I feel like this is a really tough discussion to have because it's hard to say '***** is the wrong word here' and explain why (which is not a simple thing, and touches on a lot of cultural hot-button issues) without it seeming like censure. I don't blame anyone for using the word; we live in a culture with a deeply ****ed up gender structure and a whole lot of poison swirling around that structure. Nobody's immune, certainly not me. I'm not trying to say you're (for any value of 'you') a bad person.
But we're having this discussion because someone wrote something appalling about a rape victim. Clearly, words aren't powerless; not all words are equal. It's easy for us to be outraged by assholes perpetuating rape culture over
there, in this horrifying crime, that appalling article. It's hard to acknowledge that these people are in many respects ordinary and representative, and that if they - individuals, groups, entire communities - can **** up this hard, so can we.
People get defensive and aggressive the moment this topic comes up, particularly on HLP. And I understand that reaction. It probably feels like hypervigilance, like policing, like cultural hypochondria. But once you've started to see the patterns of language and behavior that define a lot of our culture (and for me, it didn't come from reading feminist blogs or reading feminist books; it was a barrage of laboratory data and grim, grim experiments that overturned the idea that we really understand our own attitudes), a lot of stuff that once seemed ridiculous starts to become clear.
We've had some pretty decent progress on this front here in recent years. I'd like to see it keep going and I hope we can continue this conversation without it boiling down to antagonism and defensiveness.
Connotation is personal. Denotation is universal. His sentence is no more impossible than the fact I use "cute" only to refer to small children and fuzzy animals; his connotations to the word are personal and not universal.
This drive to retire certain words because of perceived connotations that you occasionally embrace is always so very eager to ignore that while definition is usually universal, the use of language is inherently a far more squishy subject. It has a consensus method at best, no shared foundation at worst. As you cannot build a consensus, there's no way to build an argument for it.
Fortunately, this is untrue - we can actually quantify the behavioral effects of words on targets! This is part of the body of scientific research that really got me invested in the topic a few years ago.
The meanings that individuals assign to a word are in many ways irrelevant. What's important is the network of exposure-driven semantic associations that the word can trigger. These networks operate in neural systems which are not directly regulated by what we think of as the conscious mind, and they manifest in behavioral patterns that actively defy the egalitarian goals and norms most of us subscribe to. These meanings - and the behaviors they trigger - are taught by cultural exposure, without consent or endorsement; they're statistical, frequency-driven aggregates of the messages floating around us.
This is why we can't decide what a word means: most of the meaning is assigned by the cultural consensus, received by neural systems we can't easily regulate, and expressed through channels that we're largely unaware of but which turn out to be surprisingly consequential. It's a hell of a thing.
e: I feel like another really good point to examine here is the pervasive application of '*****' to mean 'a male rape victim'. There's all kinds of ****ed up semantic connectivity here: to rape a man is to make him like a woman. This is pretty awful for all parties and it ties into the problem male rape victims face wherein they feel they can't report the crime because it will emasculate them.
