“Feminist” is a dirty word
by digby
I’ve been writing for years about the rather silly decision to abandon the word “liberal” in favor of the word “progressive” in response to the decades long campaign to turn the word into an epithet. It seems to me that when they hate you for what you believe changing the name isn’t really going to fool anyone. Well guess what? Some foolish editor at TIME Magazine thought it might be time to ban the word “feminist”and defended the idea by saying she though it would allow us to “stick to the issues” and “quit throwing the label around.” (But don’t worry she “has nothing against feminism itself” so that’s good.)I guess she’s “leaned in” so far that she feels she no longer needs to identify with something that made it possible for women to become editors at elite magazines in the first place. Success beyotches!
Anyway, she posed this possibility as part of a quiz that asks if certain words should be banned. The predictable results?
Yes, it’s been determined that a bunch of misogynists flooded the poll. Who could have predicted such a thing?
But regardless of the propensity of certain trolls, it certainly is special that a young woman thinks that the word “feminist” is among those which make you feel that “if you hear that word one more time, you will definitely cringe. You may exhale pointedly. And you might even seek out the nearest the pair of chopsticks and thrust them through your own eardrums like straws through plastic lids.” Yeah, it’s really bad. If only we could get rid of that icky, icky word we could like, totally, talk about the “issues.”
Amanda Marcotte has the whole story here. It makes me depressed.
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