“Woman” is becoming a four-letter word
How do you write an article about tampons and for the most part avoid using the word “women” when talking about menstruation?
People who menstruate are saying it’s hard to find tampons on store shelves across the U.S. right now, as supply chain upsets reach the feminine care aisle.
“I just went to 5 different Walgreens [and] the shelves are CLEARED,” said one Twitter user this past week, while people on Reddit have posted about empty shelves going back months.
The shortage stems from a combination of factory staffing challenges, transportation bottlenecks, and the rising costs of key raw materials used to make the products, tampon makers say.
The word “women” only occurs later in the article, and in a more general way:
It’s another supply chain problem where women are bearing the brunt of the cost…
She’s met women who don’t have the resources to make multiple trips to the store…
Why is it so difficult for the woke to say “women who menstruate”?
Although every person who menstruates is indeed a biological woman, there is a small group of people that NPR doesn’t wish to offend here: the subset of biological women who believe that they are actually men and who wish to be regarded as people who were always men right from birth, who also have not had any surgery to remove their uteri and therefore still have periods, and to whom pointing out that they were born as women by using the phrase “menstruating women” would be to insult and offend them mightily by somehow hinting that they remain women. This group by no means includes all trans women (people born as men who transition to a female identity), and yet NPR and other groups turn themselves into linguistic pretzels – and sound ridiculous – in a story such as this.
Matt Walsh’s film “What Is a Woman?” points out how difficult – nay impossible – it is these days for professionals in the trans-affirming field to even define the word “woman,” except as “it’s whatever a person thinks it is.”
I cannot help but think of this. It was made in 1979, and is even more brilliant today than it was then:
All true, but there’s also a much larger group of oh-so virtuous people who are offended on this extremely tiny group’s behalf.
When it comes to woke culture as a general rule there almost always tends to be far more people who are offended on some group of “victim’s” behalf than the total members of the group itself.
Stan was an early “adopter”
now “Lorettas” are everywhere.
National Pretzel Radio?
Yeah, sounds about right. (Even if it’s not really fair to pretzels; but then, pretzels aren’t really fair to bretzels…)
OTOH “menstruate”, because of its first three letters, is probably not kosher anymore either. What to do, what to do… Hmm.
Ah! Guess they’ll just have to tweak the original—there is a precedent for this—and run with “mynstruate”…
File under: When the absurd get going, the going gets absurd…
Last year, the egregiously disastrous Governor of Oregon signed into law the “Menstrual Dignity Act” requiring the placement of feminine products in bathrooms for those formerly recognized by everyone to be boys. The truly unhinged reaction from leftists to the new film from the very amusing Matt Walsh is hardly surprising in a culture which can produce a young woman (Arrambide) willing to testify in Congress that a man can, in fact, become pregnant and have abortions. Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat (not truly a line from ancient Latin, but pithy nonetheless)!
I interrupt this thread to announce the breaking news:
Tony Fauci has tested positive for Covid!
Time to put Biden in a Hazmat suit!
Reminds me of a Bee headline:
Senate Confirms First Ever Non-Biologist To The Supreme Court
Just to spoil all the English-language jokes about how you can’t have “menstruation” without “men”: The word for a woman’s monthly discharge of blood and tissue fluid is called the “menses” in medico-speak. It comes from the Latin word for month, which is a third-declension noun, mensis in the nominative and the genitive singular cases. However, mensis is a masculine third-declension noun, so there’s that.
Apropos of the tampon shortage, maybe Neo didn’t notice– or didn’t want to mention– the comments cropping up around the Net that the tampon shortage could be solved by removing the tampon dispensers from bathrooms for people who identify as men. As j e above noted, a lot of woke schools and workplaces have installed tampon dispensers in the places formerly known as men’s bathrooms.
A friendly warning to Barry Meislin: Watch what you say about pretzels– my home county introduced pretzels to the rest of the country. Here’s just one local website for hand-made pretzels: https://www.martinspretzelspa.com/
I can testify from personal experience that they are delicious!
It took the fine folks at NPR long enough but they finally got around to the real culprit in this birthing person/menstruator mystery…men in the positions of “decision-makers” and CEO’s!
I’m surprised they didn’t just blame Putin.
As to the rising cost…Joe did it with his “incredible transition” policies.
LeClerc: Here’s another Brandon-related COVID item: After four boosters and a previous COVID infection, Justin Trudeau has tested positive again for the Woo-Woo flu after meeting with JoJo last week: “Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Monday that he tested positive for COVID-19 — just days after meeting with President Biden at a conference in Los Angeles. Trudeau, 50, met privately with the 79-year-old Biden on Thursday afternoon at the Summit of the Americas and was near him again on Friday.”
https://nypost.com/2022/06/13/justin-trudeau-covid-positive-days-after-mingling-with-biden/
The article goes on to list other swamp dwellers (Buttigieg, Pelosi, Blinken, et al.) who have tested positive after being close to or touched by Biden. So we have not only a dementia patient in the WH, we have a male Typhoid Mary as well.
she met with cop killers before her nomination,
https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/pro-life-facilities-are-under-attack-a-top-doj-official-called-them-fake-clinics/
Which only gets more exaggerated when one realizes that many of the ‘victims’ aren’t, themselves, offended by the ‘offense.’
Love the old Monty Python. I’ve noticed that while you do see a number of Python movies pop up here and there, I’ve never seen “The Meaning of Life” show up on cable or Netflix in recent years. They pushed the political incorrectness envelope quite far on that one. That film would have never gotten made today.
“I am woman, hear me roar”. Seems like a long time since we heard that quaint chant.
