The Blogging Month
I hate, hate, hate the insult douche or douche bag or douchebaggery. I don't pretend to know anything about actual douches. I'm fairly certain they are a part of feminine hygiene. But I understand the insult to imply that one of the worst things you can be is the waste of said feminine hygiene process. My guess is that that waste is not a pleasant thing at all, and maybe I'm out of line and confused, but to link such a crude insult to females seems to me to be an insult to those females as well.
The only thing related to males I could see as a parallel would be smegma, yet you don't see this as an insult nearly as pervasive as douche and its kin. Sure, you'll get the occasional "dick cheese" crack, but not all over the media like douche is.
So help me on this. Am I misguided? Am I forcing that implication there, revealing my own confused view of women? Or am I kinda close on this thing?
Labels: words
posted by Daniel @ 11:53 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
You're right on.
How about trying to replace douchebag with enema bag?
Ewww. I think it's all gross.
No no! I changed my mind about this word just last week.
I was listening to Dan Savage, a prominent gay, sex-positive, super-liberal sex columnist/blogger. He uses "douche" regularly as an insult, and it always kind of bugged me, until one day he explained that he'd gotten a call from someone who was irritated by it, like I was.
It had never occurred to him that douche was a feminist-negative word, because now-adays no one in their right mind douches their vagina. That was a 60s and 70s trend when marketers tried to convince women that they'd be cleaner and more appealing down there if they douched regularly. People soon figured out that douching was actually not healthy, and women stopped doing it...to their vaginas.
But if you're into anal sex, homo or hetero, douching is apparently a very good idea and very common. It makes later activities much more clean and pleasant. But the douching itself, Dan says, is obviously pretty gross.
So douche, I think, is a pretty okay insult. If a person is a douche, they're the stuff you use to clean your asshole. Everyone (um, I think) has an asshole, so it's not sexist, and recent studies suggest that anal sex is not just a homo thing (at ALL), so it's not queer-negative either.
So that's how I went from seeing "douche" as a negative, anti-woman term, to using it semi-regularly.
I agree with Leah, which is why some people may understand and know the contemporary use of anal douching, I'm not prepared to ask someone when they use "douche" whether they mean anal or vaginal. So while it might not be feminine or homosexual negative for everyone who uses the term, it's gross, which is reason alone to avoid its use.
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