A Field Guide to Awkward Silences (24 page)

As a small child I used to keep a detailed mental list of naughty words. It was my personal version of Ariel’s chamber of Thingamabobs and Whatsits, carefully culled from conversational shipwrecks in the world above. I cobbled them together and ordered them based on the things that saying them made the people around me do. There was “damn,” which made my mother look sheepish, “ass,” which had gotten me a stern talking-to from my second-grade teacher, “shit,” which someone got into trouble for writing on a piece of our classroom furniture, “turd,” which got my mother to look disapprovingly at my aunt, “bitch,” “hell,” “dickcicle,” a word from a funny story about a man who had gone out to retrieve his newspaper on a cold morning without wearing enough layers, which my relatives had all laughed at and then, when they noticed me, insisted was a type of bird, and “krup,” which I thought was bad because of its placement in the
West Side Story
song “Gee, Officer Krupke.” I ran through these unsayable words in my head after bedtime, like counting black sheep. I ran through them until they were meaningless noises and I didn’t see what the trouble was at all.

From there I branched out to a second collection: odd old expletives. Gadzooks! Egads! Dagnabbit! Odds bodkins! I came up with
phrases and translated them into Norwegian online. “Dra liger tjaerliget til en sau. De erren sonnen au en moose!” (Go make love to a pig! You are the son of a moose!) Why, I thought, limit yourself to certain lumpy monosyllables when so many things were so much more fun to shout? My mother had a college roommate who had shouted something along the lines of “Grilled cheese that lands on the floor on the wrong side!” in moments of deep rage, so I knew there were levels beyond this that I could dream of attaining someday.

You could mark sea changes in my life by the phrase that I used when I was upset. Blast! gave way to Uff da! gave way to Zounds! Once, some of these words had been fearsome. A century or three ago, if I’d gone downstairs grumpy and mumbled “Zounds” into my oatmeal, I would have been stuck spending the rest of my life in an oubliette without Wi-Fi. Now I could casually throw it around on the playground, and the only consequences were to my social life. These fangless words became my constant companions.

Actual bad words, meanwhile, retained their incantatory power. To me, they were unsayable in a way my exclamations weren’t. When I finally came to use them, I found myself glancing around, nervous, for someone to crawl out of the woodwork and ask for my dollar for the swear jar. If not that, then something worse. A kraken, an octopus, a birthday clown. Something bad was bound to come. You couldn’t just
say
them and get away with it.

•   •   •

I’ve come to appreciate certain bad words. For the most part, bad words are funny. Just listen to them.

Fuck has a jolly sound. It is the little black dress of curses. You can dress it up or down as the occasion requires. You can wear it discreetly at work under a tailored jacket and then bring it out at the end of the evening in a more private setting.

Shit, on the other hand, I’ve never liked. It’s too close to Sith, and those folks were evil.

Turd has a rotund companionableness to it. If you say it right, you get the sense that Turd meant something beautiful in its original language. Perhaps this is overstating Turd’s case. Let’s say, rather, you get the sense that the person bestowing the name had an old Auntie Turd whom he loved very much.

Asshole always seems to be driving a fancy car.

Dickcicle. Heh.

•   •   •

Now I know which words pack a punch and which don’t. I’ve been on the receiving end, and it’s different than you think.

Take slut.

Slut. It begins with the slick insidious “sl-” that launches a thousand insults: slippery, slimy, slough, slattern, slump, slithering, slug. Nothing good starts with that noise, that vigorous pursing of the lips. Lolita would not have gotten very far if her name started with a “sl.” It does not go trippingly off the tongue. You have to uproot it somewhere deep. It pulls itself out of your mouth like a layer of dead skin, like a condom being rolled off and chucked into a trash can. Slime. Slick. Slip. Slid. Slop. Slytherin. Slurp. Slut.

It’s a discouraging word. A cowboy would never call another cowboy a slut.

Slut. Say it enough times and it—never quite sounds pleasant, the way “fuck” and “turd” do, like things you would call your Viking comrades in the mead hall.

Take bitch.

