Bob,

I did, actually, understand the metaphor. The problem is I don’t like it, and I sometimes try to use flat-footedly literal readings to point out implications of metaphors that I don’t like.

I don’t mind “vulgar” language, and I certainly don’t mind giving William a shout-out for a brave and eloquent speech in front of the world, especially at such a time.

What does trouble me is metaphors that tend to identify courage with masculine sexual anatomy that more than half the population doesn’t have, because it identifies courage with masculinity (and in particular with an especially obnoxious form of male sexual aggression, i.e. proudly exposing your man-bits to an assembled crowd). And, contrapositively, it also suggests that there’s something wrong with not having balls — by identifying not having balls with being cowardly. That kind of metaphor points up irrelevant or nonexistent features in those who get the “praise,” and simultaneously excludes a lot of people (like, say, Betsy or Celia) who actually are both very brave and also literally ball-less.

It’s particularly troubling when the tenacity, endurance, and courage of that majority, in the face of suffering, terror, or death, have historically been, and often currently are, systematically blanked-out, denied, disparaged, or ridiculed and mocked (as silly, worthless, sanctimonious, or “bitchy”) — mainly because those forms of tenacity, endurance, and courage were and are practiced by people with no balls, and also because they were and are typically practiced outside of antisocial institutions devoted to killing foreigners or beating up demographically “suspect” locals — institutions such as the hollering, chest-thumping uniformed thugs trying to intimidate and assault their way through the streets in St. Paul. (And it’s largely from the vernacular talk within those military and paramilitary outfits, suffused as they are with a cock-swinging macho “warrior” mindset, that metaphors about things like balls of steel have generally entered our language.)

There are lots of good, visceral metaphors for courageous defiance — showing spine, having guts; even “courage” is one (etymologically, it means having heart). So why not use one of those metaphors, which would probably have worked just as well in the rhetorical context, and which don’t have the same sexual implications?

Thanks for spread the word on all this.

Just one thing. William Gillis’s address at the press conference was marvelous. But what have his testicles got to do with anything? And where in the video did he flash them? Seems to me like if he did, that would have been just rude, not to mention distracting from the main point.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so. Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as keeping out of politics. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer….

— George Orwell, Politics and the English Language (1946)

I dunno. I think people who use the word “anarchy” use it as a package-deal: it’s not that it means chaos instead of freedom from rulers; it’s used to mean both chaos and freedom from rulers, because people who use the word that way think that the two are the same thing, or at least inevitably connected with each other.

So when people are package-dealing, there’s two ways you could respond. You could reject the term and come up with a new one. But what would you come up with? “Peace?” “Freedom?” That’s what anarchy means, but obviously the common uses of those terms are just as knotty as the common uses of “Anarchy.” “Lawlessness?” “Ungoverned?” Both of these imply chaos in common usage just as much as “anarchy.” “A spontaneous, polycentric, or non-hierarchical social order?” Gag.

Fortunately, there’s another thing you can do when dealing with a conceptual package deal: you can pick out the part of the concept you want to preserve and defend, and then explicitly challenge the presupposition behind the attempt to package-deal it with the part of the concept you don’t want to defend. For example, this is what gay men and lesbians did when they reclaimed the words “homosexual” and “bisexual” from the psychiatrists; the words used to be used so as to imply both (1) having particular types of sexuality, and also (2) suffering from mental illness. The gay liberation movement embraced (1) but chucked (2) out the door, and it didn’t take too long for much of the rest of the world to catch up.

It might seem like taking the reclamation route is somehow a drain on time, since it gets you tangled up in other people’s confused terminology. But I’m not at all sure that’s right. Identifying and challenging the confusion that’s implicit in the ordinary use of the word — e.g. the confusion between lawlessness and riot, or the presupposition that only government force can produce social harmony — is part and parcel of the strategy of reclaiming the term. In some important ways, it involves you much more in meeting people where they are, whereas minting new language can lead you into inadvertently sidestepping the real issue, by not confronting the confusion that’s at the core of the dispute over the meaning of e.g. “anarchy.”

William H. Stoddard: The trouble with this sort of argument, though, is that it treats the legal term “animal” as synonymous with the biological term “animal.”

Well, I stipulated that I was considering the term as “used in contemporary English,” by which I mean ordinary English rather than a particular technical argot. If I were a wagering man, I’d wager that in most ordinary contexts of use “animal” is a deferential term in which non-specialists defer to biologists (not lawyers) for the referent-fixing criteria.

William H. Stoddard: Though whether Superman is nonhuman seems debatable. There’s lots of material from DC that suggests that he and human women are interfertile.

But I don’t think that being interfertile with human beings would make Superman human, or a member of the biological species H. sapiens. Species are constituted (among other things) by their common evolutionary heritage, which Superman — who has an unrelated alien lineage — does not share. (You can hybridize peaches, plums, and apricots; but that doesn’t make them all members of the same species.)

Roderick: If Superman doesn’t count as an animal because he’s not biologically related to homo sapiens, then perhaps Lois Lane doesn’t either, because homo sapiens is the name for a species in our universe whereas Lois Lane lives in the DC universe and is not biologically related to anybody in our universe.

Well, if homo sapiens names a natural kind, surely it names the same natural kind in every possible world, and in a given possible world W it is only the case that humans in W have to be related to all the other humans in W, not that they have to be related (how?) to humans in other worlds not actual relative to W. In order to prove that there are at least some humans in the D.C. universe, you just need to find at least one actual human who exists in the D.C. universe as well as in @. Any such must also be human in the D.C. universe as well as in @ (since humans have humanity essentially, not accidentally). There are in fact plenty of cases of transworld identity (e.g. Franklin D. Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler have both appeared). So as long as it’s part of the story that Lois Lane et al. are appropriately related, evolutionarily speaking, to these known humans, Lois Lane et al. will also count as members of the human species.

Black Bloke: Nivens ignored a lot of things for the sake of comedy.

Too bad, I guess, since the essay is not very funny.

Etymologically, “bestiality” would seem to be best defined as “sex with a beast,” i.e. a nonrational animal. So I think Lois is O.K. to the extent that Supes counts as rational.

On the other hand, I’m not sure that he counts as an animal at all — at least, as the term is used in contemporary English. Your argument seems to presuppose that it’s the name of a functional or structural kind, rather than the name of a particular biological kingdom. If it’s the latter, then the natural kind can’t include anything that’s not interrelated with the other members of the kingdom, meaning that, except on a theory of panspermia, no alien life form at all could count as an “animal” except in a scare-quoted, analogical usage.

I think we agree that incremental reforms, where they can be gotten, would be preferable to the status quo. The important thing is to be clear about the difference between (1) supporting incremental measures for strategic reasons, in order to pry whatever limited relief you can out from under a horrid political system, and (2) compromising moral principle by accepting, or pretending to accept, that some kinder, gentler, more efficient form of international apartheid could possibly be just or prudent or excusable. (1) is a perfectly reasonable political strategy, but it is worth nothing, or even less, when accompanied by (2) rather than by a principled moral opposition to the violent punishment of peaceful immigrants.

As Garrison said, “Urge immediate abolition as earnestly as we may, it will alas! be gradual abolition in the end. We have never said that slavery would be overthrown by a single blow; that it ought to be we shall always contend.”

William H. Stoddard: Nonetheless, I’m not sure what other short word there is to use for people whose view of economics and labor history is generally compatible with the ideas of Karl Marx.

Well. “Marxist”?

If you need something a bit broader in application, you might try “Marxian,” or, more broadly still, “State Socialist.”