"Me, too".

[Janik]

Wasn't Cameron sitting next to May (admittedly the other way around in terms of Chief and Indian) when he told a member of the Labour frontbench to 'Calm down, dear' or similar. The presence of a high powered female is unlikely to stop them.
None of this changes the fact that it's irrelevant to the Lewis joke, and that it does that twitter user a disservice that he sought to deflect with by using it.

[E10 Rifle]

I think it should be possible to both condemn Lewis and to call out some of those piling on him (including in his own party) for their own hypocrisy and opportunism. Because that's going on too. Shades of the antisemitism debate, where it should be possible to both admit it's a problem and to call out people for weaponising it to silence critics of Israel. But let's not go there again.

[G-Man]

I have no idea how many times I might have been deaf to offense I might have caused women with comments; all men should feel challenged to review that behaviour. I can think of only one incident where I overstepped the mark into sexual harassment, when I was 18 and in a drunken state I demanded a goodnight kiss from a friend I had a crush on. My friends very quickly called me to order. When I was sober I was so ashamed of myself, not least because my mother didn't raise be to be like that, literally. In teaching me how to conduct myself in relation to women, she drew very much from her best friend, a radical feminist. Central to that was respect for women's sexual autonomy. I was never in doubt that the word "no" absolutely means no.

I'm not sure I've always maintained that respect verbally, by way of "innocent banter", though.

[E10 Rifle]

I suspect all of us have stayed silent in the face of unacceptable 'banter' at various times. It's our biggest everyday challenge to be honest.

[Diable Rouge]

No surprise that a rapist should have extremely odd and disturbing views on feminism, but Assange has gone off on a bizarre tangent, bringing Ted Bundy into the mix:

https://mobile.twitter.com/JulianAss...44243597463552

[MsD]

I saw his other Tweet. Mansplaining predation to women, while literally hiding from sex charges. Thanks, Julian, I'll be sure to look out for those "feminist" men.

[Janik]

I think it should be possible to both condemn Lewis and to call out some of those piling on him (including in his own party) for their own hypocrisy and opportunism.

Ah yes, opportunism. That clip that Socialist Voice tweeted which may or may not contain a sexist comment is over a year old, isn't it?
Face that, this was just embarrassing.

[E10 Rifle]

Yes, lots of people are embarrassing themselves.

[Etienne]

I don't think that being a year ago is an issue. (Obviously, if he doesn't say "bitch" then it is).

Nusrat Ghani has proposed an emergency debate on Lewis' conduct. I think that an example of a Tory Minister using the word to a woman in the chamber within a year would be relevant.

[Satchmo Distel]

Anyone here familiar with the late comedian and cod philosopher Patrice O'Neal (d. 2012)? He seems to have convinced a lot of dudes and apparently a fair few females that bitch is fine. See also the context-dependent defenses of "faggot" by Bill Burr, Louis CK, and other comedians. Comedy is for many the domain where these things get hashed out. There are better and worse diatribes against the word police; Patton Oswalt has some decent bits, and of course Carlin went on at length about it. And no, I'm not saying that this Clive person has been a victim of excessive political correctness........ But the comedic defense is typically that it's okay as long as it's funny, and I gather he was trying to be funny.

Comedy has a license to test these boundaries, which doesn't mean it gets a free pass but does give it the benefit of the doubt often. Politicians OTOH have a responsibility to steer clear of any boundary where misogyny and/or sexual coercion could become an issue. That automatically puts bitch and fag out of bounds always, in any context, for a politician.

In my own case, I am definitely far too guilty of playing around with boundaries that I am just not skilled enough to police myself around properly. So finally, aged 51, I have learned to not do it. But it took a few falls off the wagon to get there.

[Satchmo Distel]

I think if Mundell had really said bitch during PMQs, two months before the election, Labour would have been all over it. So that makes the age of the quote a factor in its dubious trotting out at this point.

[Satchmo Distel]

They have a self-interest in having wider freedom of speech so they can tell a greater range of jokes, I guess. OTOH that also means they get lazy: it's easy to go into a stream of consciousness about c**ts, bitches and fags than to write a truly imaginative joke. The same is true of musicians and, obviously, makers of porn.

But culture is divided into 'spaces' which each have norms that should be respected, even though legitimate debate can be had at the edges.

[Satchmo Distel]

I remove the asterisks when talking about Trump or John Terry but not when gender and sexualization is the topic. And I feel this forum generally has a consensus in that regard, whereas again comedians want to have the freedom not to have to justify content against context, which is more freedom than would be healthy for a mixed gender forum like this where some posters may prefer not to have that boundary crossed.

