Transcript

I hate how a lot of the halloween costumes made for women just make them look like whores.

You know, I share some of your concern about objectifying halloween costumes, but I wish you wouldn't use a pejorative term for sex workers as some kind of low standard that women should want to avoid.


You're so over-sensitive about words! Remember, sticks and stones may break my bones but words -

-directly reflect and re-enforce social attitudes and structures that have real consequences on my life, such as my ability to stay employed or housed, my mental health, my ability to form trusting and long lasting relationships, my perceived value to others, and also the physical safety of myself and my loved ones,

so indirectly words may also contribute to actually breaking my bones, especially because those words and the bone-breaking sticks and rocks are usually wielded by the same people. so yeah, language has power, words do actually contribute to a whole robust system that causes individual and societal harm,

and it's probably best that we start acknowledging that instead of pretending that the only way of harming someone is physically beating them with blunt objects?

Well, that's not nearly as catchy.

Words

Posted on October 29, 2015 by Robot Hugs
New comic! 'It's just a word' is a fairly common protest when I point out problematic language. It's frustrating, because the truth is that language, power, society, and structural discrimination are deeply entwined. As someone who has studied linguistics and social information practices, I can absolutely speak to the fact that language is a powerful and insidious tool for keeping people down, whether it's hissed at you by a passerby on the street, or spray-painted on your house, or used jokingly by your peers, or used to describe you in legislation, the language that describes and defines us has consequences that ripple through our lives, right down to our bones. The flip side of this is that when you're aware of the power of words, it becomes important to be able to take control of that power by self defining and reclaiming language. People get weirdly upset at 'made up words' for gender and sexual orientation without understanding the history of criminalizaing, pathologizing, misinterpretation, and discrimination that the 'normal' words carry.  We are aware of this power, and we're using the power of language to self-identify. Apparently that's very threatening. "it's only a word"  - so, it won't be a big deal for you to stop using it, right? Right?