Definitely not a child-safe post

[NOTE: Jim C Hines recently had a post on rape on his blog, so I thought -- for reasons that will become obvious as this post continues -- I'd move this one up and save Monday's scheduled post for Wednesday.]

I swear. A Lot. If you’re ever in a relaxed conversation with me, the least offensive term you’ll hear me use is “bloody” and you’ll quickly discover that my favourite word (besides “utterly”) is “fuck” and its many, many, wonderfully evocative derivatives. When referring to people, I have no compunction about referring to them as “cunts”, whether in admiration or degradation. To me, it’s just a word.

I don’t temper my swearing in front of the kids, although I have told them not to use such language themselves because they will be judged by it and they’re too young for that to happen. So, despite hearing their mother swear like a sailor from the moment they were born, neither of our children swear. It’ll come, and I’ll deal with it when it does, but we’re not there yet.

As a compulsive swearer, there are a couple of things I’ve noticed about it. For one, it’s definitely all in the rhythm. You have to be relaxed to swear well. I have been more shocked by someone say “bitch” than a friend telling me about a few cunts he ran into at a nightclub. If you haven’t internalised swearing, relaxed into it, woven it into the very cadence of your speech, it sounds more provocative and jarring than if you have.

Does the fact that I swear mean I have a small vocabulary? No. I consider my vocabulary to be decent-sized. And it isn’t a pointer to a lack of education either. Likewise, I don’t regard it as any kind of mirror to my personal moral standing. So, why do I do it?

Well, for one, it’s a habit. People have their own little mannerisms and twitches. Mine is that I swear. That’s just the result, however. In order to understand this more fully, you have to understand three other things, from consequence to source, from least to most important.

One is that swearers swear because the word loses meaning. I once worked with a very nice Basque by the name of Felix. He was a software engineer. And he used to swear a lot. “How the fuck do they expect us to fucking code this shit when they haven’t bedded down their fucking architecture and haven’t fucking prepared proper fucking design documents for it yet?” was along the lines of his usual objection. (That he was right, you can take as a given.) Even in casual Australia, this caused a bit of a stir. When questioned about it, mild-mannered Felix had a ready answer. “It’s not my language,” he shrugged. “‘Fuck’ doesn’t mean anything to me. Plus it’s fun to say.” And he’s right. Having also learnt some choice Chinese dialect words, I can say that calling people some pretty nasty names in another language doesn’t mean anything to me, either.

Two, when I studied martial arts, my training partners were mostly nineteen and male. Do you know how much testosterone is pumping through those young, toned veins? You can almost smell it the moment you step into the kwoon. And do you know how much disregard such young males have for the English language? But, of course, that doesn’t mean that I fell into swearing just because others were doing it. I hope you at least know that much about me, by now. It just made the environment more lax.

Three. Now this is the most important, so I left it to last. And please do think about this one. My previous Chinese boxing instructor used to hold anti-rape workshops. He did a lot of research into the topic. And what he told me was that men often use swear words to shock their victims. Women, not used to hearing such language, would freeze or hesitate when they heard foul words being shouted at them by an assailant. And in that moment of inaction, the attacker would then press his advantage through the use of physical force.(*)

One reason my instructor did nothing to curb the level of swearing in our kwoon was that he had the express purpose of inuring me to it, so I wouldn’t fall into the same trap. What can I say? It worked. A stranger can walk up to me and call me a useless fucking excuse for a diseased cunt, a motherfuckin’ abortion, spittle-flecked and straight to my face and I wouldn’t bat an eyelid. Instead, I’d be watching for other things going on — any other people around? How is he standing? What is he doing? How is he moving?

Swearing is a complex topic and the knee-jerk response of saying it’s All Bad and that civilised human beings Don’t Do It is a gross over-simplification. Because of the kind of training I underwent, I know that I’m better able to stand up to verbal abuse as a precursor to violence than the average woman. Because of the kind of world we live in, this training has actually paid off. The “downside” is that I’m not offended by any swearing and, as a corollary, tend to swear a lot myself. You can’t really have one without the other and I have no regrets. Just something for you to think about the next time the moralists start up.

(*) Rape is an heinous invasion of another human being’s privacy and will. Author Jim C Hines (whose blog I read religiously but who doesn’t know me from toffee) has a page on rape at his website. If you know anyone who has suffered rape, please go here for further links and information.