A New Hampshire Representative substituted the word vagina for women
because you know women are just female sexual organs. This is not
actually true. Take a minute, kiss your kids, do what you need to, to get to a
place where we can continue.
I read
about this on TheFrisky, Jezebel, HuffPo, and HyperVocal, which is where I pulled
the info from Slade
Sohmer’s article. So because you think of vaginas when you think of “stand
your ground” wait…this makes no fucking sense. Anyway, New Hampshire has a bill
up to repeal “stand your ground” or as I call it “open season on people of
color by idiot racists.” I guess the festivities kicked off with an 11-year-old
brandishing an AR-15 outside the State house over the weekend asking adults to “Come
and take it.” Kids, aren’t they cute? Take back the kiss you gave them.
Now, a
Representative has used the word vagina as a synonym for women in an official
email to the full House email list. The email was sent by Rep. Peter Hansen, an
Amherst Republican in his second term (and fingers-crossed his last) was
written on April 1st about the debate over “stand your ground” and
sent to the full House email list. Hansen in a moment of unrivaled eloquence
states, “What could possibly be missing from those factual tales of successful
retreat in VT, Germany, and the bowels of Amsterdam? Why children and vagina’s
of course. While the tales relate the actions of solitary male the outcome
cannot relate to similar situations where children and women and mothers are
the potential victims.”
Rep. Steve
Vaillancourt provided several examples of situations where he hadn’t needed “stand
your ground” to protect himself. Hansen claimed his email was meant to
demonstrate that women and children could have different situations (because women
who shoot batters totally are protected under “stand your ground” except no). Hansen then said he was using the word “vagina” to prove a point. I’m
pretty sure that point is to demonstrate he’s an idiot.
Hansen is
trying to tread water shortly after the email was sent out:
“Having a fairly well educated mind I do not need self appointed wardens to A: try to put words in my mouth for political gain and B: Turn a well founded strategy in communication into an insulting accusation, and finally if you find the noun vagina insulting or in some way offensive then perhaps a better exercise might be for you to re-examine your psyche.”
This is
the equivalent of “hush, a man is talking”. Guys, guys, I’m being snarky, but he’s
so smart after all he says so. Gee, I wonder why rendering half the population
as nothing more than their sex organs could be construed as offensive? Wait,
nope. Pretty sure everyone gets that. I didn’t know of course that anyone who
took offense to being called a vag is sexist though. I mean men/boys use terms
traditionally used for women as derogatory all the time (see women, girls,
bitch, ladies, etc), and while, yes this is sexist language, I wonder if Hansen
is trying to subvert that culture of masculinity? No, I’m sure he isn’t. I’ve
never been called a vagina, but I have been called a cunt before. And being
rendered equivalent to my reproductive capacity is pretty damn offensive. Also,
calling me one to my face will get you verbally torn up and possibly punched in
the face.
Later he
really apologized:
“Can there be any doubt my comment is being misinterpreted and taken completely out of context? It was not, and is not, my intention to demean women at any time. It is apparent that the intent of my remarks has been misinterpreted, the true goal of the message lost and for that I apologize to those who took offense.”
See his
apology is for someone taking offense, which is the non-apology apology. My
favorite thing is taken out of context by being taken at face value. Idiot. If
this man can serve in a state House, than I can, which should make everyone
nervous.
Ok, so I’m
not going to describe in explicit detail why women are people and calling all
women vaginas as a synonym is a way to remove women from the conversation. I think
I’ve written about that here before. But I am about to blow your mind: some
women identify as women and don’t have vaginas. *drops mic* What Rep. Asshat
Hansen does is reduce women and men
to biology when gender is a social construct.
More so,
gender is performance (Judith Butler). We perform our gender arguably as society
tells us to, and I have a lengthy term paper on the ways society reinforces
race, class, and gender though structures, stereotypes, and policies (Ivy Ken).
I present my gender as a CIS woman. Butler argues that doing gender is a social
relationship. We do not perform gender for ourselves (though I think this
conversation can happen), but mostly our gender presentation is for others.
This is Foucault, right? Without getting too into Biopower, race and class (a
lot of the time) are policed by society and the government, while gender is
more often self-policed by ourselves and those close to us. I think the
argument can also be made in reverse in specific situations like when a
government or publicly funded school enforces a dress code on women only. Or
when a person of color is told by family/friends they are acting too white
essentially not conforming to the socially acceptable standards, but those conversations
need to happen, but this is not where we are having them. So it is
stop-and-frisk of a black man compared to a father telling his son he can’t
play with a doll or wear a dress. Like I said, it is boiled down to its simplest
form right here.
At the end
of the day, we have a state Rep being an idiot and a sexist reducing the
population to their biologically assigned sex while conflating sex with gender
and singling out half the population. Yeah, people should be pissed. You see by
equating women with their sex; Hansen is also equating men with their sex
trapping everyone in a gender binary.
In
conclusion: repeal “stand your ground” and stop using gender and sex as interchangeable.
Finally, don’t reduce women or anyone else to body parts because it makes you look foolish.
