Chaste ears refrain.
Who hasn't been taken aback, when meeting teenagers, by the funny names of birds that come up in their conversations?
If adults are no longer surprised to hear boys calling each other insults, this is more the case when middle and high school girls are calling each other, among friends, with sexist insults.
However, they are the first to be targeted and to suffer from it on public transport or in the street.
Whatever the social background, they call each other “slut”, “bitch”, “whore” as if they were sweet words, like a mother calling her child “my toad”.
For what reasons ?
At a time when controversy is raging in Spain due to the choice, which has just been revealed, of a song deemed sexist which will represent the country at Eurovision, we went to ask them the question.
Among our Spanish neighbors, feminist associations are not taking off.
This is because the lyrics of the title Zorra, proposed by the duo Nebulossa, can leave you perplexed.
If "zorra" literally means "vixen", the word also takes on another meaning in Spanish: that of an insult to designate a prostitute or a woman who has multiple partners, and which could be translated into French as "bitch" or “whore”
.
The version retained leaves no doubt.
Singer Maria Bas happily repeats
:
“I know I'm just a bitch.
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Appropriate the insult to weaken it
This doesn't surprise Charlotte.
Besides, she does not understand the outraged reaction of feminists.
“It’s common in Anglo-Saxon songs, and yet it’s women who sing them, or even who wrote the lyrics.
Why would this vocabulary be reserved for guys?
In this case, it doesn't shock anyone, points out the 1st general student.
They talk openly about their sexuality and send the message that if it bothers them, and they are judged as easy girls, it's OK for them.
They don't care.
They are super powerful,” insists the high school student.
“When I do it with my girl friends, I don’t really insult them.
It's just that we are so complicit that we can afford it.
It has nothing to do with the guy who insulted me in the metro,” compares the teenager.
The Spanish interpreter also denies bringing grist to the misogynists' mill, quite the contrary: “I have often been called a female dog.
This title is a way of transforming this word into something beautiful, in the sense of
knowing what you want
,” the singer explained to RTVE, the Spanish public radio and television.
We call this the reversal of stigma in sociology, or how to appropriate an insult, claim it and make it the engine of the refusal of self-shame.
Is this the same logic that drives middle and high school girls?
Also read Harassment in public spaces: “Dirty whore, it’s the insult that comes up the most”
“It’s a complex phenomenon,” warns Aurore Vincenti, a linguist specializing in issues of gender and sexuality.
She agrees with the desire of these young girls to “return the stigma”, “to integrate words that come from the aggressor to weaken their power and so that they hurt less”, adds the expert.
However, for it to work, there have to be many people doing it.
You don't turn a stigma around alone.
The group gives more power.
“Is it effective?
I really want to believe it but I don't know.
Maybe after a while the boys who insult them will say to themselves:
What's the point of doing it?
They laugh about it among themselves
,” says Aurore Vincenti.
Terms also used by the feminist movement
“And then it shocks the adults a little, it’s funny.
We're not little girls anymore,” says Keira, in 3rd grade.
In middle school, more of them than high school girls put forward this argument: using foul language to signal that they no longer consider themselves children.
The adolescent girls interviewed, however, understood very well that the sexist insult thrown in their faces is as individual as it is collective (and condemned by the law).
When (most often) a man calls them a “whore”, all women are also targeted.
“Basically, are these words really insults?
It was those in positions of power who decided that
whore,
for example, was not worthy,” continues the linguist.
But why refer to each other like this?
“It’s not because the attacker is not there that his gaze is not internalized,” she explains.
Read alsoFamily, school and digital: sexism persists and even worsens among young men, according to the High Council for Equality
A strategy to suffer less and therefore a form of activism.
It is true that in the 1970s, in the midst of the women's liberation movement, the signatories of the Manifesto of the 343 proclaiming to have broken the law by having an abortion, took up the expression "Manifesto of the 343 Sluts".
A headline straight out of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, which supports the initiative.
More recently, in the United States, this community solidarity is expressed in particular among feminists around “slutwalks”, or “slut walks” organized against sexist and sexual violence.
Since the premiere in Toronto in 2011, the event has gone international.
Sexist insults when talking to her friends, Amalia, in her final year, also does it to “play down the drama”.
That's to say ?
“I only do it with my best friend.
In fact, our exes sometimes called us that.
We chose to laugh about it today.
I understand that it can be shocking, but by doing this, the thing that hurt us no longer affects us.
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