How I spent my summer guilt-trip

Finally, I am returned to the fiber-optic embrace of the Internet!

I apologize, mostly to my co-bloggers, for the delay in postings. All Mothers Day, I was paraded before various neighbors and relatives to prove I had, in fact, survived four months in Milwaukee. Saturday and Friday before, I spent the next two days either in transit, or packing and unpacking baggage material and emotional of my sister and myself. It was a long, infuriating, unproductive trip that provided me only one incidence of liberal guilt to contemplate.

On Saturday, we were moving my sister out of her second-story dorm room.

My father was about to attempt the navigation of two crates of books, a boxed printer, and a bag of laundry onto a thirty-inch high rolling dolly down a flight of stairs. I tried to warn him, but relapsed into passive-aggression, and merely said that avoiding wheeling luggage equal to one’s own bodyweight down stairs was a good rule of thumb.  

Father proceeded anyway. The luggage, of course, was upset, and took ten minutes of shuffling through a stairwell to recover, and so was I. For I then remembered reading that the phrase “rule of thumb” originated in an Elizabethan law permitting a husband to beat his wife with a rod no wider than his own thumb.

Since becoming involved with campus feminist groups, I’ve become painfully aware of the pervasiveness of sexually violent language used in civil, casual conversation. “Fuck”, “screw,” “nail,” “suck[ing] [it]” all illustrate violent sexual action, and are ubiquitous in their usage. Many self-described feminists I’ve spoken to admit to still using them out of sheer habit, and may or may not feel guilt as a consequence. I’ve all but expunged “screwed,” and try to use grammatically incoherent constructions of “fuck” under extreme duress. But still, I occasionally find myself horrified by things blurted out, the connotations of which only occurring to me after their utterance. Some weeks ago in a class discussion I found myself broadcasting the phrase “lie down and take it.” The sexual connotations occurred to me for the first time when the laughter arose—the topic of our discussion was feminist ethics.

So again I was horrified by unintentional invocation of domestic violence. Fortunately, five minutes of web searching proved the Elizabethan-stature legend untrue. The law never existed, though it was referenced several times in the 19^th century in domestic abuse trials. The phrase first appeared in a fencing manual by Sir William Hope in 1692, reading:

“What he doth, he doth by rule of thumb, and not by art.”

                   I was relieved somewhat, but I remained troubled by questions of the relationship between feminism and language. A common objection raised against the movement(s) which I think bears addressing is the claim that feminism “mangles” English, insofar as every political movement exploits language. I hope to make another post on the subject soon, but for now I open the floor to discussion.

Is guilt an appropriate response to mistaken offensive utterances?

Do you have any distasteful phrasing habits you’d like to break for sexual-political reasons? Do you even want to break them?

That is, do they do harm in of themselves, or are they symptoms of a more widespread apathy towards sexual violence? Is it enough for modes of thinking to change, or must language with it? “Good thoughts, good words, good deeds,” thus spoke Zoroaster.

Or, must language change before thought can?