On Sunday evening, while procrastinating writing this column, I noticed that one of Twitter’s trending topics was #HowToPissOffAFemale.
For this female, the existence of such a hashtag could be deemed the number one method of achieving said end.
It only employs six words, but even without its host of accompanying tweets, it manages to be icky. First, there’s
the implication that more than half of the world’s population
can be irritated in the same set of 140-character ways (though I suppose it’s a rather certain fact that any woman would be upset if someone were to “replace her tampons with party poppers” — mainly
for the assumption that she wouldn’t be able to tell those items apart).
Then there’s the use of, in lieu of “woman” or “lady” or
even an affectionate “slampiece,” the clinically cringeworthy
“female,” which many a male Republican politician
has used to make women sound more like chimpanzees in a nature documentary than people whose votes they might
want (i.e. “the females” must not be allowed access to contraception, “the females” have some disgusting organs in their
bodies that I wish you’d not mention in front of me, “the females” will extract our semen in the night and go start another civilization without us).
And then there’s the fact that the Twitterverse feels the
need to brainstorm answers to this problem, when Todd Akin is sitting right there.
It really won’t do much to list the tweets this hashtag produced — you can probably guess 10 of them without thinking.
“Compare her to other females,” “Tell her to make you a sandwich,” and “Call her fat” numbered among the hit parade. There was the omnipresent, “Ask if she’s on the rag,” the rapey, “Forget to pull out,” and the presumptuous, “Don’t give her no D.”
These responses, no surprise, all came from apparently male Twitter users. Among the tweets written by the “females” in question, I was pleased to see the righteously angry and the righteously sarcastic.
But I was disappointed that the majority played right into the expectations of the hashtag’s misogynistic creators. I gave them a free pass because, you know, solidarity or whatever.
