Words for Asshole

There are many ways to call someone an asshole. If they're a guy, you can call them a dick or a douche bag. If they're a woman then you can call them a bitch or a cunt. Either way, you can still just call them an asshole (although, like many gender-neutral terms, it is more often used for guys). All these words, when used as a pejorative, have basically the same meaning: that the person in question is self-serving, cruel, callous, greedy, or just generally evil. Yet, the connotations of the words are so different.
The most obvious difference is the gender difference. Cunt and bitch are used to describe women, which makes sense because they mean "vagina" and "female dog," respectively. Dick makes sense for men because it means "penis" (or a male nickname). What about douche bag, though? It's a female hygienic product, so it's kind of a mystery that it's used to refer to men. I guess it could be to create more of a gender balance in the number of words. Dick already provides a lot of permutations, though: dickhole, dickface, dickweed. It's kind of unique amongst these words. Cuntface? Bitchweed? You just don't hear it.
Another stark difference is the level of offensiveness. Obviously, cunt is the most offensive of these. Calling someone a cunt and calling someone a dick are basically the opposite-gender equivalents of each other - they're both words for genitalia that also colloquially mean asshole - and yet the former is so much more offensive than the latter. I'm not really sure why this is; possibly just a result of the fact that it's used less-often.
I've seen lots of people try to "reclaim" the word bitch, and re-invent it as a compliment. I've even seen a positive backronym create for it: "Beautiful Intelligent Talented Cute Hot." I'm against this reclamation. If someone calls you a bitch and clearly means it as an insult but you respond as though it were a compliment, then you're just being an idiot. I'm generally against people responding to the literal wording of what someone says when it's clear that the intended meaning is different, like back in elementary school when you asked your teacher if you can go to the bathroom and she'd say "I don't know, can you?" That's kind of the same thing that someone is doing when they interpret being called a bitch as a compliment, except it makes less sense because they're not using the literal meaning; they're using some crazy, made-up one. "Bitch," unlike other words that have been reclaimed like "queer," wasn't a slur against every member of a certain group but rather an insult against someone's personality. Plus, reclaiming the word bitch wouldn't really change much. If someone wants to say that a woman is an asshole, they'd just call them an asshole. Or cunt.

The Big Transgender Post

This article expects you to have a basic understanding of terminology surrounding the transgender movement, but in case you don't, here's the one-paragraph summary: "Sex" refers to one's maleness of femaleness in the physical sense (ie; your plumbing). "Gender" refers to someone's mental sense of identity of being male or female (what you consider yourself to be or "identify" as). "Female-to-Male" (or FTM) refers to a transgendered¹ person who was born with a female body but identifies as a male. "Male-to-Female" or MTF would be the opposite of that². A person who's not transgendered is called "cisgendered."
I don't really have a blanket acceptance for all transgender issues nor a blanket denial of them. It's a little more complicated with that, so I'm going to list some statements that would generally be used to describe what the transgender rights movement supports, then whether I consider then true or false and why. If any of the issues require further clarification or support after this, I'll write a separate article for them.

