Fuck You

Interesting comment from a friend:

A woman shouldn't be president because women are fucked, and we don't want our country to be fucked. Our country should be doing the fucking.

(Paraphrased.) Now, whether this particular speaker was being facetious or not, there are many for whom this statement, I would argue, accurately summarizes their viewpoint.

It's a linguistic issue that's always troubled me. "Fuck" is a crude verb for sexual intercourse, with a relatively neutral connotation. (While often suggestive of promiscuous, unattached sex, any positive or negative connotations associated with that are dependent on the speaker: I might use it with disgust, but a frat boy, pardon the cliche, might use it with triumph.)

"Fuck" is, of course, also one of the more vulgar profanities in English. (In my experience "cunt" and racial slurs are the only words considered worse.)

Which brings to mind my question: in terms of sex, "getting fucked" is generally considered a good thing, or at least relatively neutral; in terms of profanity, "getting fucked" means something bad has happened. "Fucking someone", of course, follows with the same divergence of meaning.

The answer to this is painfully obvious, though back in the days when my mind first questioned this I did not possess the necessary understanding of societal assumptions. It's sexism, of course, the misogynism ingrained into the consciousness of patriarchal societies everywhere. Women are weak animals that get fucked -- defeated, conquered, raped -- by the strong animal that is man, who fucks. Sex is a battle and to be on the implied receiving, passive end is to be on the losing side. It's a disgusting reminder of our earliest, animalistic days, when sex really was rape and women were the property of whatever man won them.

It would be little more than a creepy curiosity if that attitude had died and the linguistic artifact of "fuck" (and similar words) was the only remnant. But as the quote at the top demonstrates, the connection between these two meanings is still very much a part of people's consciousnesses (both men and women, as a Daily Show segment on Hillary Clinton disturbingly proved about a month back), and that makes it dangerous. In an age when even racism seems on its way permanently out, and nationalism and religious discrimination seems the only major obstacles left, it's easy to forget that the oldest and largest oppressed demographic (women are actually a slight majority of the world's population) still faces serious opposition to equality.