I sympathize with Rock about campuses as there may be people there who are policing speech inappropriately and not allowing for context, or for the fact that students are not being forced to attend his gigs.

"World-class" attached to comedy is a curious concept. Seems a bit elitist and deferential for something that should encourage iconoclasm.

[Satchmo Distel]

I mean I am trying to put myself in the mind of someone who logs into the thread and encounters the word in this specific context and I am basing it on how the OTF members on the forum have responded to other cases which enable me to infer their probable reactions.

[Hot Pepsi]

I thought Breaking Bad had shown to the world that "bitch" is no-longer a female-gendered term. Though using it as an insult for men could be read as both sexist and transphobic, I suppose.
I would never used it as a noun for a woman, and probably not for a man. Only way it should be used as a noun, really, is for inanimate referents. Like "That pot is a real bitch to clean." Or, it can be used as a verb to describe "unwarranted, irritating complaining."

[Hot Pepsi]

To your example Reed, I wonder was the expression "life's a bitch" how it got started? and if so what if anything explains it.

It’s just a harsh ugly word, I suppose.

[Satchmo Distel]

There's the misogynistic joke, life's a bitch and then you marry one, which says far more about the teller and his culture than it does any kind of truth. It's an example of how comedy can be a safety valve for hateful emotions that also legitimizes them.

Culturally I am still British but because I teach American students, I adhere to American norms as much as I can, partly to minimize the risk of blurting out something offensive in class, which, as Amor said above, is a risk when your guard is down.

[Satchmo Distel]

I'd be extremely surprised if a woman ever found the c-word acceptable anatomically when spoken by a male unless they were in all-female company or in some consensual S&M context.

[Kevin S]

By anatomically, do you mean using the c-word to refer to a vagina?

If I said 'Boris Johnson is such a c**t' in a conversation with my wife at home she wouldn't bat an eyelid. But then we do both swear quite a lot.

[Kevin S]

This guy is probably largely responsible for it being said on air a lot in recent years.

[Hot Pepsi]

There's a lot of women trying to claim "bitch." For example.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3vAVhaIEIk

Or www.bitchmedia.org

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

That abomination of a song is on a compliation album which we injudiciously played in-car while our 6 year old daughter was on board, with predictably hilarious/embarrassing results in a busy public place a few days later.

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

This guy is probably largely responsible for it being said on air a lot in recent years.

Very good! And responsible for inspiring one of Viz's best ever Roger Mellie strips.

[laverte]

I just want to write a homage, I guess, to the girls and women who are confronting their abuser Larry Nassar before he is sentenced. There are now 105 of them speaking or due to speak. Reading their words is not only a way to say fuck you to Nassar and other abusers, but also really individualises the victims and their experiences. Each one of them was tricked, betrayed in eerily similar ways. But no two react identically: pain, anger, resilience, regret, sadness, retribution, breakdown are all there, in different measures, in different words.

Each of the testimonies is valid and powerful by itself, and many are unimaginably honest and clear-sighted. I was blown away by the lucidity of Rachael Denhollander on the Burn it all down podcast (transcript here: content warning for explicit details of sexual assault, but honestly, if you can read it, you should).

Lindsay Gibbs, the host of Burn it all down, has a typically insightful summary of the hearing so far:

It is gut-wrenching to listen to these stories; we’ve been taught to look for happy endings in tales of suffering. We hone in on bravery, and force protagonists into the role of conquering hero, whether they’re comfortable with that or not. We prefer to talk about their trauma in terms of what they have overcome; as if it’s all in their past, not a part of their present. It’s easier to wade through the wreckage if we can keep one eye on the light at the end of the tunnel.

But it’s also important to accept the reality that for many of these survivors, that light is hard to come by. That’s not because they are weak, or because they’re less brave or resilient than other victims. It’s because what Nassar did to these women was an unthinkable betrayal of trust, and because trauma impacts everyone differently.

Matt Mencarini is reporting the hearing on his twitter feed

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Jesus Christ what a story. The other thing is that people should prepare for an awful lot of this sort of thing over the next little while. If the Irish experience is anything to go by, the first few stones start to slip, and that Nassar story is a fucking huge boulder going down the mountain, but before you know it there's a fucking landslide sweeping all before it.

Having watched with increasing horror, how paedophiles had wormed their way into positions of unsupervised authority over children In Ireland in all aspects of life, it occurred to me that there was no reason why this wasn't also happening in every other country on earth, and that sooner or later everywhere was going to have a similar reckoning. It's grim as fuck while it is unfolding, but it is an important and almost entirely beneficial process. There are lessons to be learned in how we handled and mishandled the process, and there is no reason why anyone should make the same cackhanded mistakes that we did.