#Adjectives

“…that is such bullshit I can hardly stand it."                                                        --U.S. Sen. Mazie Hirono (D) HAAs Lou Grant once famously said about Mary Richards, I like Senator Hirona’s spunk. What she was responding to was the grand mal fit of the Republican majority in dealing with the sexual assault charges against Trump Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. And her forthright, colorful and…let’s cut to the chase here…politically incorrect language was a welcome change from the usual discharge of equivocating, parsing, and death by a thousand qualifiers that usually comes out of the mouths of Democratic Party leaders. I am convinced that the Dems need more of such plain kitchen table talk to both win back the Congress and undo the enormous damage that’s been done since government control passed to Republicans. Having said that, I’m far less enamored of this other saucy statement Hirona made that lifted her national profile far above what’s normal for a politician from Hawaii. In its coverage of her statement, TV station khon2 in her home state cut immediately to a political expert—a man--who praises her stroke of genius in coming up with “Shut up and Step up”, a T-shirt phrase as he proclaims that is “capturing the mood” and “everyone is picking it up.” Except that he’s on TV talking about it rather than shutting up as Mazie demanded. That kind of undercuts the substantive value of what she said and casts it in the sound and fury signifying nothing phrasemaking category of Laura Ingraham’s “Shut up and sing” and “Shut up and dribble”.  Nonetheless, how about the substance of Mazie’s clarion call…All men should shut up? Really? The Kavanaugh debate is the most intense and immediate manifestation of the the #MeToo movement, which has been gathering measurable momentum over the past few years. But how is that movement for building a broad, multi-gender consensus around a firm, unassailable, codified belief that non-consensual sexual aggression is wrong if half the population is told to shut up? Does Mazie really believe that the male victims of Jerry Sandusky at Penn State should have just shut up? The male victims of Kevin Spacey should have just shut up? The thousands of male victims of the Catholic Church should just shut up? Does she believe that Ronan Farrow who has been one of the most dogged and successful reporters in the country in exposing predatory sexual behavior should just shut up? Of course she doesn’t, and if she’d given her words just a second thought she most likely would’ve amended them…not, we pray, to the extent that John Kerry, say, tortures every 250-word paragraph that comes out of his mouth, but amended enough to inspire without insult. Our rich, pliable English language offers plenty of tools for turning phrases that not only make for T-shirt-worthy catchphrases but can engage support for causes rather than repel it. High up in the order of those tools are what we all learned in junior high English class as adjectives, qualifiers and quantifiers. Would Hirona’s statement have been weakened if she had used an quantifying adjective like some or many or most men should shut up? Perhaps...if weakened means accuracy over outrage. But the world of adjectives is wide and deep. She could’ve said, “Insensitive men should shut up.” “Neanderthal men should shut up.” “Cold-blooded men should shut up.” There’s a thesaurus full of words available that would’ve made her statement less insulting to half her constituency, and actually given her statement greater impact.  This is by no means a molehill I'm insisting on making into a mountain. The NotAllMen hashtag is in widespread use on the Internet and generously employed to mock and/or intimidate any male who makes the fairly obvious point that every man is not a misogynistic sexual predator. The cheering that greeted Hirona’s remark that men should just shut up clearly was an endorsement of both the style and substance of what she said. (And the “Step up” line that followed the “shut up” line doesn’t mitigate against the damage done. Her shut up line was too emotionally loud to allow the step up line to be heard…and even if it wasn’t, how can one shut up and step up at the same time?)   As “feel good” as it may have been in the moment she uttered it, it is unlikely that Mazie’s moment had any effect on the Kavanaugh debate other than to harden the gender divide around it. Nor is it likely to have any practical or political future use in galvanizing more men to “stand up” for fairness, justice and equality in matters of sexual assault and exploitation. From firsthand experience, I can easily anticipate a negative reaction to this post from women…excuse me: some women…that there’s nothing so patronizing and insulting as a male critiquing what a woman says…especially an accomplished woman like Mazie Hirona. Sensitive as I am to that reaction, allow me to bring an innocent bystander to my argument. In Slate Lili Loofbourow has been writing extensively and intelligently on the Kavanaugh matter without falling into the all men trap (or smear, depending on your viewpoint). Below I excerpt a few paragraphs from her Men Are More Afraid than Ever* and highlight in red her judicious and effective use of adjectives and other qualifiers in describing the men she’s writing about:

It is a remarkable fact of American life that hordes of men are now defending sexual assault. It’s not immediately clear why. It seems like the very definition of an unforced error. But a substantial group, many of them in politics, has taken to the internet to argue that a 17-year-old football player should get to do as he likes to a 15-year-old girl—say, for example, trap her in a bedroom, violently attempt to remove her clothes, and cover her mouth to muffle her screams—without consequences to his life or reputation. 

Almost as if they’d planned it, a clutch of disgraced men who were finally exposed for years of ongoing alleged abuse has been creeping back toward their long-lamented spotlight. There are quite a few. These reputationally injured parties range from Jian Ghomeshi and John Hockenberry to Louis C.K. to Bryan Singer. What they share—besides a history of inflicting their sexual attentions on the less powerful because they felt like it—is an itch to be famous once again.** They want their timeouts to be over. 

A certain kind of man not getting exactly what he wants, precisely when he wants it, will truly believe he’s suffering more than a woman in pain who has never been told that what she wants might matter. 

It’s useful to have naked misogyny out in the open. It is now clear, and no exaggeration at all, that a significant percentage of men—most of them Republicans—believe that a guy’s right to a few minutes of “action” justifies causing people who happen to be women physical pain, lifelong trauma, or any combination of the two. 

None of that may have merit for emblazoning on a T-shirt, but all of it has merit as powerful argument open to engaging--rather than alienating or dismissing—all genders.

   * I give Loofbourow a pass on the general smear of all men in the headline to her piece: "Men Are More Afraid than Ever" because she probably didn't write the headline and headlines operate under slightly different rules than articles primarily aimed at grabbing hearts and clicks rather than minds.

** Note she does not go for the cheap and counterproductive line that what they share is maleness.