If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. – George Orwell.
It is wrong, a dishonest and lazy thing to accuse someone of sexism or racism or of being patronizing without knowing them or bothering to even speak with them.
I never use those words on people I do not know, or even on those, I do. They are a gross misuse of language and demean the very words themselves. They are used so recklessly and cruelly that they are losing all of their meaning
Yesterday, I wrote what I thought was one of those upbeat pieces about strong women who dare to take risks and create successful things.
It was just one of those fun pieces about my dog and her entry into the world of grooming.
America being what it is, the attacks were quick in coming. We are a nation of victims and the aggrieved. Why was I spending money to groom a dog when I could do it myself?
The champions of feminism who wrote me didn’t bother to mention this creative and brave young woman starting a successful business all of her own in difficult times. They were too busy attacking me for using the word “girls” to describe her childhood.
Why was it sexist and patronizing to refer to a farm child (now an adult) as a “farm girl?” People love the piece and hundreds shared it. I had no idea I was being both wasteful and offensive.
It turned out to be one of those inevitable social media dustups that are a part of being a writer who writes in the open and shares essential criticism. (And oh yes, the word “treats” was misspelled as “teats” and a whole other legion of the outraged appeared. I don’t think anyone died or was harmed.)
Sexism and racism and the patronizing of women is an important thing to be talking about.
I liked this piece a lot and am proud of it. I referred to Kiley, the groomer, as one of those “farm girls” who learned much about animals when she was young and how this affected her grooming. I even said “farm girls and boys” to be safe. Read it for yourself.
This touched off some outrage and anger from women objecting to the term “girls” as sexist and patronizing. I believe they took the word out of context without giving it a thought, but still, it is a discussion worth having. Given what women have suffered and still suffer, there can hardly be enough discussion about sexism.
But in a story about getting your dog groomed?
Really?
I changed the references (Kiley was a “girl” when she worked on the farm, the phrase was accurate. She is a woman now.) It seemed quite obvious to me.
Writing anything on a public blog without offending someone is no longer possible. Most of the outrage came from people who call themselves conservatives; a lot comes from people who think they are progressives but who also try to dictate the words that are acceptable for other people to use.
It’s astonishing to see the tools of fascism so enthusiastically embraced by the people of the “left” and the people of the “right.” True conservatism and liberalism hardly exist any longer.
Everybody wants to tell me what words to use, and that is never a good way to talk to me, or to anybody else. As my readers know, I am all too human. Words like “sexism” and “patronizing” are not meant to educate or argue or enlighten. They are cruel and meant to hurt, not persuade.
And they do hurt. It is morally wrong to use them against people you know nothing about.
I must admit I consider the word obsession a kind of cultural fascism (Vladimir Putin has been telling people what to say for years), and it is one of the many reasons so many rural and non-urban people hate liberals and Democrats, (I plead guilty to being both, much as I hate labels.)
As our country moves to the extremes on both sides, it is almost impossible to be pure enough, and as usual, the criticisms come along with insults and righteousness. Being in the middle is like sitting in the bullseye in a shooting gallery.
You can’t just be wrong or asked to reconsider; you instantly become a cringe-worthy sexist, racist, condescending, clueless tool of the patriarchy or white privilege. That is not conversing, that is bullying.
And the two things I really do hate in the world are bullying and hypocrisy.
In a sense, all white people are guilty of some kind of racism, and all men are guilty of some kind of sexism. Will name-calling ease that? If we don’t learn to talk to one another in a civil way, our open culture will continue to be a cesspool of hatred and argument.
This issue is important; it affects our culture, freedom, and the idea of free speech.
The musician Lizzo is a hero of mine; she recently was accused of using a word in her lyrics that might be offensive to the disabled.
She wisely and instantly apologized, withdrew the song from future releases, and said she was always open to criticism.
I admire Lizzo and am not nearly as wise or intelligent a marketer as she is. It’s not so simple for me. Since someone somewhere objects to everything I or any other public person writes, there is already a chilling effect on thought and expression.
I don’t want to write with cautious devils in my head. Will people be offended by this word? This phrase? This sentence? I want to write freely and honestly and that means using the words I want to use. I dream of a world where people can challenge and correct me in a civil way, without insult or arrogance or the awful stench of superiority.
