Women in Philosophy: Feminism and the F-Bomb

by Leigh M. Johnson

This past September, Judge (now Justice) Brett Kavanaugh appeared before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in a bid for confirmation to a seat on the Supreme Court amidst several allegations of sexual assault. We now know that these allegations had been leveled against Kavanaugh prior to his confirmation hearings, but they were not made public until the hearings were nearing an end. After the details came to light—and after a protracted, hostile, and ugly political fight over their presumed merit and/or relevance—the Judiciary Committee finally conceded to hearing testimony from one of Kavanaugh’s victims, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, resulting in a scene that was, for those of a certain age, both familiar and grotesque.

It was impossible not to recognize, in both Dr. Ford’s testimony and her treatment, reverberations of Anita Hill’s appearance before the same committee twenty-seven years ago. But this was not 1991! (Or so we told ourselves.) Dr. Ford, unlike Hill before her, had the full weight of the #MeToo movement behind her. Over the prior year, #MeToo victims, survivors, and allies had relentlessly demanded a national reckoning with the prevalence of sexual violence in the United States. The upshot of that conversation was not only careful articulations of the material/existential conditions of toxic masculinity and rape culture, but also a refusal to countenance the sort of default mistrust with which victims like Dr. Ford are so frequently met.

Before her testimony in 1991, Anita Hill said in a press conference: “I resent the idea that people would blame the messenger for the message, rather than looking at the content of the message itself.” (Pemberton, 187) The #MeToo movement’s insistence on the content of the message of systemic sexual violence itself, as well as its corresponding refusal to blame messengers for reporting violations, is certainly, perhaps exclusively, to be credited as the efficient cause for the Senate Judiciary Committee’s decision to grant a hearing to Dr. Ford. This should be viewed as some small progress by feminists, no doubt, though the extent to which the “message itself” of Dr. Ford’s testimony was actually “heard”—by the Judiciary Committee, by the American public at large or, more importantly for what follows, by feminists—is another matter entirely. Was that message heard?

Are we willing to reckon with the many and varied, systemic, culturally-sanctioned habits and speech-acts that we employ, often uncritically and non-reflectively, which actively contribute to the perpetuation of rape culture?

Over the course of the Kavanaugh hearings, I began to notice (both IRL and on social media) one particular, frequently-deployed manner of expressing outrage about the ubiquity of sexual violence and the discrediting of sexual assault victims that I now view as deeply-problematic. What I noticed was this: many people—who self-identify as feminists, as progressives, or as generally sympathetic to the victims of sexual assault, as a matter of principle— publicly articulated their support, sympathy, exasperation, and outrage in statements like “Fuck Kavanaugh!” (Or variations on the same sentiment: “fuck prep schools,” “fuck GOP Senators,” “fuck frat boys,” “fuck the patriarchy,” etc.). Frequently, if not exclusively, these declarations were made in the very same breath as condemnations of (general or specific) sexual assault, of toxic masculinity, or of rape culture.

The use of the expression “Fuck Kavanaugh” in the above way, in context, constitutes a manifestly self-contradictory manner of articulating its speaker’s moral and political commitments. Moreover, I want to argue in the following that the use of “fuck” as a transitive verb more generally— specifically, the use of “fuck” (you)” or “fuck (x)” as an invective—is categorically (a) counterproductive, (b) antifeminist, and (c) deserving of moral opprobrium.

To wit, I want to advise against dropping the F-bomb in any way, for any purpose, or toward any end in our ongoing discussions concerning Justice Kavanaugh, specifically, or in our advocacy on behalf of victims of sexual violence, more generally. As a feminist philosopher, it is my considered judgment that we all (myself included) ought to exercise considerably more prudence in how and when we deploy the F-bomb as a transitive verb. I have become convinced that this specific speech-act inevitably implicates its users in the replication and proliferation of anti-feminist/anti-woman ideology and the reproduction of actual material conditions of harm for women and feminized agents.

When we say “FUCK (x)” or “FUCK (someone),” especially when we do so in anger, we are explicitly validating rape culture. We are declaring our wish to see the other sexually degraded, debased, and dehumanized. We are explicitly articulating an active desire for non-consensual sex to be the punishment visited upon our antagonist. We are personally employing the ubiquitously-implied threat of rape as a coercive power.

In the last month, we saw a similar phenomenon unfold in the public and online rhetoric surrounding recently-convicted serial sexual predator, Bill Cosby. The widespread articulation of outraged sentiments that effectively “wish” that sexual offenders be raped in jail is a phenomenon frequently repeated in the rhetoric surrounding any convicted rapist who is sentenced to jail. However right or righteous one’s anger toward rapists may be, we must reckon with the fact that willing sexual violence to be done, even to convicted sexual offenders, actively contributes to the epidemic of rape culture: to its casual, causal, ubiquitous affirmation and, consequently, to all manner of well-meaning excuses for the most fundamental presumptions that maintain the threats of rape culture qua real, existential threats.

To be clear, if you wish that sexual offenders be raped in (or our of) jail, you are contributing to the existential imperilment of women, in particular, and to the existential imperilment of the most vulnerable among us, more generally.

I get it that, in everyday parlance, what we mean by “fuck you” is something generically insulting, something like “a pox upon your house!” or, in more contemporary slang, “eat shit and die!”. One might object to my caution against dropping the F-bomb by countering that when you say “a pox upon your house!” or “eat shit and die!,” you do not mean for a literal pox befall your target and their heirs, or you do not mean for your target to literally eat literal shit and literally cease to be. To which I would reply: yes, of course, these are the well-known and well-documented, academic vagaries of “slang.” Slang never means what it literally says, of course. As an informal register of language, slang maintains its communicable function only by virtue of the shared, mostly implicit, cultural, political, and/or social shared- understandings that constitute the group that employs it qua a shared-language group.