What has happened to women? They seem to be letting crazies trample on them. Or, as I suspect, most of them just ignore it all.
“What has happened to women?”
This is a gross simplification but what has happened to women is they got rid of men. The male or masculine worldview and attitude have been expunged from public discourse. Women thought that would be liberating but they now have to deal with all the elements of Human Nature that used to be restrained and suppressed by the dominance of the male perspective and…well, willingness to not be emotionally blackmailed by the alleged suffering of others.
Mike
MBunge:
That’s only a smaller subset of women, but unfortunately it’s a group that’s hugely influential (in academia, the press, Twitter, and businesses) and hugely activist and vocal and willing to bully and threaten and destroy.
Like the Furies. See this as well as this.
[BOLDED] LOL!!
I had to stop, realising how idiotic the target of our dear, patient hosts umbrage is.
I know I speak for many when I say that life’s just too short to care so much about so little.
Instead, later today or tonight, I’ll share the end-run (to employ a highly appropriate football term, and unpackaged Mark Bauerline’s (sp?) diagnostic of Millennial moron moralism: “they believe everybody should be happy.”
As called by his former student and office assistant at Emory University, and detailed in his latest book, “The Dumbest Generation Grows Up.” Perhaps others have seen this book%.
MORE, later.
“Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad…”
GB : Touché.
“It’s another supply chain problem where women are bearing the brunt of the cost…”
“She’s met women who don’t have the resources to make multiple trips to the store…”
In both these examples using the word “women” I suspect it was okayed by the editors because it shows how women are suffering because of “the system” imposed on them. Even if the author didn’t call it the “male patriarchy” it is implied.
..forgot to mention with mustard, of course.
Sincere apologies…
Billy Joel, 2022: “She ‘s always a person who menstruates to me…”
Helen Reddy, 2022: “I am person who menstruates, hear me roar…”
Robert Plant, 2022: “Person who menstruates, yooooouuuu need me!”
Frank Sanatra, 2022: “Luck be a person who menstruates…”
They just need to be slapped with a large fish women are women they are not these bizarre golem carved by butchers no the hack who is a health vice commisar is not a woman just some soul less thing lets start there
They can define what is a woman. They just don’t want to, because it would show them to be complete frauds.
Not necessarily a four letter word but more a name that shall not be spoken. I don’t know if it is Voldemort or one of Monty Python’s other sketches “Y’know, nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more.”
Extraordinary dissection of the current Left by a person who was a committed Leftist, even Marxist:
“Why I left the left;
“The egalitarian, pro-worker left is gone and it’s not coming back.”
https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/06/08/why-i-left-the-left/
Key grafs (RTWT):
“…The modern left had already lost the plot when I was beginning my career as a feminist writer back in 2009. The fact that any feminist or socialist would frame prostitution as an empowering choice for women was always strange to me. I remained committed nonetheless….
“…The left didn’t want me, but I hung on. It wasn’t until the past couple of years that I came to terms with the fact that I no longer wished to be tied to this modern iteration of the left.
“The most decisive thing for me has been the left’s erasure of women, which is now undeniable….
“…When I criticised this move at the time, my column was later unpublished by Rabble.ca editors, which led to my resignation. In a Facebook post explaining my split from the site, I wrote that I refused to participate in ‘this Nineteen Eighty-Four-style Newspeak’. Things have only become worse since.
“I wanted the left to change. That’s why I stuck around for so long…. I warned that this kind of censorious, cowardly silencing and refusal to have any critical debate about ideas would lead to the left’s failure. But progressives only doubled down – clinging ever-more tightly to ideologies and mantras that are irrational and regressive, and censoring anyone who dared challenge them.
“The left, seemingly along with most feminists, has now decided it no longer knows what a woman is, and that anyone who claims to know must be silenced.
“At a certain point, we have to stop pretending this is just about a few bad apples…. It is time to deal with reality, not wishful thinking: this is the left now, whether we like it or not….”
Barry Meislin:
Thanks for that link. A “changer” as neo might say.
Nothing will change because nothing has changed. Wicked. Final, even. Ethical.
“This is a gross simplification but what has happened to women is they got rid of men. The male or masculine worldview and attitude have been expunged from public discourse. Women thought that would be liberating but they now have to deal with all the elements of Human Nature that used to be restrained and suppressed by the dominance of the male perspective and…well, willingness to not be emotionally blackmailed by the alleged suffering of others.”
Interesting thought.
It’s almost as if there were a slippery slope, if not slippery cliff. To be heard, and catered to, people are having to be ever more downtrodden and victimized. But we have gotten to the point where people are being mutilated and neutered just to wrack up victimization points.
But maybe the tie to feminism is a result of the difference between female and female methods of group decision making. With a group of women, everyone needs to be heard, and their views need to at least be acknowledged. This seems completely pointless to a lot of men, who tend to be a lot more hierarchical. The guy at the top makes the decision, and everyone else follows him. If his decision making leads to suboptimal results, someone else will be followed. With women, they must have the most victimology points to be heard, and catering to their victimology shows the female virtue of caring. From a male point of view, it is all so pointless. We ask: why are we catering to such marginal groups? Why determine what the rest of us have to do, say, or think, based on the mental disorders of a small deviant fraction of a percent of the population? From a guy’s point of view, they don’t matter.
I had an added thought here while I was writing this. Those pushing this ca tearing to more and more obtuse victimhood seem inevitably to have adopted a Marxist outlook towards tearing down society and then rebuilding it. But they forget that Marxism is, in the end, communitarian, and what is important is the group. The fate of the .1% deviant isn’t of concern to the welfare of the group, and if they become too troublesome, they are simply eliminated.