Feminism is a different matter. For whatever reason, people don’t think it’s worth doing research before spouting off about something in the humanities. We hear it all the time. “Feminism is stupid and dated because men aren’t all evil.” For misstatements of fact, that’s right up there with “Mountain Dew is great for birth control.” Then there’s “Feminists are bad because [I can’t be bothered to do my research and have no idea what I’m talking about].” Seriously. If you don’t get what feminism is about, check Wikipedia or something. If that’s too much effort, fine. But why pretend to speak with authority on something you know nothing about?

If anything, the bragging was even more upsetting. When you argue that you survived a harrowing pregnancy because you’re “tough,” you imply that other women who die under similar circumstances were too weak to deserve to survive. It’s already bad enough that the religious right shames women who choose abortion for choosing their education, careers, relationships, already existing children, or their own lives over the obligation to have another baby. But shaming women for being weak who die trying to fill the mandate (or who are deprived of the choice) to bear children at all costs? That’s dark indeed, no matter how glowingly white the background of the ad is.

It’s not that I don’t get why we have political arguments about language. Words have power. Of course they do. Their power is to communicate concepts and define the reality of a situation. When someone uses “gay” to mean “gross and weird,” or when someone describes a person as “acting like a bitch” to denote that this person is being weak or over-emotional, or (if the person is a lady) not weak or emotional enough, or when someone casually appropriates the term “rape” to mean anything other than forced sex, I feel queasy. The reason I feel queasy is that using those words, in that way, is an act that relies on underlying concepts that are terrible. It relies on the idea that gay people are gross and weird, that women are and ought to be weak and hurtable, and that rape is not a serious enough crime for you to shudder at the mention of it, although Lord knows when a woman actually uses the word “rape” to describe her own experience you will start finding reasons why she shouldn’t be allowed to do that because, you know, It Is A Serious Crime And Let’s Not Trivialize It and all that. The words don’t mean anything unless you’ve got that structure of thought underlying them; if this weren’t true, people could just pick up the word “gay” from a “that’s so gay” statement and replace it with any given word in the English language, to the same effect. Yet I cannot start randomly going “that’s so coriander” if I want you to know what I mean. The reason people work to limit women’s ability to use the word “rape,” the reason that people work to defend the ability of guys to use it in non-rape contexts, and the reason that these are frequently the same people, is that words have power, and give their users power. Naming something is a way of asserting that you have the ability to define it. So, yes: your language matters. It makes sense to fight about bad language, because language is one of the most fundamental ways we use our power.

Rape can be enacted by men in many ways, under innumerable circumstances. Sometimes in loving contexts, sometimes in hateful contexts. Sometimes insensitive men don’t pay attention to women’s non-verbal cues. Sometimes men willfully ignore women’s explicit demands for them to stop. Some men put drugs in women’s drinks so physical force is no longer an issue beyond the force of the rape itself. Sometimes men wait for women to get drunk enough that their capacity to make informed decisions is lessened. Sometimes fathers rape their daughters, husbands rape their wives, and boyfriends rape their girlfriends. And, yes, sexual assault can happen against boys as well as girls, against sons as well as daughters, against intersex and transgendered people of any age, and in lesbian and gay relationships as well as heterosexual ones. But boy-raised men raping girl-raised women is the most common form of rape along with boys and men raping girls. Any form or manifestation of rape is part of a larger pattern of rape used as an act of terrorism, subordination, and violation against women and girls by men and boys. This is the central political theme and story.

But some other part of me suspected the real truth, one too bitter to let in. That part in my unconscious, knowing and wise, was telling me exactly who I was identified with. It was telling me that my values, my spirituality, my way of being a woman in the world were masculine through and through, I was immersed in the world of the father.

Sue Monk Kidd, “The Dance of the Dissident Daughter”

To be born female in this culture means that you are born “tainted”, that there is something intrinsically wrong with you that you can never change, that your birthright is one of innate inferiority. I am not trying to imply that this must remain so. I do believe that we must know this and understand it as it is given before it can be worked through.

Anne Wilson Schaef

When I use the term feminine soul, I’m referring to a woman’s inner repository of the Divine Feminine, her deep source, her natural instinct, guiding wisdom and power. It is everything that keeps a woman powerful and grounded in herself, belonging to herself, and yet connected to all that is. Connection with this inner reality is a woman’s most priceless experience.

Sue Monk Kidd, “The Dance of the Dissident Daughter”

Sex is not a contract for pregnancy any more than swimming is a contract for drowning.

The woman’s orgiastic fantasies and her sharing of them over the internet with a willing recipient is not a crime. She was not inviting rape. Group sex is sex with consent. Rape is not. People entertain all kinds of sexual fantasies, from sex with celebrities to SM bondage, midnight forest romps, bisexual threesomes and romantic mountain-top trysts. Such fantasies may not turn you on, but I say: live and let live. Harmless sexual imaginings should not be allowed to interfere with the dispensing of justice by our courts. If the young woman was raped, I hope she appeals and wins, for the sake of all women – and men – everywhere. Justice demands it. No means no, always.

“Feminist philosophers and linguists have shown that women are marked. Marking draws attention to the woman’s femaleness and carries implications of inferiority. The woman is present, but only lesser. Marking is achieved by pronouns, prefixes and sex-specific words and naming practices. Practices of marking women as diminutive, secondary, or amateur serve to diminish us, particularly when such marking fits into a systemic cultural pattern of women’s trivialization.

Secondly, women are erased as subjects. Discursive practices set women up as outsiders, as objects in texts, but not straight-forwardly as speaking subjects.”

Lynne Tirrell, “Language and Power”

Strictly Feminism

Sex is not a contract for pregnancy any more than swimming is a contract for drowning.