My beloved, let's get down to business

Can it really be so?  Have I actually decided I have something to add to a discussion of that hyperinflated term, empowerment?  Well, yes, I'm afraid that time has come.  Strap in. 

What put me over the edge this time was watching Music, Money, and Hip Hop Honeys--which I dearly hope will have the distinction of being the only show produced by the BBC to feature a presenter asking a sexual assault victim to explain how her clothes influence rapists and jurors.  What happens in the show is, one of the women (who refer to themselves as 'video girls') gets quite bubbly and animated when she puts on revealing clothing, so the presenter concludes that, far from feeling exploited and unhappy and used while performing sexually, some women find it empowering. 

Then the presenter discovers that most women performing in videos don't get paid, and that they have shockingly unrealistic expectations that they are about to be 'discovered' while gyrating, and that being so discovered would make them super-rich.  She concludes that, while some video girls may feel empowered, the power actually rests with the people making all the decisions that affect their lives, and that this power relationship is not substantially affected by their gyration. 

That seems to cover the ways I generally see "empowerment" used in discussion.  So what I want is to tease out some of the meanings and assumptions when different people talk about empowerment.  I made a chart. 

As Twisty classically pointed out, the term has been co-opted by advertisers, tied firmly into the ideals of consumption.  At some point, "empowerment" was decoupled from the actual substance of power in capitalist society, namely the ownership of money and property, which is handy because open discussions of wealth do not benefit capital.  So the main way empowerment's used today is to describe feelings. 

Now, I am sick to death of empowerment discourse which is about personal feelings and not substantive measures of social power (i.e. money, i.e. redistributing money more evenly among existing humans, i.e. people pissing and moaning about the status quo but if you try and change it suddenly you're a communist).  Personal feelings pay for jack shit. 

Moreover, it seems that people who want to talk about feelings of empowerment are happy to imply that individual empowerment is simply collective empowerment at a smaller scale.  Individual empowerment is plainly not the secret to collective empowerment: I may gain a great deal of personal power by marrying a billionaire, but that does fuck-all for the rights of any group I purport to belong to.

What also tends to happen, as is very much the case in Hip Hop Honeys and in Twisty's worldview, is that empowerment then becomes the disempowered individual's responsibility, neatly removing oppression from the equation.  Anyone who comes to the table pre-empowered--whether by an accident of birth, lucrative work, or bald calumny--will be treated as though power is their birthright, while anyone trying to get somebody's boot off his face will have to prove both faultless and meritorious to be granted the right to occupy the ground he's being crushed into.

Mostly, though, "empowerment" is used to talk about women and sex.  What kind of sex would empower women?  What kinds of acts would sexually empowered women get up to?  What positions would be most empowering for them?  Would it be more or less empowering if the women were very attractive and young?  Would adding additional young attractive women to a sex act make it more empowering?  These questions and so many more like them have been discussed in tedious detail in the media for some reason. 

The position of third-wave feminists, if I may generalize, has tended to be that THEY are deeply afraid of a woman's pleasure, and as such every orgasm amounts to sticking it to The Man, even when you obtain it quite the other way around.  But this association of pleasure with power is problematic.

One of the themes of this blog is that pleasure is, at best, limited in its capacity to change power relationships: there's a lot of pleasure and peace in complying with society's plans for your ilk.  And unlike Homo Economicus, we often do things to get along, or to impress a lady, or to be sociable, or to have self-respect, which may not garner us or our identity-politics group greater social clout.  Making empowerment a stand-alone measure of whether an action is morally positive collapses a bunch of relevant factors into a black-and-white caricature of human lives, emotions, and social relationships, which I guess explains why it's so widely used.  

On Giving Offense

Recently, somewhat to my chagrin, I have adopted the word "retarded" into my daily vocabulary.  I don't consider this in any way laudable, and I don't intend to advance a defense of my practice.  Just because I enjoy something, that doesn't make it right, is the basic theme of this blog.  What I'm interested in is interrogating what gives the word its appeal to me and its offensive punch.  As for me, I like its sort of Southern US drawl...what're yew, some kine a ree-tawrd?  I also like (if I can move beyond that word association without insulting the South more than is absolutely necessary, as they have their own problems, the poor dears, and besides, the South seems to hate being labeled an intellectually deficient region almost as much as they hate being compelled by judicial fiat to treat fairly the people they had planned to treat like shit) how it is basically the way anybody who doesn't think much of education or curiosity (e.g., a Southerner) calls somebody stupid.  It's a word you might get a slap for saying as a child, which makes saying it at this point in my life kind of giggly and exhilarating. 

As to offense, well, thereby hangs a tale.  A certain portion of a word's offensiveness is tied to its meaning, but obviously not all, or else Richard Herring would genuinely have been censured as much by the BBC for saying "clacka-lacka-dack-dack" as if he'd said "cunty-cunty-cunt-cunt".  There are ways to refer to taboo subjects long and turgid enough to dissipate all but the most histrionic of hurt feelings, and cruel and ugly ways to phrase nice sentiments.  The offense content of swears, slurs et al., then, is mainly the implicit contract that one party ought to intend to give offense, and the other party should be courteous enough to take some of it.  People are always renegotiating one side or the other of this bargain for any term sufficiently charged with vigorous feeling--hence your reclamation efforts, your refusals to let a word "define me", your PC thuggery, your South Park episodes. 