The criticism is rarely gentle or thoughtful; it always begins with outrage and insult. I’m sorry, but I am unwilling to surrender to that. Being a coward won’t help anyone.
I also see it is possible to be correct while being a jerk or an asshole. That’s the trick: get past the rudeness and hear the message. I might have written the piece in a clearer way, but that does not make me a sexist or an oppressor of women.
To be a free writer in America requires a big ego and a thick skin. I’m big on the former, working on the latter.
A total stranger named Emily G. said my piece on my blog posts – as innocuous a piece as I can remember writing – was offensive to her, and she said, was offensive to many of my readers, although she wouldn’t reveal how she might know that. Several other women agreed with her.
She even said she cringed reading it.
“Wrong, Jon. I’m another person who read “farm girls” and just cringed. Adult women who run a business are not “girls.” That sort of language is widely considered sexist and demeaning, whatever you or your wife might think about it. Would you think it ok to refer to an African-American male as a “boy”? Is Maria a woman or an “artist girl”? Calling an adult by a child’s designation implies that you are the only grownup in the room, and that’s why it’s patronizing. Many of your readers wince at openly sexist language like this, whether or not they call you on it.”
Emily has raised an issue worth thinking about it, as rude and obnoxious people very often do, and the issue is essential and should be discussed.
But think of the tone and the exaggerations and holier-than-thou ness and judge for yourself. I have never called Maria or any adult woman a “girl” artist or a “girl” anything, I have never, in my life and my writing referred to an adult male as a “boy.” That certainly would be sexist and racist.
I don’t need Emily to teach me that. How presumptuous. She has no right to speak for Maria or any of the thousands of women who read my blog.
She’s not inviting a discussion, but simply insulting and bullying in the epidemic and increasingly popular social media way.
People who write in public in America now do so in fear because of messages like this. There are millions of people out there just dying to attack them.
I admit to feeling the need to fighting for their victims and targets and also for me. I have been fighting this fight for years, and am losing ground, but I’m not into giving up.
That might be grandiose, no one has appointed me chairperson of free speech defense.
There is nothing more alarming to people who deal with the public and depend on them for support than being accused of sexism, racism, or any ism.
More and more, they just fold and run, like Lizzo chose to do. I’d like to land in the middle – to listen and learn, but never to ride or hide.
If my writing is worth anything at all, it is because it is written in my own, unfiltered, and honest voice. Sometimes that is good, sometimes it is bad. It’s called freedom, and it is the sweetest and most wonderful thing.
Few people in the world have it. I won’t piss it away.
That’s why I am writing about it, not just to defend myself but to bring something important out into the open, which is my job.
In writing about Kiley as a farm girl, I was referring to her childhood, hot her present life. I explained how she learned so much about caring for animals. It was as a “girl” living on a farm, that is how she described it to me. To say otherwise would have been a lie.
I was unsettled enough to change all of those references; I don’t get off on offending people unless they go out of their way to offend me. Still, I changed them, which I feel was a sad but correct thing. But I’m not really sure.
I don’t know where this ends. I know too many people who will not write freely online because so many Emilys out there.
Here’s Gabriella’s logic in a message to me:
Because she found the word “girls” offensive in any form, then it’s perfectly understandable that other people would.
Except most other people didn’t understand, including me.
I got scores and am still getting scores of supportive and shocked messages from all over the country from people as taken aback as I was that this gentle and upbeat piece would be seized upon not just as “hazy” but as an “assault on women.” We go from the ridiculous to the sublime in a strato cloud of overheated rhetoric. We are now facing two political ideologies that are competing to be the looniest and most disconnected from reality.
Gabriella: “The term “farm girl” is what is known as a microaggression–Jon, you can Google the term if it’s unfamiliar to you. Whatever you meant by it, however clear it was to you, it’s an assault on women to refer to them as girls. (I don’t buy your clearly after-the-fact back pedal that you were talking about her life as a child growing up. Kiley lives on a farm now; in context, “farm girls” is a descriptor of Kiley. African American men were once boys, too; is it ok to call them boys now? If you had wanted to refer to Kiley’s childhood, you could have written something like “Children who grow up on farms really learn to understand animals.” Without the context that you’re discussing something that happened in the past and noting its effect on the present, your meaning is hazy. It’s perfectly understandable why people found the language offensive, since I did myself).
