Clichéd Responses to any Mention of Feminism

People, mostly males funnily enough, need to get over their fear of feminism. True enough, it is an umbrella term that encompasses a wide range of perspectives including some fairly extreme positions. However, let's be realistic. The feminists I know are not "man-hating lesbians." Most of them shave their legs (and it's hardly your problem if they don't). None of them want to enslave you after confiscating your barbeque, asking for those bloody directions and chopping your balls off and wearing them around their necks so other blokes don't get any ideas. All the feminists I know stand for the not-so-outrageous things like pay parity, equality in distribution of domestic duties and the end to the ridiculous notion that women in miniskirts are at fault if they get raped by predatory rugby league teams. In fact, feminism is such a large umbrella that you might find - and I hope you're sitting down - that you're effectively a feminist under a mainstream conception of the word. Welcome to the club and see you at the next meeting.

As an example of a woefully construed take on an aspect of feminism, let's examine this letter to the editor in the May 19 edition of The Wellingtonian:

Advice for Slutwalkers

I write regarding the May 12 issue, and those two young ladies quoted and pictured, specimens of people upset by the recent commonsense advice of a Canuck policeman.

Why don't they all put it to the test by not dressing like sluts? That way we would soon see whether this would result in a significant reduction in the number of actual or attempted rapes and indecent assaults by males on females.

H Westfold
Miramar (abridged)

In other words, according to H Westfold (who has cowardly hidden their gender by providing only a first initial) if you dress like a slut, it's your fault if you get raped. By wearing a short skirt, you've consensually waived your right to not get raped. Seems a little unfair to us. If I wear a bone carving, have I waived my right not to be called a n****r? In other words, get with the fucking program.

Then again, since we gave women the vote we've had two world wars, a holocaust, the rise of numerous dictatorships and the emergence of several economic downturns. Coincidence? No way! Think how many lives and how much grief women could've saved if they weren't such selfish feminists....

Linguistic Annoyances

This is the first of what will probably be multiple posts on linguistic devices that annoy us. Do these things sound familiar? Do they annoy you too or are you guilty of using them?

1. "Actually," misuse of.

'Actually' should only be used when correcting someone. If I ask you if you had a good night, I am not implying anything about the quality of your past 24 hours. I am not passing any judgement as to whether the night was good or bad. In other words, I am not saying anything that could be corrected so don't reply, "yes I did, actually." It actually makes you sound like a bitch. See what I mean?


2. "In terms of," misuse of

No, using 'in terms of' to join every word to every other word in a sentence doesn't make you sound cool or smart, it just means I can't understand a damn thing you say. "We need to synergise in terms of our top-line deliverables to maximize our output in terms of success." That is not English, that is a terrible language called management-speak where only one word in a hundred means anything. I don't know what terms the top-line deliverables are measured in, so how can I synergise in terms of these vague, probably non-existent terms? How are we measuring success when it has no terms in and of itself? Just to clarify, 'in terms of' is a completely legitimate phrase in plenty of circumstances. For example, from Bartleby.com: "We measured sales in terms of the number of units sold per year, rather than in dollars taken in per year." Spot on. The rest of you: if you can't use 'in terms of' in terms of correct use of in terms off, sod off and get a new catchphrase like 'neato'.


3. Marking anything as a scandal by adding '-gate' to the end of it.

From a friend of UUJM:

I saw a nice joke on The Mitchell and Webb Show on BBC -- "This is the biggest scandal since Watergategate", because David Mitchell points out it was a scandal about the Watergate Hotel and not water, and everyone knows that to label something a scandal we merely add "gate" as a suffix."

It's a wonder that September 11 isn't referred to as "Boardinggate."

Self-Pigeon-Holing Through Vocational In-Jokes

Here at UUJM, we love a good pun but only when it DOES NOT relate to your job.

If you are a woodwind player, you do not need to wear a t-shirt that says "bassoner the better" and point at it with a big smile on your face whilst nodding your head slightly to show you get the joke and you believe I can too if I put my mind to it. If you are a scientist and your friends are scientists, you don't need to call your pub quiz team, "Particle Physics Gives me a Hadron" and then tell the neighbouring pub quiz teams that you're all scientists, in case they don't understand how funny you are. If you're an accountant, please don't describe your work as "taxing" before looking at me expectantly, waiting for the onslaught of milk-out-the-nose laughter (and thereby reinforcing everything society thinks it knows about accountants).

Let's run through some more likely suspects. Teachers are not "all class." I don't want to hear about geographers' "cleavage." Journos, don't tell me your work is "press-ing." When cricket players don't know the answer to a question they shouldn't tell me they're "stumped." The list could go on but these things are not funny. They're tragic and they make it obvious that you have no identity outside of a small box you've put yourself in cos you don't dare to expand your horizons and thoughts. Shame, really. By using these puns you've labelled yourself by nothing but your job title. That's sad, man.

Just to prove we love a good pun, I told Shaun a joke every year for a decade. Do you know how many made him laugh?

No pun in ten did.

Yeah, well fuck you too. Don't look at me like that.