Now, the word retard, as you probably know, is similar to the words moron, idiot, fool, simpleton, imbecile, and cretin, in that it was once advanced as a neutral term for someone with a cognitive  impairment but rapidly increased in pejorative use until its proponents abandoned it and jumped onto a new, more passive term.  Inasmuch as disabilities will likely always carry some stigma that will stick to words used to describe them, this is pretty much a treadmill for disability advocates, which sounds exhausting and disheartening.  "Retarded" is fresh enough as a term created to provoke an outpouring of sympathy that its use as a synonym for "stupid" still carries a shocking and painful sting. 

I should say, here, that like "retarded" I also have a history which does not reflect well on me.  Until I was around seventeen I had a hysterical fear of being perceived as having Down Syndrome by strangers.  I would examine my face in the mirror to make sure that no inadvertent expression would make me look slow.  I knew a couple kids in grade school who seemed to have greater than average learning disabilities--Wayne, my childhood boyfriend for around a week, who manifested an obsession with Chuck Norris before it was ironic to do so, and Michelle, an obese girl with cornrows, who could only discuss the band TLC.  They evoked a certain horror in me, particularly Michelle, whose overuse of ketchup at lunch created in me a longtime aversion to the sauce.  I tried my best to avoid them until they switched schools, just in case. 

In middle school, as a desperately fat, charmless, and unpopular child myself, I was often the remainder of any group-formation exercise, and would as such be placed by the teacher with the autistic or Down's kids.  Rather than risk displaying any kind of warm human fellow-feeling, which frankly I still have yet to develop, I treated them with an arms-length minimal politeness that I'm sure did not endear me, particularly to the autistic ones.  It was essentially a manifestation of my fear that the one thing I believed I had over the other kids, my freakish smarts, would go unrecognized or be stripped from me, and then I would have no way to feel superior (and therefore good about myself) at all. 

I don't mean to conclude with the suggestion that calling things retarded decreased my anxiety around being, if I may slightly misuse the term, socially deprived.  That was resolved instead by finding people who would tolerate me and help me build feelings of worth that wouldn't be so brittle as to shatter if someone didn't think I was smarter than them.  Today, I don't believe too much empathy can damage me, and if someone regards me as a pariah for believing that everyone deserves to be treated with respect and kindness, whether convict or miner or immigrant or ned or misogynist or paedophile or suspected Lockerbomber or bipolar or Israeli, well, I don't think that person is very nice, but I try to see where they're coming from. 

I still use that word, though.

if they say I never loved you / you know they are a liar

I'm quite petty, and I love convincing people who think intelligence is important that I'm smarter than they are.  From this, you might assume that I would be a big grammar nazi, perpetrating systematic, IBM-assisted genocide on unclean participles.  I find I can derive more immediate pleasure and greater satisfaction, however, from using my love of intellectually dominating towards rocking the pillars of faith that buttress grammar snobs' shaky feelings of superiority.  This is easy.  Here's your guide. 

Step 1:
Wait for the grammar snob to overhear something that compels him or her to make a meaningless correction.  You won't be waiting long.  They're on hair triggers. 

Step 2:
"Actually"
Beginning with this lets people know that they have been laboring under a misapprehension.  Keep your voice conversational, as though you were telling them an interesting thing you heard about naked mole rats rather than bringing them up short for doing something annoying. 

Strep 3:
Just say that the point they're correcting is perfectly acceptable English, "attested" (I enjoy using this word, as it suggests data) since Shakespeare.  This is almost always true; Shakespeare was quite free and loose with his words, famously.  If the person is more concerned about being correct in the future than being correct in this instance, this will often defuse them.  You'll have to repeat this tactic every time it comes up, though. 

Step 4:
If the amateur grammarian refuses to accept your authority on this matter simply because you can speak in an authoritative tone, escalate your rhetoric while retaining the same flat, disinterested air.  You know, because you are exceptionally well-read on matters of linguistics, that languages exist in a state of flux, and efforts to preserve them in a fixed state are not merely doomed, but laughably wrongheaded.  Ask them if they understood the sentence in which the grammatical "error" occured, and what the problem is if it communicated clearly to them. 

Step 5:
If your interlocutor still won't relent--and they probably won't, as by this point they have invested quite a bit of their self-worth into the conversation--use shame.  It is pretty trivial to construct an argument concerning class, race, the prestige of different regional speech patterns, access to education, and shibboleths, and so I leave it as an excercise to the reader.  Let them know that by correcting others, they are not educating them, but merely perpetuating an injustice based on the circumstances of their birth and early childhood.  Wither them.  If they are liberal, this should plunge them into a vertiginous shame spiral.  If they are conservative, they are a terrible person.

Step 6:
Repeat as desired, or until you no longer have friends who will talk to you about words.