Gabriella, your letter is not micro-aggression (look it up yourself). It is aggression, pure and simple.
Here Gabriella dismisses what is obviously the simple truth – Kiley was a farm girl who learned to love animals. Those were her words, not mine. Gabriella considers that back pedaling because she doesn’t want to hear it. But truth doesn’t matter in the face of unthinking fanaticism.
Then she brings in African-Amerian children as if they are one and the same thing and I am now a racist also. Here we see the decline of rational progressive thought, and the death of the liberal mind.
Gabriella, ought to be working for Trump, the two of them think exactly the same way. It’s perfectly understandable, she says why people found the language offensive, “since I did myself.” But very few people found the language offensive, Gabriella, that might get a rational person to think.
It is possible to dislike or challenge my use of the word without accusing me of an assault on all women rather than of choosing the wrong word. As it happens, I think I chose the right word. But I’m not as sure as Gabriella and Emily that I am always right.
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I am criticized every day of my life by someone offended one way or the other by whatever it is I write. That’s the way it is. I accept it, this is the life I chose.
Four or five people attacked me for going to a groomer at all; I shouldn’t have to tell them that I can’t bend down to do it myself.
And it is, of course, none of their business.
It was Emily’s business to point out something I wrote that could be offensive to some people. That is a discussion we should all be having.
The challenge for a writer like me is to be sensitive and thoughtful without succumbing to the barrage of ideologues and extremists (and angry people) who have turned social media into a nightmare for free people.
I never refer to adult women as “girls” or adult men as “boys.” And I don’t need to be lectured. I never think of Maria or any other adult woman as a girl. No one who knows me would believe that.
I might be white and know too well what it is like to be patronized. Women are not the only ones who suffer at the hands of men.
All white people are privileged in this country in one way or another, as whiny and resentful as so many are. Of course, I am.
Anyone who reads me regularly would know that is the truth about me, and I invited Emily to share the research she had done to speak for so “many” of my allegedly offended readers. I have yet to hear from a single one after her claim many others we’re cringing too. While accusing me of sexism, Emily is brazenly sexist and insulting to my wife, assuming when she says “you and your wife” must be thinking the same thing and she could not possibly have a mind of her own.
I still don’t know if I made the right choice in changing it, caving in to the political correctness of the day is an awful way to think about writing. Life in the middle is tricky when there is no longer any middle.
Since Emily decided to drag Maria into the discussion, she should know that Maria read the piece and found the criticisms “ridiculous.” Maria has been an active feminist her whole life, making her feelings known through her art and life; she isn’t drawn to attacking people or telling others what to do or write.
I can’t say if I’m wrong to use the words I use. My readers will ultimately judge that, and so, I suppose, will history. But either way, those are the words I use, they are my words, my voice.
How very sad that in this quite wonderful country we are turning ourselves into a nation of social cannibals, finding nothing more meaningful to do than argue over a word an upstate New York blogger and the author used to describe a farm girl who became a successful adult. If the so-called feminists who are assaulting me think this will in any way advance their cause or hurt mine, they are as delusional as the broken people on the far right are getting to be. I see these people as struck with a fever that spans anger, righteousness, and cruelty. They are not advancing the cause of women in any way, they are encouraging countless people to hate the very idea.
I hate spending my time this way, but Liz Chaney reminds me that speaking the truth is not always free or easy. But it is worth doing. She is a strong and proud woman, I admire her even though we have so little in common. That’s how democracy is supposed to work. I am not fighting over the fate of Congress, but I do think I am fighting for the right to speak freely and openly. Disagreement is a sacred and healthy thing.
Cruelty and lies are not and should be challenged at every turn.
Sometimes, you just have to take the heat. It’s the toll for being free.
My challenge is to listen and learn, grow and change when I should, and stand my ground when I should.
I wish it were as simple for me as it is for others to live in the black-and-white world of the legions of righteous who always know they are right and live on social media looking for targets of their outrage and hurt.
We have forgotten how to speak in a civil and kind way to one another, and that it is harming free speech as much or more as any dictator or fascist.
I keep thinking that if it costs a dollar to hit the send button, people might have to think before they speak.
But we are far past that. If free speech is to survive and free thought prosper, people with something to say will just have to stand up and say it.
To run and hide would be a catastrophe, for the free mind, for the free country.