• A person is a man³ or a woman based on what they identify with. Sort of. Like many discussions, this one comes down to a matter. Here, we have two different definitions for man,* one stemmed in gender, and the other stemmed in sex. The exact wording that I most often hear for the gender-based definitions is that a male is "anyone who identifies as a male." The sex-based definition I like to use is that someone is male if they're "phenotypically male," that is to say if they've grown male reproductive organs.
  As far as which of these is correct, they both are to some extent. Some people, when they say "male" are referring to someone who identifies as male, regardless of gender. At the same time, some people are referring to anyone who has a male sex when they say it. Really, in a way, these are two separate words that just happen to be spelled and pronounced the same way. So, they're both useable definitions.
  My position, though, would be that the sex-based version is more useable. The reason for this being mostly that it's the meaning that most people are thinking of when they say male, and most dictionaries would agree with it. There are also some inherent problems with the gender-based definition, probably the greatest of which is that it's a circular definition; it includes the word "male" in the definition for "male." It also implies that anyone who doesn't speak English can't really be male, because they probably wouldn't identify with a word that they don't even know. I know this sounds like I'm being pretty ridiculous in my interpretation of this definition, but when a definition doesn't create any meaning in a word besides the word itself, then it's just not a good definition and opens itself up to these problems.
  I can also see how people might see the gender-based definition as sort of a "straw-man," but that is honestly the definition I've heard most often offered by people who consider maleness to be gender-determined. Still, I'm also willing to listen to other definitions if any readers have another one to offer.
• A transgendered person feels a strong compulsion to express their gender which they cannot help. Sure. I mean, I don't have the experience of being any of the people out there who say these feelings are so compelling, so who am I to disagree with them when they tell me how they feel.
• A person should be allowed to wear the clothes and then present themselves in such a way that reflects their gender identity. Yes , with a caveat. This is all about being honest with yourself. If you a person feels that their gender compells them to wear a skirt instead of pants or visa versa, then more power to them. There's really no harm in dressing to express. I put a caveat in here though, with regards to dressing in order to convince people that your sex is something it isn't. I've noticed a pre-occupation amongst transgendered people with their ability to "pass," or present themselves in such a way that no one guesses their sex. This is different than dressing in a certain way for the purposes of self-expression; it's dressing for the purpose of creating an idea in other people's heads, and a false idea at that. I'm not saying that this should be illegal or anything like that, but there is a moral obligation not to, as it is dishonest.
• Transgender people should be free from violence and harassment because their presentation doesn't match up with society's proscription for how people of their sex act. Absolutely. There are very few things in this world that someone can do to warrant violence against them, and choosing not to fall in with society's gender roles is not one of them. Anti-transgender violence is also (I've heard) one of the factors that pressures transgendered people into hiding their birth sex, for their own safety. So any act of violence against transgendered people for anger over dishonesty about sex is having the opposite effect intended.
• A transgendered person should be able to use the bathroom, locker-room, or similar facility which corresponds with their gender. No. This goes back to the first issue I brought up, about what makes someone a man or a woman. The reason that we have separate facilities for men and women has nothing to do with self-identities or gender roles and has everything to do with bodies. Being nude is a very corporal thing. In our society, we have this pervasive idea that seeing a nude person who has the same kind of body as oneself and being seen nude by people of the same kind of body is really no big deal, but seeing or being seen by a member of the opposite sex is something to be avoided, or at least reserved for people one is intimate with. Now, one can certainly argue that this idea is pointless or wrong or whatever. It's not my intention to defend this idea as something necessary, but rather just to point out that it is there and that it is the basis for why we have "men's" and "women's" facilities. So it only makes sense that how we divide people into these facilities should follow along corporal lines. Also, there are some single-user, unisex restroom out there; an idea that I'm totally in favour of.
• Transwomen should be allowed to attend the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. Yes, but there's more to it than that. for those of you who've never heard of it, the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival (or MWMF) is an annual music festival built around female artists and has had a long-running rule of only allowing "womyn-born-womyn" to attend. Recently, they started agreeing to sell tickets to transwomen, but informing them that they are violating the spirit of the festival. Then, they eventually just dropped the rule altogether, but I feel it's still an issue worth discussing. I could probably write a whole post on the MWMF, but I'll try to keep it brief here. Preventing transwomen from attending the festival was wrong and discriminatory, but it wasn't wrong because doing so didn't recognize them as women; it was wrong because trying to limit the festival to only women in the first place was bigoted and discriminatory. There has been a noticeable movement in the transgender community to try and gain access to the MWMF, but they're not doing it by saying that they should end their discriminatory admittance policy, but rather that they should just revise it so that transwomen aren't excluded. The thing about how the transgendered movement has treated this policy, is that they've implicitly said "It's okay that you discriminate; you're just discriminating wrong." The fundamental difference between the MWMF and the places mentioned in the above issue is that a music festival has nothing to do with one's sex or body, so it doesn't justify to exclude people based on their sex or body.
• A transgendered person should be allowed to marry someone of their birth sex (and opposite their gender). Yes, but same with cysgendered people. I'm definitely in favour of marriage equality (see previous post), so I don't think sex (or gender) should be a factor that prevents anyone from getting married.
• A person should be legally protected from being discriminated against for employment, based on their gender. I agree. A person shouldn't be disqualified from a job because of their gender, their sex, or whether or not the two "match." The reason being is that none of these things have any baring on a person's ability to work. There are a few jobs that would count as exceptions (e.g. stripper), but these really are just small exceptions and shouldn't allow discrimination in other positions.

¹Some people have a problem with using "Transgendered" as an adjective. I am not one of them.
²Of course, there are more categories out there than "male" or "female," but I'm trying not to over-complicate thing
³For brevity's sake, I'm just going to be talking about how this argument applies to whether or not someone is a man. Everything in this section can be applied to whether someone's a woman, as well.

On feminism (and masculinism).

     Feminism is an interesting word.  It means many different things to many different people.  To some, feminism is almost synonymous with the legalization of abortion.  Others may consider those values completely incompatible.  I've heard feminism often described as "the radical idea that women are people," an idea that's hardly been radical in my lifetime.  If I were to provide a definition for how I see it, it would be that feminism is the desire to remove from our society the cultural and legal inequalities between men and women which negatively effect women.  Certainly, there will always be argument over what these inequalities are and how best to get rid of them, but I believe at the core are the things I stated above.

