"Whore" Is Not Synonymous with "Woman"

Regarding Imus. First, about First Amendment issues. Here's a concise treatment of the general legal question, by the Princess from her blog:

On The View this morning, I was listening to four women talk over each other and get the point about freedom of speech completely wrong. The First Amendment prevents the Government from censoring speech. Not corporations, not fans, not consumers, not your neighbors. You can be booed off-stage. You can be fired should your speech tarnish or endanger the reputation and the profit margin of the corporation for which you work. Lots of kinds of speech are proscribed: threats of violence, fraud, perjury, liable, defamation, verbal/emotional abuse, sexual harassment, and cetera. These kinds of speech are actionable. You might say anything you want, but to imagine that speech does not or should not have public and communal and legal consequences is childish and silly. http://kalidharmashaktidharma.blogspot.com/

So, let's not conflate rudeness with freedom. Now, that said, I don’t want to tolerate a lot of crap on the airwaves, but I don’t think that Don Imus is the King of the Demons of racism and misogyny. We need to look deeper, into the movement of culture that has allowed the release of the memes that make the interchange of the words “woman” and “whore” mundane.

I am looking for a world where no one is called by that name. Indeed, I am looking for a world wherein no woman ever has to be treated so lowly that she must either be called by that name, or practice that profession. If I were a black woman I would be sorely pissed. I am pissed enough as it is. The way black women are portrayed by some black men is awful. And, yes, the way they portray themselves or allow themselves to be portrayed. But that is the point. These kinds of words and attitudes and abuses wouldn't be as harmful if they didn't affect the people they describe or attack. Verbal abuse takes a deep toll on a person's self-concept. Enough conflating of woman and whore has a catastrophic affect on women's and girls' self-concepts. Such a deep affect that some of us end demeaning ourselves in videos or clubs or on the street or with our men or with cutting or drugging or dangerous sex because we can no longer see that what we are doing demeans us. We've been conditioned to see those insults as either true or harmless, but all the while the self-concept is falling and the damage is being done.

So stop it! No more calling women ho! First, let's get the very idea out of our minds. Then, let's create a world where there is enough economic opportunity that women don't need to hook, enough true respect for women that they don't lose themselves to themselves so completely that they want to sell themselves to icky men, and enough true respect for women that no man will want to use a woman that way. Without the demand there is no market! That is the world we must create. A world where women are not objects to be bought and sold. The normalization of the word "ho" into the language is only a symptom of a growing attitude that it's perfectly fine to buy and sell women for profit. Just stop it. Now. We are not for sale.

All one needs to do is to spend an hour on MTV or VH1 and my point will be clear. And that portrayal of black women bleeds over to all women. And “entertainment” is no excuse!

There is too much low and disrespectful discourse circulating at present. It’s good we’re talking about it. Otherwise, all the sudden my daughter doesn’t even blink when her boyfriend calls her “ho” in fun, and this combines with the egregious propaganda that stripping is empowering for women (if you think that, ask yourself how happy you’d be if your daughter were doing it) and that “sex work” is no more damaging to a woman than waitressing. Anyone who calls women by those names or promotes in any way those means of earning money is guilty of harming and of demeaning women. Period. And keep in mind – what Imus said, as Clarence Page (black Chicago Trib columnist) said on Diane Rehm’s show this morning, is nothing compared to what we hear from Snoop Dog or on some hip-hop radio stations generally. Don’t believe me? Give it a listen. My God. I’m not going to be such a pansy white liberal that I refuse to hold anyone of color accountable for this "ho" phenomenon.

It does seem that humans have to grab a scapegoat in order to change a cultural movement. Not that Imus isn’t guilty. Clearly he his. And I wish the country didn’t think people like him (and Rush, and Ann Coulter, and Howard Stern, and that Simon guy on Idol, and rude people generally...) were entertaining. We seem to think that "telling the truth" means being horribly rude. But it doesn't. The Truth is never rude, doesn't need to be rude. It might be painful, but it is never rude. Truth is the mother of Love, is part of the fabric of everything, right along with carbon. The Truth that underlies Imus's comment has more to do with his fear of those athletic Rutgers women than it does the words that came out of his mouth. The next time you hear someone be really rude, resist the temptation to think, "Well, at least s/he's telling the truth." S/he is not. The rudeness is a symptom of something else, some other pain or anger or fear. The rudeness is the drug that person is using to avoid the truth.

The market is taking care of Imus. He will probably move, like Stern did, to satellite radio where he won’t be regulated by the FCC or catch hell and can tap into another market. Entertainers who wish to degrade women and make racist speech (even against themselves) will sell as many CDs as people want to buy. For the rest of us, this is an opportunity to look inward. My hope is that when we do, we see that we don’t want to buy those CDs any more.

Can we just be kind to one another? Can we please just not think of women as objects for sale? And the term “nappy headed” should have left the language a long freaking time ago. I mean really.