The real moral/political question at issue with our current and too-common slang deployment of the F-bomb is not whether one literally means that another should be non- consensually, sexually violated when one says “fuck you,” but rather why and how it is that we so easily, so unreflectively, and so intuitively resort to this particular metaphor? Especially when we have at our disposal so many other, non-sexual, non-patriarchal, non-heteronormative, and non-violent slang expressions to articulate offense or insult: why do we say “fuck you”?

I am more than willing to stipulate without objection that it is in fact the case that, in common American slang, “fuck” (as a transitive verb) is deployed as a generic insult, a generic indication of one’s desire for some generic harm to be visited upon its target, a generic signal of ill-will, disapproval, or condemnation. (I’m leaving out, for lack of space herein, the more nuanced and interesting linguistic analysis of this particular phoneme— “fuck”— with its particularly aggressive audible force.) And I’ll concede that I was, prior to this week, semi-sympathetic with the argument that there might be a way to “reclaim” the F-bomb for women in the same way that other, historically pejorative terms have been reclaimed, as either an indication of (or an assertion of the necessity for) reorganized power dynamics.

Upon reflection, I am decidedly not so inclined anymore. Because here is the fact with which all of us must reckon: rape culture is a culture.

None of us, fully-embedded and socially-constituted as the subjects that we are, can escape the siren calls of the culturally-imposed affirmations and sanctions that form us. We aren’t merely pinballs in an entirely predetermined Universe, in my considered view—I’m a fallibilist about that claim, fwiw—but none of us, even and especially (we) righteously angry feminists, can sever the ties that bind us to social, political, familial, and institutional structures that determine our default dispositions toward power and/or the available resistances to power. Even if we were to ignore the quite literally overwhelming majority of scholarship produced by other humanities disciplines over the past two centuries, which we (philosophers) frequently do, we still have more than ample arguments to find in our own house—since at least the 19^thC. (in Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud), and the libraries-worth of “identity”-based scholarship by 20^th and 21^st C. philosophers of critical race theory (Mills, Anzaldύa, Alcoff, Bernasconi), feminist philosophy (Young, Beauvoir, Fricker, Card), gender and queer theory (Sedgwick, Foucault, Butler, Halperin), trans* philosophy (Rubin, McKinnon, Halberstam, Bettcher, Haraway), etc.—to confidently affirm that one’s subjective lived-experience is thoroughly-predisposed to confirm the prejudices of the culture in which it is formed.

It should be no wonder, in a culture in which sexual violence is both positively affirmed and its sanction is regularly, legislatively, and juridically denied that our knee-jerk expression of insult is “fuck you.” Ours is a culture fully saturated with toxic masculinity, patriarchy, compulsory heteronormativity. The “fuck you” invective did not sprout up out of the ground like broccoli; it is the entirely natural consequence of a pandemic. Widespread, relentlessly reinforced, often unreflective, sets of behaviors that enable (as Patricia Rozee has argued) “sex role socialization practices that teach non-overlapping ideas of masculinity and femininity” have, in American culture, unsurprisingly produced exactly the sort of environment in which not only victims of sexual violence, but all of us, are culturally conditioned to repeat the refrain that the best (or only) punishment for sexual violations is a repetition of the same violence.

In her most recent text Rape and Resistance (2018), Linda Alcoff argues against viewing sexuality—and, by extension, sexual assault—in the exclusive terms of (what she calls) the “juridical” or “contract model,” an insight that I think is eminently helpful for thinking about the many shortcomings in the way we currently think and talk about sexual violence in the context of not only the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, but also Cosby and #MeToo. (Also, I would add, the way that we so unreflectively drop the F-bomb.) The Kavanaugh hearings were represented to the general public as being explicitly, exclusively, and reductively “juridical”—about determining the verity of the parties’ testimony and the innocence or guilt of the accused—but, following Alcoff, even if those determinations were juridically decided in Dr. Ford’s favor, we still would not have even begun to scratch the surface of what makes what we call “rape culture” remains a persistent, ubiquitous, perpetually elusive, and seemingly intractable phenomenon.

Everything that mattered in the Kavanaugh hearings hinged on what Alcoff calls “the thorny question of experience.” That is, and remains, a very thorny question, in a culture of rape culture.

We, all of us, have more than an ample supply of speech-acts readily available and at our disposal for articulating outrage at justice delayed or denied without resorting to invocations of rape culture. To the extent that we continue to employ this invective, we should consider ourselves complicit in rape culture.

We feminists, LGBTQ advocates, allies, and self-avowed progressives have, in my view, a supererogatory obligation to oppose heteronormative-patriarchy and its symptoms (rape culture, ubiquitous sexual violence, toxic masculinity) and, consequently, there is exactly zero excuse for our use of the F-bomb as a transitive verb.

This is going to be a considerably difficult endeavor for many of us, myself included. But, as Spinoza observed, all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.

Leigh M. Johnson is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Christian Brothers University in Memphis. Her research interests include Gender Theory, 20th Century Philosophy, and social and political philosophy. Johnson’s current research, teaching and blogging focus on the fate of the human in the age of technology. She has been blogging regularly at readmorewritemorethinkmorebemore since 2006. An earlier version of this post appeared there.