re: #176 Obdicut

It’s not just terms rooted in power and privilege, though. It’s about identity. “Wimp” is a word that only is an insult to men, really— it’s funny, but the stereotype of women in this case is protective against the insult. “Wimp” is an insult because of gender roles that our culture has, not due to power and/or privilege.

See, that’s my main complaint. Obviously, we’re communicating through a text-based medium, and so talking about language is natural, but to me it always feels like you’re saying if we stopped the use of these words we would have a significant effect, and I simply don’t believe that’s true. I think new words, new phrases would spring up, and it’d turn into an endless rigmarole of chase-the-sexist.

I’ve agreed with the majority of things you’ve said here and I agree that because the idea is not directly addressed by removing a word (other words will indeed replace it) it appears a wasted process, but the vilification or de-normalization of a word is one aspect of de-normalizating the idea. De-normalization is always a multi-generation process so the appearance of the process being ineffectual by focusing on a word is frequently misleading.