Sep 2, 2021
Do you ever notice how modern day slang employs the word "kill" quite frequently?
Language plays an important role in moving from Domination Systems to Partnership Systems. Shifting from language based in domination to language based in partnership is something we can all practice on an everyday basis.
You may be surprised at the amount of domination-based language you use and hear daily, so here are some easy switches you can make to common phrases:
Find more partnership vocabulary here.
Do you have other examples of Domination to Partnership language to share?
Let us know: contact CPS with your ideas. https://centerforpartnership.org/connect/
Yes! Language is So Important in promoting norms. The word Bitch is literally used as a synonym for anything female now days, particularly any time any woman (or young girl) is being anything but passive, sweet, pretty and easy going. If we are in someone’s way, we are a bitch, even if we have the ride of way! When men call each other bitch, it’s generally in the context of being a whiny, weak, pathetic female. And on TV, females of all ages are referred to as Bitch, Stupid bitch, you bitches, etc. And men are simply called “son of a bitch” which only insults a woman who is not even in the room to defend herself! We are teaching our boy-children that all females are bitches, and it’s okay to call them that on TV and in life, and yet we are telling girls that they matter, that they are smart, that they have value, but then we tell them on TV that they are also still just bitches. It’s a mixed message! And girls are inherently insecure as it is! Can you imagine if Marcia, Jan and Cindy Brady (The Brady Bunch girls, in the 1970s) had been called bitches by friends, adults and their sisters alike?
The scariest thing of all is that women and girls themselves have now adopted the word bitch in our own daily language and thoughts, thus legitimizing the use of that term (and its inherently female meaning) in the general vernacular. Between that change to our everyday language, combined with countless images of female full frontal nudity in film and on TV and female fashions in media, a bona fide link between bitches, female nudity, and oft-repeated images of “real women” as narcissistic, drama-seeking, highly manufactured female images such as Kardashians, Housewives, and pole stripper fashions of female singers are creating a “definition” of a) what defines female; and b) is causing predominant and very disrespectful attitudes women–aka attitudes of misogyny–to form in our world and society.