS OR OPINIONS. It’s just like when someone tries to call feminists ugly or hairy or lesbians. It is, ladies and gentlemen, an attempt to try and control us and our message. When you are threatened by something, and let’s face it, a lot of men FEEL threatened by feminism (even though they shouldn’t because lord knows feminism benefits men AND women) it is so much easier to dismiss it for petty reasons than it is to face the actual dialogue. If you notice, plenty of dissenting commenters like to point out how “poorly” we write or how bad our spelling is as if that somehow negates our whole points.
Well let me say something. Not all of us have editors. And many times, when my fingers are flying across the keyboard because I am fired up about some injustice in the world, I am not thinking about grammar or style or spelling (though Firefox’s nifty spell-check feature does help me). I am thinking about content. I am thinking about what I want to say. Who gives a damn if a few comma splices or misplaced modifiers sneak in? It doesn’t erase WHAT I am saying.
And about my cursing. No I will never stop. It’s part of my style on this blog: that I am very very very very angry and I will express it as such. Do you want to know why I am angry? Well the short story is that we live in a racist, classist, sexist world and people would rather poo-poo my crass word choice then actually care about the issues. The long story? Well, it’s my whole blog, really, but I would urge you to start here, here, and here. I am angry because 1 in four women will be the victim of attempted rape. I am angry because my students, who for the most part are minorities and live in a low-income community, are 9th graders on an average 3rd grade reading level and go hungry every day. I am angry because women are beat by their husbands, children are raped, girls are sexualized, people are starving, and my status as a full human being is questioned every day because of the business between my legs. And all that anger, frustration, and rage comes out, a lot, in the form of a good-old fashioned FUCK YOU.
So please, whether its by calling us ugly, calling our grammar into question, or hating on our foul-mouths, Fred, and others, you will never silence us.
