Women vs. Gendered Slurs & Euphemisms & Feminist Nomenclature

From The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Women:
Women are a protected class, meaning that if anyone tries to proliferate negative material about women as a group, action can be taken to get the offending material removed on the grounds that it is hate-speech. Trouble is, the law is an ass and typically only recognises hate-speech against women as hate-speech if the word ‘women’ is used.

Gendered slurs:
Other recognised instances of hate-speech against women by law is the use of gendered slurs. I’m not going to list them here, I’m going to assume we all know the endless number of gendered slurs that exist.

Euphemisms:
Neither of the above instances recognise new euphemisms for women that are constantly cropping up. The latest one being “Karens” and the one before that being “thots”. A euphemism for women clearly qualifies as a gendered slur and therefore a form of sexist hate-speech. Even if you were to argue “Karens aren’t all women” — technically neither are any of the recognised gendered slurs that focus on promiscuity, for instance, right?

Feminist nomenclature:
There are several misogynistic subreddits that “ban hate speech against women”. The way they perform this trick is by replacing the word ‘women’ with the word ‘feminists’ and then suddenly all their hate-speech is protected by free speech. ‘Feminist’ (noun) is not a protected class and because you identify as feminists yourselves it can never be recognised as a gendered slur. So feminists are complicit in allowing the weaponisation of speech against women. ‘Feminist’ most probably started out as an adjective. It was probably misogynists who turned it into a noun, so that it could be used in the common sexist practise of othering women via euphemism. Trouble is, women who are sympathetic to the feminist cause have adopted the label, making it the perfect weapon and shield for anyone who wants to engage in hate-speech against women.

Because women have been labelled all their lives, this form of oppression has become such background noise, that it is rendered invisible, inaudible, impalpable.

The reason men hate being described of as ‘cis, straight, white men’ is because they are accustomed to being viewed as individuals by themselves and by society and judged based on merit. It makes them sensitive to the othering qualities that labels bring. Women completely lack this sensitivity. Most women don’t feel anything when being referred to as ‘cis, straight, white women’ for instance.

Stop thinking you can take back labels. ‘Queer’ was never taken back, since ‘queer’, the slur, was a noun, not the innocuous adjective we use today, which hadn’t been in use for a while. So the noun wasn’t “taken back”, instead the adjective was resurrected and redefined. The N-word was never taken back, and the slut walk was a failure. You may have your own personal definition of ‘feminist’ (noun), but society has another. Which definition do you think is going to stick? Nouns (for people) can never be “taken back”, they can only be used against you.

Now we come to the really controversial bit. Within the microcosm of feminist discourse there are euphemisms against women that are probably used more often by people who identify as feminists themselves than by people who don’t. I’m talking about the acronyms “TERF” & “SWERF”. These labels qualify as dehumanising euphemisms, they qualify as gendered slurs, they qualify as hate-speech and there really is no way around that fact. Anti-feminist misogynists use terms like “feminazi” to mask their hate-speech against women, by arguing: it’s only aimed at a certain type of woman, a woman who is saying & doing the wrong thing, just like insert-promiscuity-based-gendered-slurs-here, just like “Karens”, just like “SWERFs”.

Euphemisms are distancing language, which is a form of dehumanising language. Euphemisms are a way of weaponising speech, they are a tool within propaganda and propaganda is a form of psychological warfare. Not only have euphemisms for women never benefitted the feminist movement, but they have been consistently employed as a means to undermine women’s issues.

Our culture professes to care about cracking down on hate-speech against women, but it allows the use of sanctioned euphemisms any time we want to make an exception for ourselves. Those exceptions are turning into the rule. How often and where do we see/hear euphemisms to describe women? All the damn time and damn near everywhere are the answers to those respective questions. If a social movement like feminism truly cares about the issue of sexist hate-speech, maybe we should:
a) not contribute to it
b) not tolerate when others do it, whether they’re part of the movement, or not

Seeing people call J. K. Rowling a “TERF” was just a repeat of what I had seen MRAs do time and time again.

I had seen this movie before, I see it all day, every day in fact. Every single time any woman anywhere makes any attempt at all at exposing misogyny on either a personal, or structural level, a substantial number of people respond by calling her a bigot, often using gendered slurs to do so.
It’s an anti-feminist strategy as old as feminism itself. The three-pronged approach follows this structure:
a) don’t address, or even acknowledge the misogyny that she exposed
b) accuse her of being prejudiced herself (shift the blame)
c) apply a gendered euphemism to her, marking her analysis of bigotry as bigotry itself via the use of literal bigotry

It’s an effective way of cementing over the concept of prejudice against women, labelling analysis of prejudice against women as a form of prejudice itself, while masking the bigotted backlash against any woman who wants to address the issue of prejudice against women as a necessary anti-discriminatory measure.

“TERF” really is a slur.

It is up to feminism to be the resistance against this unequivocal form of anti-feminism. There is no point in a feminist movement if it’s only going to serve the backlash against women’s issues.

I’ll end by amplifying a silenced voice, with the well-articulated, succinct opening and closing quotes transcribed from a Youtube video by a radical feminist, who was subsequently bullied off the platform by 4Chan guys who doxxed her:

“Radical feminism by definition is a philosophy that emphasises the patriarchal roots of the inequality between men & women. One of its many facets is recognising that the patriarchal invention of gender is key in maintaining that invention of inequality; that gender is something you are socialised into since birth. In this society women, or biological females, have been socialised into femininity, below men, biological males, who have been socialised into masculinity. To put it simply the radical feminist stance on the whole two genders issue is that there are only two genders we can be forced into but in a truly equal society there would be none & the only distinction between men & women would be just that, the biological differences. Our personalities would completely be our own choice, rather than stereotypes forced onto us through the system that is gender. This leads us to the conclusion that “man” & “woman” isn’t something we can identify as but it’s rather something patriarchal society identifies us as, if that makes sense […]
Language is used to articulate thoughts, and obscuring the basic definition of concepts like ‘radical feminism’ is pushing us further & further away from actual progress. Because if we don’t have the language to describe our movement surely we won’t have the language to describe our goals & we’ll remain stagnant as a society, as we won’t know what to strive for, since we can’t articulate what we want as a society going forward”.