Sean: Do you have a soul mate?
Will: Define that.
Sean: Someone you can relate to, someone who opens things up for you.
Will: Sure, I got plenty.
Sean: Well, name them.
Will: Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Sam Harris

go fuck yourself. I don't care. You're oversimplifying language.

There's been some controversy about my recent statement that I thought words like “bitch”, “cunt”, “abortion”, and “rape” were inappropriate in almost any context as insults. I'd like to clarify why, without resorting to claims of political correctness.
 
At the heart of all these words is gender, plain and simple. The first two apply to women, the last two are acts that, arguably, have more significance to women than men. So first off, there's an entire underlying queasiness that I think all men should feel when dropping a specific insult like that. It has nothing to do with legality or who it hurts; it's the same compulsion that should make us want to use gender-neutral language when it's available. Anyone who thinks gender-neutral language has to also Do Something doesn't understand the reason people use it. There's something kind of awful about choosing to use the word “freshmen” when you know you can say “first year college students” (arguments of length not withstanding) or “firemen” for “firefighter”. When ignorance is not an excuse, we all should feel some discomfort about the words we choose to use when we know better words exist. It's a bit like moral vegetarianism; the fact that we can live without killing an animal should discomfort us, however slightly, when we choose to do it anyways. Of course gender neutral language is a matter of switching words, where vegetarianism involves dramatic lifestyle and attitudinal switches, so the level of discomfort there is clearly one most people can live with. Yet I don't think you can excuse it when it comes to words; in that case, how absolutely lazy do you have to be to not want to change a few figures of speech (in my case, I believe it's unfathomably)?
 
There's also an issue of some saliency I think men ignore; there's no male equivalent for these words. The closest you can come is “prick” or “cock ”, both of which are not only also terms of endearment in some circles but are actually verbs in day to day life (prick your finger, cock a shotgun) which can't help but
subtract from the malevolence of the insult. You have to add the suggestion of homosexuality, with “cocksucker” to really get someone mad. There's something innately sexist about perpetuating the four words previously listed. Now, let's be fair; rape and abortion both have alternate meanings. The Rape of the Lock comes to mind, or the computer procedure of aborting, ignoring, failing which every nerd who's ever touched MS-DOS knows.
 
But my last point, and honestly my strongest one, is how often do we run into this as opposed to “I raped that guy at some video game” or “it was an abortion of a play”? In this day and time, it happens a lot. It's always some kind of exaggerated nerd bullshit, isn't it, and it belongs in the same lexicon that words like “pwned” or “ownage” or that other shit that labels you as a stupid motherfucking video game playing nerd.
 
Quite frankly, I'm tired of these words. I'm tired of ironic “niggers” and people just saying shit and then mumbling something about their First Amendment rights if you tell them to shut up. The First Amendment isn't there just so someone can fuck up and get away with it as the excuse. You SOUND stupid, which is the crux of my argument, when you use these words. It's like you don't have any other reason for you argument so you just throw in the First Amendment and expect everything to be peachy and dandy. I have the freedom of speech, big whoop! I could call anyone whatever the fuck I wanted to call them too. Who cares about the right to say them? You have the right to look like an absolute dumbass. You have the right to be an absolute dumbass. That's what your freedom of speech is going to lead to. Thanks for confirming. A lot of this was written from my obviously male perspective, but I have to say I also don't care to hear women use those words either. Most “reclamation” efforts, including, of course, “nigger”, I have no problem with while conversely I think they are actually big wastes of time. The effort spent complaining about blacks using nigger or women using bitch seems just as bad as the effort to justify it. If you can successfully reclaim a word, and “bitch” is actually almost there in my opinion, good for you, but I won't pretend I care much for it, or that I don't wince when it seems inappropriate. If you're on your period, why do you have to be a “bitch” today instead of just “in a shitty mood?" I get why you're acting like one but can't you just say you're not in the best of moods because you're getting that visit from Aunt Flo (Good God, do girls have the worst ways to describe their periods)? Does one really empower in any way? Or is it, as I've argued earlier, just because you're lazy and don't want to use a better or more correct word? Who knows? It's a subject of no interest to me. But I'm not going to pretend it doesn't make me wonder if women who say they're being a bitch today are necessarily aware of the social contexts of that word and are instead falling into the world of shit we call a patriarchy where she genuinely thinks she is being a bitch instead of just a grouchy woman. Let's not even touch on bitch as a sign of effeminacy.