“If I go out alone I’m the slut / If I’m having fun, the sluttiest / If I go out and it’s daylight / I’m even more of a slut.” The Alicante duo Nebulossa won the Benidorm festival and will represent Spain in Eurovision with an unconventional pop song about a mature woman who decides to take on the world shouting “bitch.” The intention is to redefine a rude sexist insult as a slogan of empowerment. Do you get it? Criticism against it is increasing and the RTVE Equality delegate has resigned.
The philosopher Clara Serra believes that there is room to redefine the word, while the writer Laura Freixas It is a mistake to normalize the insult.
Misogynists are not the owners of words
CLARA SERRA
The controversy that has been unleashed with the song Bitch, who will represent Spain in Eurovision, has once again brought to the scene a long discussion about meanings. It is an old slogan of a certain feminism to insist that it is not resignified at will because, as Alicia H. Puleo says, “meaning is a social effect,” because the connotation of words “is not changed by individual decision”; or because, as Miguel Lorente has said these days, when faced with a term constructed against women the solution is not going to be “something as simple as making a song.”
Forty years after Las Vulpes sang I like to be a slut, 15 years after Itziar Ziga wrote Becoming a bitch and arriving at a moment in which to title a song Bitch —as Bad Gyal does— or Bitch —like Zahara does— or Bitch —as Rigoberta Bandini does— is nothing new, some feminists tell us that the transformation of a pejorative term is a slow process that can only be seen after many years. Man, we carry a few.
It is very good not to fall into voluntarism and know that “meaning is a social effect”, but precisely for this reason the closed-mindedness with which certain feminism persists in denying certain social effects is surprising. There are many women today who use the word slut (especially in friendly and colloquial language) in a banal – indeed! – sense. It is deeply contradictory to criticize, on the one hand, that we are naive for trying to change the meaning of a word without having the power to do so and, at the same time, to criticize that we have trivialized it. Either “bitch is always a sexist insult”, as some feminists have said on Twitter in recent days, or the word today has a banal use and that means that its meaning has changed (or, at least, it means that it has different meanings possible depending on different contexts).
Slut in our society means different things and that feminism that insists on its stony density is rather working for its univocality. In fact, he is demanding that we reserve it to name only one thing and thus, fighting his possible polysemy, he is also working for his resignification in the face of a society that has trivialized him.
But is the banal use of the word “slut” necessarily a rebellious and feminist act? Well, that’s probably the other error in a debate that shows a certain social hysteria and a suffocating all-or-nothing logic. The alternatives cannot be that using “bitch” is an insult to the victims or that it is a feminist anthem. It is neither one thing nor the other. Nebulossa’s song is the symptom that misogynists who insult women as “sluts” are not the exclusive owners of meanings.
This opens up margins for a conscious resignification and politicization of words that I don’t think a feminism that is too essentialist in language can take advantage of. But let’s be ambitious. If Las Vulpes remind us of something, it is two things: first, that 40 years ago it was possible—yes, it was possible—to begin to redefine the insult “bitch” and that, put to it, there are much more revolutionary ways than the one that is being the subject of this discussion today. It’s a shame that we have to go out and defend something so basic: that something doesn’t need to be a feminist anthem for it to retain the right to exist as a song. The most worrying thing is that, in the midst of a genocide, the controversy—almost global—is one that forces us to come out and say that feminism has to be able to criticize banal songs but not defend their elimination. The best feminism is the one that wants us to talk about Palestine in this Eurovision gala and boycott not Bitchbut to Israel.
It is not resignation, it is self-deception
LAURA FREIXAS
They say that Bitch turns a sexist insult into a feminist proclamation. They say that the contempt suffered by a group can be erased by “resignifying” the pejorative term that names it. What a good idea, how had we not thought of it, what an easy solution! Really…? I see at least two problems.
The first has to do with words. Given the controversy over the Eurovision song, these days the precedent of fagot and Nigger: The fact that gays and African Americans call each other that shows how insulting terms can become ironically endearing. There is, however, a fundamental difference: Nigger means black, faggot means homosexual. But is a fox the same as a woman?
Language tends to confuse both concepts. Well, language is not limited, as is often believed, to impartially reflecting (sexist) reality, but rather reinforces that sexism through value judgments. For example, in reality there are whores and whoremongers, but in language, only bitch It’s derogatory. The fact that whore is the worst insult applicable to a woman shows that their sexuality is the main criterion for judging them. And the language says something else: that they are all potential whores. Words like any either tart (which in their masculine version only designate an indeterminate man) establish an equivalence between a prostitute and a woman. The first problem of Bitch is that he accepts it. Her narrator, who does not practice prostitution, does not protest because she is called a slut (whore), but rather because it is called an insult.
If we now forget language to observe society, what do we see? Once again, the tendency to see sexual objects in women, from increasingly younger ages. The shorts and children’s swimsuits are roomy and comfortable; those intended for girls, tight, short and with padding in the case of bikinis. Very young girls adopt poses sexythey twerk, they put on makeup: they are called Sephora kidsafter the name of the beauty products chain. For adolescents and young women, forms flourish soft of prostitution, such as sugar daddies (publicized, by the way, by the song that represented Spain in Eurovision in 2022) u onlyfans… Is that what we mean by women’s liberation? And if the answer is no: will announcing “I’m a slut, slut, slut, a postcard slut,” as the song suggests, help us reverse it? Will calling ourselves bitches help us be seen and respected as colleagues, interlocutors, bosses, scientists, activists…? By the way, Nigger or faggot is only used by blacks or homosexuals among themselves; But bitch, once the season is open, anyone can call us. Thousands of men chanted it when the song was presented in Benidorm.
Bitch is the most used word in violent porn, the favorite insult of abusers, rapists, and murderers of women: it appears in 15,000 sentences. What do we do, do we advise victims that when cornered by the pack, they shout: “I’m a slut, slut, slut, a picture-postcard slut!”?
And, as Celia Amorós pointed out, “it is not whoever wants to resignifies, but whoever can.” But we are in the age of mirage. In philosophy, the “linguistic turn” prevails, the theory that philosophical problems can be solved by reforming language. In politics, the left woke up replaces the program with the battle over statues, flags and pronouns. On the networks, the slogan “the delulu is the solulu”, the idea that the solution to our frustrations is self-deception (delusion in English).
Marx said that philosophers had wanted to understand the world, when what it is about is changing it. It seems that today we are going to settle for resignifying it. But that does not alter reality. Resignifying is deluluNo solulu.
