{"id":13981,"date":"2012-02-13T21:24:25","date_gmt":"2012-02-14T02:24:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2012\/02\/13\/13981.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T19:03:43","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T00:03:43","slug":"the-bitch-is-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2012\/02\/13\/the-bitch-is-back\/","title":{"rendered":"The Bitch Is Back"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

So. There was Your Humble Blogger, reading the OBO of the ODI<\/a>, as you do, and there was this sentence typed by the redoubtable Rob Smyth: England have 99 problems in one-day cricket, but I don’t think [Alastair<\/a>] Cook’s batting is one.<\/i>\n

Gentle Readers may remember that YHB dislikes the word bitch<\/i><\/a>, considering it more akin to a slur than to simple profanity. The repeated use of bitch<\/i> and whore<\/i> (pronounced ho<\/i>, of course) in the original Ice-T song<\/a> (by the way, many of those lyrics are clearly wrong at the moment—he likes to fuck them all and leave them at the curve? I think not) turns it from a moderately clever brag in line with a history of similar hokum songs about sexual prowess into a bit of vicious misogyny. I suppose it could be argued; there’s nothing about violence in the song, for instance. The character does claim to love the ladies, and furthermore claims that the ladies love him. It’s implied that he satisfies his conquests sexually—it’s difficult for me to tell, from tone, whether it’s the kind of double-joke that Woody Allen used to do in his stand-up, where his sexual bragging was funny because of the underlying joke of his actually being sexually unsuccessful. I would guess that Ice-T is more straightforwardly bragging, and making a (humorous) claim to lothariosity. That’s fairly important, I think, because the claims of misogynist objectification are born out more clearly if the brag is straight-up. Either way, the terms of it sound horrible to me, and sounded horrible to me at the time, when I was young enough and went out enough that I’m pretty sure I heard the song in someone’s house or car.\n

On the other hand, I’m pretty sure I have never heard the Jay-Z song that uses the same chorus<\/a>, with its insistence that a bitch<\/i> ain’t one of the titular problems. It’s a much more serious song than Ice-T’s, judging from the lyrics. Despite the title and chorus, the Ice-T song is not about his problems; the speaker is glorifying his own (fictional) life, and whatever the ninety-nine problems are, they are less important than the one, the thing that ain’t a problem, his sex life. The Jay-Z song is (from the lyrics, anyway) about his actual problems—his legal problems, his critics, his maladjustment to sudden wealth, his untrustworthy hangers-on. It’s also taking himself as the Black Man in America, with both the general problems of race and the specific intersection of race and celebrity. He feels, justifiably, that there are people out to drag him down and drag down his image; when he gets into the criminal justice system, he does not expect fair treatment. His brag, such as it is, concerns his ability to insist on his minimal civil rights to avoid an unreasonable search.\n

Is it a misogynist song? Well, y’all will have to come to your own conclusions. I’m inclined to say that yes, it stinks of the whiff of misogyny, mostly because of the language. But it would be possible, I suppose, to argue that it is subverting the original Gangsta idea where one’s credit comes from sexually degrading nameless women—where Ice-T dismisses his ninety-nine problems to talk about the one, Jay-Z is dismissing the theoretical problem he might have with a woman (or with women generally) to talk about the more important societal issues. Or you could argue that its dismissal of women is contemptuous. Or whatever. On the whole, if the lyrics contain the words whore<\/i>, pussy<\/i> and bitch<\/i>, you have to do some serious arguing to convince me it’s not bad for women, but there it is.\n

I do think that the adoption into the popular culture of the chorus is bad for women, and is a symptom of the deeper problems we have with sexual equality. And it certainly is a meme, as you can see on know-your-meme<\/a>. It seems to have hit that cultural chord at the right moment. And, of course, our political blogosphere is hip-deep in the zeitgeist. Mitt Romney? Check<\/a>. Newt Gingrich? Check<\/a>. Herman Cain? Check<\/a>. Rick Santorum? Check<\/a>. Stephen Colbert? Checkerooski (in a pdf, yet).<\/a> And just trust me on Our Only President, OK?\n

Now, as we see, the trick of it is to say that [x] has ninety-nine problems but [y] ain’t one<\/i>, so that the phrase makes it into use without the slur. If it is a slur, of course, which I take it as being. Certainly, when the speaker uses the word bitch<\/i> in the reference, it always comes off as misogynist to me, and is often deliberately, explicitly and nastily so. As a joke, of course, ha ha. Let’s leave those aside, though—while the prevalence of nasty anti-woman jokes are clearly bad for us all, the small subset of obviously misogynist 99-problems ones are, I think, lost in the miasma. No, what bothers me are the references like the one I started with. There’s nothing nasty in there, nothing vicious, no reason why someone would take offense. Particularly when the meme is so widespread that a person like YHB could perfectly plausibly have soaked it up from Left Blogovia without ever knowing that the original word was a bad one. Right?\n

Only… I’m still uncomfortable with it. There’s no question that the adoption of the meme amounts to a sort of endorsement of the song, unwittingly perhaps. If I were not just uncomfortable but truly offended, I would be offended all over again by every new reference to it (at least, those that didn’t explicitly reject the original), even if I knew that the moment’s speaker doesn’t intend the insult. Much communication of insult to women is done with a wink and a nudge and a seemingly innocuous reference; there’s too much of it to let ignorance be an excuse. If you think that misogyny is widespread and deep-seated, and if you are determined to be part of the proverbial and not part of the problem, then you owe it to your readers to find out about the meme, and to decide if it’s worthy of you.\n

Understand, I don’t mean to suggest that people shouldn’t listen to Jay-Z, or Ice-T for that matter. I listen to blues singers; I am accustomed to some violent misogyny in my music. I have thought for twenty years or more that the pearl-clutching about rap lyrics is overdone; the problem people seem to have with them is the crudeness, as there are plenty of genres (including opera, of course) that glorify sex, violence and drugs. The over-reaction to rap’s language is class-rooted, I think, as well as race-rooted. It’s not wrong because of that, but it is less persuasive to me.\n

Still, I’m not sure I can think of another situation where a substitution-phrase like this has become so popular amongst seemingly proper and mainstream writers, where one of the substituted words is a slur. Unless it’s not a slur, of course, but just a cuss. I hear it as a slur, but that’s not a discussion that’s finished yet by a long chalk.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger has really only three or four problems, I mean that I would call problems. I wouldn’t call the appropriate categorization of swear words a problem<\/i>, really.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[206],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rhetoric"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13981"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13981\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19496,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13981\/revisions\/19496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}