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In reply to the discussion: Misogynistic language.... [View all]tanbrown
(32 posts)I'll never forget the moment in residency when a fellow resident - a guy I liked, as much as I could like anyone in that hellhole of bigotry - referred to the one and only female attending as a "cunt".
I stood there while the roomful of male residents laughed. It was so sexist, so unfair - she was a tough woman but most of the male attendings were far worse, and got respected for their prima-donna ways. But I said nothing. I played the good little Uncle Tom, fitting in, because the price of speaking up was so high. I was already the butt of jokes, already branded a feminazi, lesbian, and man-hater because i had tried to protect female patients and colleagues from some far nastier stuff. I couldn't afford to die on this little hill, defending this other woman. (Who, after all, had already survived her own residency.)
It was not the dark ages. But it was a tiny backwater of medicine - UT-Chattanooga, 1991. Only four female interns had been admitted to surgical residencies - more than most years - but two had already been scapegoated, humiliated, and hounded out. The one female Ortho resident, a third-year, was also thrown out after breaking off her engagement to her chief res.
Hearing Steve call Dr. M a cunt - that was one of the smallest and most insignificant pinpricks of misogyny I experienced at UT-C. Compared to most of the stuff that went on there - stuff you wouldn't believe - it was next to nothing.
So why did it burn me like acid on flayed skin?
I think people - like me - who hate the word "cunt" don't hate it as a stand-alone word floating free in space. We hate it because we've been shoved up against walls by the kinds of guys who use it. Me, I watched my father use that word against my mother while he choked her. I went through college hearing frat guys use it to describe me and other girls who didn't sleep with them, as well as girls who did. The word is a symbol - no different from a swastika or the Confederate flag or the flag of ISIS.
Flags don't hurt anyone and neither do words. Why should we have a problem with "cunt"? Why should the Jewish fraternity at Berkeley care about the swastikas frequently painted around campus? Why should a black person mind a doodle of a burning cross on the bathroom wall? Gosh, it's not like anyone's lynching us! It's just words, pictures, flags, no big deal!
Here's what many don't seem to understand:
If the worst thing that women suffered at men;s hands was the word "cunt," the word wouldn't bother me at all.
I wish that all I (or any woman anywhere) knew of misogyny was a few nasty epithets thrown by men. Really. Imagine such a world! Imagine equality and respect, no coercion inside the family, no violence on the streets, no religious leaders preaching about women's submission and men's rule, no father smashing the plates while my mother shakes; no guy on the train grabbing my breast and smirking as he gets out, no colleague pinning my arms over my head "for fun" because I outscored him on the in-service exam, no girls sold into slavery in every damn country including ours, no headlines about rape, woman-beating, or wife-murder in the newspaper, no fundamentalist husband shouting his right to control my movements, my clothes, my spending.
I want to wake up in a world where women's only problem from men, is that angry men sometimes yell "You cunt!"
So - all you progressive, good-hearted people of DU, I extend to you an invitation. Let's work to make that fantasy-world a reality. Once you've helped me do that, I promise you can call me a cunt all you want, and I truly won't mind at all.
Deal?