Let Jargons be Jargons

Update, 10/29/16: There's some dumb-ass stuff in this post, but I'm leaving it up anyway, because I think it's worth thinking about. In particular, I remain convinced that we need to watch ourselves for patterns of language that make us sound like an exclusive clique, and we need to be patient with people who haven't yet absorbed the complex intellectual constructs behind these terms. If we find someone who bristles or goes blank at one of these words or phrases, we should shift gears and work in common language to bring them on board with the concepts, rather than doubling down and insisting on the righteousness of our progressive lexicon.

One of things I find frustrating about being a feminist is that feminism and gender-conscious activism are not always a particularly welcoming club. It's pretty doggone easy to come across articles or blog posts or Twitter feeds full of statements lamenting straight white cisgender male indulgence in heteronormative language and behavior that ends up contributing to rape culture.

Now, I know what's meant by each of those terms, and I know that the issues they address are real issues with profound negative consequences for women and for the collective psyche of our society. But to someone looking at feminism from the outside, the movement's language sounds at best like that of an insular academic subculture and at worst like an actively hostile clique.

"Cisgender" is the least offputting of the batch, but let's face it, it's awful. There's nothing intuitive about it -- it's weird looking and alien, and really has nothing to recommend it to the people it's supposed to describe. Intellectually, I think it's kind of cool, "cis" meaning the numerically prevalent form of something with "trans" being its inverse. But I had to look it up in the dictionary the first time I encountered it, and most people don't want to look things up in the dictionary.

What would be wrong with something like "plain-gender"? The word "plain" is known to everyone, and is neither favorable nor unfavorable because it has a variety of connotations -- some positive, some negative, and some neutral. It implies that which is commonplace, and seems far less likely to confuse or turn people off than "cis."

So let's look at "heteronormative." Anybody with basic reading comprehension skills should be able to glean from context that "heteronormative" means something bad. No one ever goes around talking about the benefits of heteronormative thinking. So if you're heterosexual, and you think of yourself as "normal," the word "heteronormative" seems to be calling two strikes against you. It's obviously something bad, so maybe it means being hetero is bad or being the norm is bad, or both. That automatically puts nonfeminists on the defensive and raises their barriers to the word.

But what if we replaced it with "heterotyping" or "heterotypical?" The echoes of "stereotyping" and "stereotypical" would make the terms more familiar and more sympathetic, because everybody already knows that stereotyping is bad, whereas most people don't think that the "norm" is bad. Furthermore, stereotyping is a special kind of bad -- we all get that it's usually very negative ... but we also know that everybody does it, and it's sometimes relatively harmless and can even be a source of humor. A nonfeminist might bristle at being called "heteronormative" while thinking, "Well, maybe I am 'heterotypical,' whatever that means," or "Could I be guilty of 'heterotyping?' I mean, I know I let myself stereotype people sometimes ..." So some combination of those two terms might be more accessible to nonfeminists from beyond academia than "heteronormative," which if we're honest sure sounds like an egghead pointing fingers and being snooty.

Finally, the most problematic is "rape culture." I think it's self-evident that any decent person who perceives her- or himself to be living in a "rape culture" must feel profoundly alienated from that culture, because any decent person finds rape abhorrent and unacceptable. So as soon as we use the term "rape culture" around those unfamiliar with its overall conceptual framework, we imply that we're a bunch of malcontents unable to tolerate and fit into society as a whole.

I have to ask, who wants to join that team? Who do we think is going to rally to a cause that advertises itself as alienated by and disjoined from the mainstream? Maybe we do live in a "rape culture," and maybe it does deserve our contempt and alienation -- but do we think boasting about that is going to bring people around to our way of thinking if they're deeply invested in what they perceive to be a generally decent society?

A major drawback of the phrase "rape culture" is that everyone knows about "gun culture" and "drug culture," which are both associated with people who actively engage in and want to promote the objects of their focus. "Gun culture" people think guns are great. "Drug culture" people like doing drugs. These are established terms, and the fact is that "rape culture" is not parallel to them in the least. There's no significant group out there openly advocating rape or its legalization.

In truth, "rape culture" is an awkward umbrella term for a slew of insidious and often subconscious attitudes and phenomena. It encompasses rape-enabling behaviors like the failure to properly investigate and prosecute rape, rape-denying behaviors like victim-blaming and slut-shaming, and general ignorance of rape due to media complacency. But in virtually none of those cases are the people involved in favor of rape. Aside from criminals cooking up date-rape drugs and the subset of fraternity types who distribute them and encourage or excuse their use, most of the elements of "rape culture" are not deliberate cultivations of rape.

So what we actually have is not a "rape culture," but a rape ecology. A set of conditions under which rape can flourish despite the fact that almost everybody believes that rape is bad. Rape is the weed or the weevil in our field of crops, and because we're not properly focused on fighting it, some of the things we do to fertilize and irrigate the field end up encouraging the weeds and weevils. "Rape culture" doesn't accurately describe that situation, and if we were to talk about "rape ecology" instead, nobody would think we were accusing the larger society of deliberately fostering rape.

Obviously, there's a huge amount of linguistic inertia that feminism would have to overcome in order to switch its current terminology to a vocabulary more friendly and welcoming to nonfeminist ears. But if we're worried about that inertia being difficult to overcome, we might as well just give up entirely, because the attitudes and societal structures we're up against are far, far more entrenched than the lingo we've developed to talk about them.

If we want everybody to be a feminist, I think we need to start using words everybody can buy into.

Otherwise, we might as well just talk amongst ourselves in Esperanto.