Bitch never makes it into the merry Anglo-Saxon camaraderie of Turd and Fuck. Perhaps it’s the missing U. Perhaps it’s the unfortunate rhyme. (Witch? Itch? Fitch? Sandwich?)

Of course bitch is fine on television. Shit’s a no-go, but bitch? Who’s that going to bother? Not even dogs. Just, you know, ladies.

For half the Earth, we take a lot of guff.

Guff’s another funny word. Not ugly, just funny.

Cursing on the Internet has always struck me as a waste of time. Half the fun is saying the word out loud.

But it has never stopped anyone.

I spend my days writing on the Internet. Writing a column is like dropping a rose petal into the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

Most days, nothing.

Some days, boom.

The echoes go flapping around your head like bats, and when you wake up in the morning there’s guano everywhere.

(Guano’s a funny word.)

My most memorable encounter with “bitch” was in the middle of all that excitement with Sandra Fluke.

In case you don’t remember this story, Sandra Fluke was a Georgetown law student who was supposed to testify before a Senate panel on the need for insurance plans to cover birth control, but the panel said no because she wasn’t an elderly clergyman, and when someone pointed out that it was weird that elderly clergymen were the only people being consulted about contraception, the answer was, “Hey, when was the last time you saw an elderly clergyman get pregnant? Something must be working.”

Contraception might seem like an issue both men and women could get behind, but that’s a misconception. (Life, for lots of people, seems to begin at misconception.) When you’re a man, you are at a much greater risk of becoming a Supreme Court justice than of getting pregnant. Lightning will strike you—twice—and you will be elected president well before any such thing happens.

By far the most effective method of contraception is carrying a Y chromosome around with you at all times. Failing that, I don’t know what to tell you. It was your fault for leaving home without it.

Fluke testified to the Democrats on the panel anyway, and then Rush Limbaugh called her a slut.

I wrote a piece pointing out that the only advertisers who seemed eager to get themselves associated with Mr. Limbaugh’s program were advertisers who targeted the Jerk Market—Web sites for people seeking affairs and sugar daddies, which had all been eagerly putting out press releases saying “We’ll still advertise with you!”

Limbaugh called me out about it on the air—they weren’t
actually
advertising with him, he said; they just
wanted
to. In the course of this—because one of the rules of criticizing female writers is that you can’t just disagree with what they’ve written; you have to personally insult them—he called me B-I-ITCHY.

It really wasn’t that big a deal. He didn’t even say the whole word!

Not being an avid talk-radio listener myself, I totally missed this. (I am a little outside the age sample. The average age of the Rush Limbaugh listener is deceased.)

I’d gone to bed without giving it much thought, and then I woke up and there was guano everywhere.

I knew it was bad when I got into the office and a colleague hugged me, unprompted. I had more voice mail than the characters in
RENT
.

I made the mistake of answering one and somehow the conversation went off in the direction of AIDS and how many people had it because they wanted to have it.

“That’s very interesting,” I said. “I’ve never heard that.”

“Oh yes,” he said. “They’re called bug hunters. The lady who teaches health at my community center explained all about it.”

“Fascinating.”

At least I knew I didn’t have to pay attention. There are phrases like that. After you hear them, you can put the phone on mute. “Ah, good,” you can say. “I can be sure nothing you say from here on out matters.”

•   •   •

It was also International Women’s Day.

Of course it would have been International Women’s Day. Think piece holidays always attract this kind of thing. I even wound up on cable news. I called my mom, who told me not to wiggle my arms too much. I called my old babysitter, who was old but still very much alive, which meant that I had to explain who Rush Limbaugh was. By the time I had finished, she was irate. “Don’t waste your time on him!” she told me. “He doesn’t like you? Who wouldn’t like you? The man must not be right in the head. Something’s wrong with him. Put him from your mind. A better one will come along.” “No, he’s on the radio,” I tried, worried that she thought he had broken up with me. “Don’t worry with him,” she repeated. “He must be a scamp.”

Encouraged, I sat down in front of the camera.

“I mean how do you feel on International Women’s Day being called and your work being referred to in such a manner by Rush Limbaugh?” Al Sharpton asked me.

