Why Feminists Supporting Insulting Women

The other day when I went to check my mail… the real stuff, not the electronic variety, I heard the radio and the voices were discussing a comment that someone male had made to Violet someone-or-other, who happens to be the only female referee in the NBA. As it turns out, this fellow told her to, or said that she should, “go back to/into the kitchen and make me some bacon and eggs.” Naturally the voices on the radio are in the public sector, and thus must toe the public sector party line. That means supporting politically correct speech and ALL sensitivities including feminist ones. Of course, I actually thought the comment was funny, and even a bit extra funny because the fellow who made it had the nickname “Cornbread.”
At any rate, you might think that supporting a comment like this makes me a cad, and you’d be right, but not because I support this comment, and here’s why:
The statement made is an insult. Insults are important to our society, and we use them to communicate, often in regards to jostling our social rankings. Between men, this means we can figure out who’s got the bigger cojones without dragging our pants down and can figure out who is top dog without fighting to the death or splattering blood on the office walls. In case you still don’t agree with me that insults are important, watch some movies… and I mean watch them carefully. In movies, you will see scenes such as, the “some backstabber gets what’s coming to him, and then the “backstabee” gets a good burn on the backstabber to rub it in” scenario, which we all silently cheer to. We all like justice, or in this case, justice plus. Another scenario is one where jostling on the office hierarchical ladder is communicated through carefully placed and veiled snide comments. Naturally this prompts our insulted hero to avenge him/herself by retaliating, which is often either accompanied or synonymous with elevating him/herself above the snide commenter on the social ladder through extreme measures.
At any rate, insults are an important communication mechanism, and to deny this mechanism with women, simply because they are women, are to simply funnel confrontation into other pathways, many of which could perhaps be more harmful. Furthermore, what is called “Affirmative Action” in the US, and “Reverse Discrimination” in the UK, means that women should be protected from being insulted, according to some ways of thinking. However I object to this as bizarre and irrational: if women are not allowed to be insulted, that there is an implicit statement that women are too weak to defend themselves, or even to survive! This is clearly unacceptable because even a hard-core chauvinist, such as myself, will agree that women are fully capable of surviving insults and giving “what-for” verbally. If anything, I would say that men are less capable than women to defend themselves verbally from insults.
Clearly, feminists have to stand up for the right for women to be insulted, less they suffer prejudice and discrimination in having an implicit statement broadcasted through public sector media.