Fortunately, this is untrue - we can actually quantify the behavioral effects of words on targets!
A basic question, then.
If it affects the target, is it not serving a useful societal purpose should she ever browse this forum? This is clearly something about which some level of shame and a feeling of being put in one's place could be quite usefully employed. It is after all something the writer should probably not do again and her behavior is clearly in need of modification. Some level of negative corrective behavior is as much a requirement for our current society as understanding is.
Or are you implying that people aren't sophisticated enough to determine the target? That argument might be true, I grant.
'Targets' here is a general term for perceivers of the stimulus. It actually includes everyone who hears or reads the word, and creepily enough, we'll be able to detect short-term stereotype-congruent priming effects in these subjects for minutes or (depending on who you ask) hours afterwards. The implicit racist and sexist attitudes that even the most egalitarian person holds (and which affect their behavior in specific situations, or along specific modalities) are derived from repeated exposure to these primes.
For example, you could flash the word '*****' for less than fifty milliseconds - well below the threshold of conscious awareness - to a group of randomly selected men and women. You might then be able to detect impaired math performance in the women and improved math performance in the men if you gave them a basic skills assessment afterwards. This would occur even if they consciously endorsed egalitarian norms and gender equality! (This effect works in all kinds of directions - white guys who have to indicate their race before taking a jump shot on a basketball court
won't jump as high as a control group.)
Mere exposure turns out to be a powerful force.
***** can also refer to a mean women. This definition is not inherently sexist and is at least as common as its other meanings. Some people still perceive it as sexist, but that is not the fault of the speaker.
You're wrong here for the same reason you're wrong about the race analogy. And I don't mean to be rude with that blunt declaration - it's, again, a super complicated topic. But the word
***** is absolutely inherently sexist, and it can never mean 'a mean woman'. Words can't be stripped of their historical force, and - to tie back in to the ~~SCIENCE~~ above - you can actually measure that force. '*****' and 'nigger' are words backed by very real, omnipresent systems of oppression that women and black people have to deal with constantly. They are invocations of threat. By contrast, 'dick' and the like don't have any real institutional weight behind them; there very few realities that we, as men, need to grapple with that are tied to this word.
Again, I know this is deeply counterintuitive, it runs against a lot of American norms of egalitarianism that feel really basic and direct. But the word '*****' is semantically connected to rape culture, to cultural knowledge of the right place of women - submissive, available, fragile, stupid. Whether you
mean that association or not unfortunately can't shut it off. We can actually measure the activation of these semantic connections.
Are the things connected with the word ***** - sexual submission, powerlessness, 'uppity' unwillingness to obey men, shrill and stupid defiance, the rape of men by more powerful men - the reasons you want this awful woman fired from her job? Doubtful. They're actually the reasons that she believes these awful things in the first place.
Again, I really want to emphasize that this conversation is not an accusation of misogyny. It's about the complexity of prejudice in the modern world, and the pitfalls we can run into.
Shakespearean insults were once highly offensive. Therefore we should throw a **** fit if someone ever uses one, explaining the historical meaning and why they should be offended when they absolutely wouldn't have been otherwise.
If someone takes offense at a Shakespearean insult that's connected to a dangerous part of their day to day life that we might have overlooked, yeah, definitely. One great example would be blackface! Blackface is superficially just an aesthetic way to make a white dude look black, so he can fit the role better. But the whole tradition of minstrelry means that blackface is actually a pretty appalling thing to practice nowadays, depending on the context.
Language evolves. For all their histories or past associations, the modern terms are effectively, for the vast majority of people (male and female), gender specific synonyms. You've noted yourself that "****" has different meanings and significance in different geographic regions - the same is true of words in different times.
Definitely true. What's important is where the meaning of these words differs between groups. For men, particularly men like us here on the internet, ***** isn't a particularly dangerous word. For a woman living in the same society as us, ***** is a word that they can actually expect to run into often - used aggressively, with intent to harm.
And that is my problem with your previous post. It's stuff like this - jumping on tiny infractions that the majority of us see as meaningless and telling us we're acting, speaking or thinking misogynistically - that give Feminism its bad name these days. You've said in the past that just about everyone in western society is a feminist according to the basic tenents of gender equality: equal pay, equal rights, things like that. And that's true. But people shy away from identifying as such because of the association with these kinds of arguments.
And yes, lab data and all that is great, very interesting I'm sure. But there has to be a better way of solving these problems than trying to censor people because that is just flat out not going to work.
Where do you see censorship here? I think I've been overwhelmingly clear in indicating that this is a conversation. And I know that conversation can work: it worked on me, it's happened to many other people here. Dilmah would be a great person to talk to here.
What I really quibble with is the idea that 'the majority of us' see these 'tiny infractions' as 'meaningless', or that for the vast majority of people these are gender specific synonyms. These are huge and constantly present issues for women: so huge, in fact, that a lot of them (I actually just ran a straw poll of the women around me) have given up ever having these discussions, whether in real life or in the Internet. They'd rather deal with being bothered and threatened than deal with the retaliation inherent in making an issue of it.
As an example, I have a friend who's working in the software industry right now and she's a lot tougher than I am. The software industry is full of really cool, really interesting, really devotedly nice people. It is also - blindly, unintentionally, without any intent to - incredibly hostile to women. The men responsible don't even
realize why they're a problem. This is why I take issue with the idea that these are tiny meaningless infractions. For people who aren't us, it turns out they're important, for reasons that aren't hysteria or oversensitiveness.