     I used to think that feminism accounted for any desire to remove inequalities between men and women.  I would rail against many discrepancies between how males and females were treated, and I wondered why other self-described feminists didn't rally behind me.  Mostly, it's because I would rally behind ideas that would benefit men, but not so much women.  Feminism doesn't take into account the needs and problems faced by men.  It's not because of some inherent sexism within feminism; it's just not what it was made for.  That was my misunderstanding of feminism.
     On the other end, you have ideologies which want to make the world a better place for women, but to do so by creating inequalities (or at least strengthening existing ones) rather than destroying them.  People in this camp will usually wave the banner of feminism, or "radical feminism."  Of course, any ideology that supports any kind of inequality between men and women isn't really feminism (as per my definition).  Because it so often self-describes as "feminist," however, I like to call it faux-minism¹.  I've run across a lot of this mindset on the internet, mostly because I'm an internet masochist and like reading sites catered towards people I disagree with.
    One such site is a little chestnut called "I blame the patriarchy"; a nice little blog and accompanying message-board.  This place is a goldmine for off-the-wall, no-holds-barred misandry, and it will probably serve as my whipping boy for some future blog entries, but I digress.  Faux-minist writings that I've seen seem to avoid the idea that they're creating inequalities with sort of a "blank check" attitude towards them.  That is to say that: they see the inequalities and discrimination against women as being so great that they could not be overcome in the foreseeable future, and that anything that makes things better for women, at the expense of men, could never shift the balance enough to set things so that they favour women overall, but would rather only move society closer to the (distant) middle-line of equality.  I'm kind of half-making this up; I've never heard it actually described to me like that.  It's more of a general impression I get from reading a ton of blog posts.  I don't believe that society is really that stacked in men's favour (which is a post for another day), but even if it were; counteracting inequalities with more inequalities doesn't "balance things out."  It's clumsy and inaccurate and just creates a more complex web of separate roles.
      Most Men’s Rights blogs I've read suffer from the same problem, but with reversed genders.  They seem to have an unhealthy interest with restoring traditional gender roles and the nuclear family, thus restoring previously weakened inequalities.  Given the fact that the modern men's rights/masculinism movement was basically created to be a mirror movement of feminism, it seems logical that qualifications for what counts as masculinism is the mirror of what counts as feminism: any idea that seeks to remove inequalities which negatively effect men.   
     There's a middle ground, as set of changes we could make in society that's both masculinist and feminist, that removes inequalities and benefits both men and women.  Removing violence and similar tough-guy ideals from society's idea of what it is to be a man is one example of this. 
     Even with the presence of common ground, though, there seems to be a weird kind of animosity between many feminists and masculinists, as though they were each other's enemy.  I don't know why, though.  Both camps have similar goals of ending sex-based discrimination; each one is just better at seeing and attacking different kinds of discrimination.  After all, the most visible kind of discrimination for anyone is the kind against a group that person belongs to. 
    If feminists are trying to remove some kind of inequality, it is not the goal of masculinism to stop them; or visa versa.  Eventually, if both parties keep removing inequalities against themselves, the barriers between men and women might not be so present.

 

¹ Why does the French word for “fake” make such better portmanteaus than the English one?

Nomenclature of sexuality

    It really perplexes me as to why we use the words "gay" and "straight," or any synonyms there-of.  Why do we classify sexuality into categories of "like the same sex" or "likes the opposite sex"?  These seem unnecessarily convoluted and weird.  We use the same words to describe a man who likes men, as we do for a woman who likes women.  We call both these kinds of people "gay," yet they seem like the complete opposite in their preference. 
    A few years ago, I decided to stop, or at least limit, using reflexive terms for sexuality (previous post aside).  It just makes so much more sense to me to describe someone as "liking women" or "liking men" rather than "liking their own sex" or "liking the opposite sex."  After all, you're supposed to be describing what kind of person someone is attracted to; you shouldn't muddle it up by using phrases that are based off of what kind of person they are.
    It's like, if you decide to have dinner with a friend and you ask them what kind of food they're in the mood for, and then they answer, "the same kind of food I had last night."  When you ask someone a direct question, ideally they should give a direct answer, not one relative to some other bit of information.  "Mexican food," is a better answer than, "the same kind I had last night."  In the same way, "I like women," is a better answer than, "I like people of my own sex."
    Unfortunately, I'm still definitely a minority in using this system.  There aren't any convenient, monosyllabic words that I can use to describe someone as liking men or liking women.  I could make some up, but people would have no idea what I'm talking about, and if they asked I'd basically have to explain my who position on reflexive language to describe sexuality.  And I'm not very fond of using made-up words to shoe-horn my opinions and rants into conversations.  I guess the words "virisexual" and "gynosexual" are accurate, but they're way too long for everyday use, and still have the same probably of people having no idea what I'm talking about. 
    Maybe I'm being overly-logical about this whole thing, but there are other reasons that it would be nice if people adopted non-reflexive language about sexuality.  For instance, if use the same word to describe a man liking men as we use for a woman liking men, then it might help us to see (at least subconsciously) that these attractions are not so different. Non-reflexive language would better highlight the inherent sexism in saying that it's okay for women to like men, but not okay for men to like men, or visa versa.  I wont go as far as to say that our system of language is what allowed homophobia to take root in society, but I certainly think it made it easier.

   I’m not saying that we should totally throw out the words “gay” and “straight”; they are still useful when speaking in a broader sense, and you’re using the word to describe both lesbians and gays, or both straight women and men.    However, when you’re talking about a specific person’s sexual preference, it just makes so much more sense to me to use non-reflexive terms for sexuality.  

   Of course, this whole rant doesn't really apply to the phrase "bisexual" (or "pansexual"), because it already describes a person’s sexual preference, without relation to their own sex.