Don’t you think that when things have been around for a very long time, we become acclimated to them and slowly forget how wrong they were ever since they began? This is perhaps not the best example, but imagine if our world was suddenly partially submerged in hot water such that, to go anywhere, we would have to walk through it. Slowly, after a few years of having to walk through it every time you went out, you might stop feeling that the water is hot and harmful to you.
Now, if you were to have kids in this world, they wouldn’t experientially know that the hot water is an abnormality, let alone understand how its negative effects. Some might try to find a way to decrease the temperature or to drain it completely, but others would just have fun with it, they might even develop new ways to enjoy it.
I think this is how biases in language work – they are the hot water that already existed in this world when we were born. So when some people tell us that the hot water is bad for us, we shrug our shoulders because we are used to it. We have become so used to certain words (that otherwise have very ugly literal meanings) that we have even developed ways to make them an essential part of our life.
Any bias is deeply rooted in history. It exists because, at a particular moment in history, the bias was very widely practised and normalised. However, as time went on and social conditions changed, the bias may have changed in strength (or stopped existing) but strangely it doesn’t get eradicated in the same way in language. So, we continue to absorb it from the world around us without really thinking about it. We learn it not from books we read in school but from the way people talk in our favourite films or shows or from the way that adults around us talk. Because certain words have existed for a long time, as a culture we forget how ugly and wrong they are.
I am referring to the numerous Hindi language slang words that focus on the woman’s body. These slangs are so popularly used by people today. Their connotation now is perhaps a 180-degree reversal of what they meant a hundred years ago. Nowadays, people use it with friends they are comfortable with, so much so that the usage of thse words has become a sign of how deep a friendship runs. But again, I think this is the hot water that we have become way more acclimated to than required.
If we look at the origins of the words and how ugly their meaning can become when said literally, we would realize that we are keeping alive a very distasteful and harmful historical bias in the name of humour, comfort and friendship. If as a culture, we have begun recognizing women’s individuality, why continue to use words that were meant to objectify them a few years ago? Why not make our language reflect that as a culture, we have evolved?
Derogatory cuss words may have begun to be used at a time when women were considered property and symbols of honour. The biggest dishonour one could bring to a community or to a man at that time was to mutilate a woman associated with them in some way. Women could not own property because they were property. Because they were property, they could not even inherit it the same way men could till as late as 2005! Considering this context, when a man said something like “teri mummy/behen ki puppy le lunga,” (I’ll steal a kiss from your mother/sister) they were telling a man that I will infringe upon and enjoy your property.
This phrase only reminds me of the Partition between India and Pakistan, when the most preferred way for men of one side to take revenge on the other was to kidnap and rape their women. My grandmother, a Partition survivor, tells me that if a woman’s male relatives died or if she was lost, she would choose to kill herself rather than be left alone because she knew what would happen to her should she be found alone. Saadat Hassan Manto’s popular short story ‘Khol Do’ (take it off/open it) narrates the tale of a woman who had been raped so many times during the Partition, that after a point, she assumed every man who approached her would open her salwar.
Notice that in statements like the one mentioned above, the woman (who has no relationship to the situation that must have provoked the man to utter these words) is present as a passive receptor of the other man’s anger. She is there, available to be mutilated/attacked/threatened by another man if her husband/father upsets him. She has no role in the situation except to serve as a site to channel anger against the man who she ‘belongs’ to.
Now, this is happening at the level of language and one can argue that it’s not like someone is actually hurting the woman, but it makes me wonder what kind of cultural atmosphere it creates for the woman. No wonder so many women live under the fear of being attacked not just because they have upset another man but because a man they are close to has upset another man.
Popularly used cuss words are likewise, ways of saying that the man is so depraved that he would have sex with his sister/mother. The biggest accusation that a man can face is not about himself but about the way he treats the body of the women in his life. Even now, when a child learns of these words for the first time, does he learn them with a disclaimer that they don’t mean what they literally mean anymore? Doesn’t an adolescent boy or girl, learning these words for the first time also learn the attitude that women’s bodies can be sites of channelizing a man’s anger/aggression/desire?
When one is insulted by saying he has had sex with his sister/mother – in doing so, don’t these words erase the woman’s choice completely? Is one also accusing her of the same depravity or is one treating her as a forever available venue for a man to channelize his depravity?
I know that when you use these words, you are not really using them to say something sexist. But why forget how loaded these words used to be at a point in time when women’s bodies were indeed owned and controlled by men? Why develop even more ways to keep these words alive? Why not develop less prejudiced ways of enjoying each other’s company, expressing comfort and communion with our dearest friends?
I would want my children to inherit from me a vocabulary that does not casually throw around words that used to be so sexist. I also don’t think that using these words so casually is a harmless choice for our culture. You may not mean them but they normalize an attitude. I am reminded of the numerous cases where a woman is killed by a man because she refused to have sex with him or to marry him (and hence refused to make her body unconditionally available to him). And this is why when I see young children using these words so nonchalantly, it saddens me and reminds me of how we end up perpetuating the very same prejudices that we are actively trying to erase from the world.