I swallowed. “I would say it’s a weird thing to be referred to as that on a
Thursday
,” I said.

(It was also a Thursday.)

I wrote a response, too, in which I offered Rush an olive branch and a sandwich. Speaking of rhyming words.

(He has yet to take me up on that sandwich.)

It was amazing, the response. People from all corners of the Internet came rushing to attack or defend. “I don’t know who you are or what you said,” they said, “but Rush despises you, so you’re okay
in my book.” Or, alternatively, “I don’t know who you are or what you said, but Rush despises you, and that’s enough for me.”

I’ve been called worse things by better people. And better things by worse people. And worse things by worse people. And better things by better people. And sometimes nobody calls at all.

All I know is that if you want to know exactly what you are doing wrong in your life, just write something on the Internet and wait for the comments to roll in.

Your nose is wrong.

You look like a “female Mark Zuckerberg.”

You look like a “turkey in heat.” (Never having seen or spent much time with any turkeys in heat myself, I had to take that person’s word for it.)

Once, an angry commenter called me a “blond bimbo” and I was absolutely elated. “A bimbo!” I told my friends. “A blond bimbo! I didn’t think any of the online pictures of me were that good!”

•   •   •

It was not supposed to be like this.

The Internet was where we were supposed to be brains in jars, communing on a level of pure thought. No longer did it matter what you looked like. You were words on a screen, thoughts transferred directly from mind to mind. But somehow before they can decide whether what you’ve said is valid, they have to decide if you’re attractive or not.

Not if you’re male, though. Guys can go straight to “idiot” without passing through “bimbo” or stopping to pay a toll at “definitely wouldn’t fuck her.” (Why do we have to stop there, anyway? That’s a complex negotiation between two people. Probably your reason for concluding that you definitely wouldn’t fuck me would be that you had seen me doing a spastic dance move I call “inoculate the herd” and would have nothing to do with any of my opinions on the Internet.)

Speaking of which, a Web site exists that began with the premise that a guy didn’t think I was fuckworthy, then finally concluded, after several pictures, that he would do so “grudgingly” and would probably not enjoy it. Thanks, guy! Did you ever consider whether
I
would fuck
you
? No, of course not.

Of course you didn’t. That’s part of the problem.

•   •   •

If I can get on my high horse for a second here—whoa, a horse! This sentence is off to a dangerous start—I always knew I was a feminist. I didn’t know I
needed
to be a feminist.

I had the erroneous idea that feminism was something that had been taken care of, already—if not in the first wave, then certainly in the second. All the obvious obstacles seemed to have passed from view. No hoop skirts. Whenever my parents said anything about arranging a marriage, it was safe to assume they were joking. Nobody was standing on the bridge to any professions saying, “YOU SHALL NOT PASS!” Tina Fey existed. So did Princess Leia.

You could, I thought, just go out into the world with your eyes on exactly what you wanted to be and just BE the pants off whatever that was. Which was great news, because I had plans.

But then I tried it. Try being a person when everyone keeps insisting that, no, no, you’re not a person, you’re a
woman
. And there are ways and words to shut you up.

And I’ve still got it comparatively easy. If it weren’t for a certain “fe,” I’d be in the single most privileged American category, White Male, the category where your only problem is that you never knew what adversity was and you feel like if you had it would have made you a better writer.

As long as you are forced to be a woman first instead of a person, by default, you need to be a feminist. That’s it. Men are people, women are women? Screw that. Screw that.

I am sick of having words aimed to shut me up. I am sick of having to be anything other than a person first. Zounds!

I enjoy being a girl, whatever that means. For me, that meant
Star Wars
figurines, mounds of books, skirts and flats. It meant Civil War reenacting and best girlfriends I’d give a kidney to and best guy friends I’d ruin a liver with and making messes and cleaning up some of them and still not knowing how to apply eye shadow. That’s being a girl. That’s being a person. It’s the same damn thing.

I wish Rush had just called me an idiot. I’m happy to be called an idiot! On the day when someone on the Internet calls me an idiot first and ugly second, I will set down my feminist battle flag and heave a great sigh.