Tits!

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Heh. Got you with that one, didn’t I?

Over on Counterpunch, Jeffrey St Clair has written a very droll piece, detailing his persecution — or would-be persecution; of course, like any sensible person, he loves this stuff — by a prudish Trotskyite groupuscule. (Yes, Virginia, there are — still! — Trotskyites.)

His piece will give you all the backstory you need, and it’s a fun read anyway. Teaser: Jeffrey is being taken to task for publishing a piece about some Hollywood ‘personality’ in which there appeared the four-letter word that entitles this post.

Needless to say, much brouhaha about this atrocity on the lefty mailing lists. ‘Sexism!’ cry the Trots. More thoughtful folk have attempted a class analysis of the Hollywood personality’s tits, without much success, since as far as I can tell they are (or, alas, were) in a class of their own.

Why ‘tits’ should be unsavory while ‘breasts’ is OK is entirely beyond me, except that the former is vernacular whereas the second, for some reason, is genteel.

I can’t see why. ‘Breasts’ seems to me both illiterate and prurient, since in English as she was well-spoke, back in the day, no individual had more than one breast.

To pluralize it calls attention to anatomy while purporting to elevate one’s gaze therefrom: consummate Pecksniffery.

But a great deal of campus-PC diction policing comes down to parlor gentility, with a thin — very thin — left cover.

I had an aunt — great-aunt, really — who used to quote the old chestnut ‘horses sweat, men perspire, ladies glow.’ She meant it, too. It wasn’t till years later that I realized this wasn’t original with her.

The same dear lady thought it was quite important whether you said ‘couch’ or ‘sofa’, ‘drapes’ or ‘curtains’, ‘dinner’ or ‘supper’ (though the last was almost Talmudically complex; each term was acceptable — in its place).

‘Tits’ was actually acceptable too, but only if you were talking about a cow. She would have spelled it ‘teats’, but pronounced it ‘tits’.

Spelling it as it sounds would, of course, have been coarse.

Auntie, if dire necessity had ever forced her to refer to a lady’s tits, would have said ‘bosom’. Anybody lewd enough to pluralize — ‘bosoms’ — would have been cast immediately into the outer darkness.

I don’t suppose she ever met any Trotskyites, but she wouldn’t have thought much of them either. She would have figured they were some odd kind of Methodists.

18 thoughts on “Tits!”

  1. Poor St. Clair then wrote a piece, from a talk he gave at the University of Oregon, titled “The Silent Death of the American Left.” For this he was again subjected to fearsome volleys, this time for more independent-minded folks on the left. Jeffrey’s essay was the work of someone who had succumbed to an intellectual pathology of defeatism. Why, all sorts of great things are happening. Paul Krugman is citing Kalecki, and a certain young “radical” had actually gone to the NYC office of The Nation and outlined for “Red Katrina” a “Letter from a Young Radical,” in which this wunderkind chastises the venerable weekly for its technocratic liberalism and then lays out a model for a new left-liberal alliance, which will certainly bring forth a leftwing party, complete with paid staff. One wag said that St. Clair was no radical, but a mere “Edward Abbeyist.” And as we all know, Abbey was from nowheresville, not a bit hip to the urban sensibility that dominates the United States and from which must come whatever radical change there is going to be. Of course, in these pronouncements, no one bothered to have read Abbey or learn the first thing about him.

    It is true that St. Clair, like good old Alex, loves this stuff and can more than hold his own. But none of the critics appeared to notice that Jeffrey’s own daughter has cancer or bothered to say that they hoped he and his wife are holding up and that their daughter recovers. Nothing shames the Trots, or the NYC intellectuals. Sectarianism for the first, superiority complex for the second.

  2. Reminds me of something I came across the other day:

    In today’s university, Herr Doktor Heidegger’s affair with a stunning 18-year-old student would be even more outrageous than his Nazi sympathies.

  3. You knew it wouldn’t be long before someone tried to make a mountain out of Angelina’s grand tetons. There is just way too much material there for the Junior Anti-Sexism League to leave to waste. All it took was for someone, preferably on the left, to use the “t” word.

    Speaking of tits I am surprised there hasn’t been an international campaign against those mountains, symbols of patriarchal oppression that they are. They should be renamed The Petite Peckers, in honor of the undoubtedly small-dicked, sexist white male scumbags who gave them their misogynistic moniker to humiliate wymyn.

    As for the ISO all you need to know about them is they support Uncle’s Wahhabi myrmidons in their efforts to “liberate” Syria one decapitated body and disemboweled rape victim at a time. But those freedom fighters (literally) would never use a vulgar word like “tit.”

    Thanks for reminding why I hate name-brand socialism with its dogma, catechism and inquisitors.

    The rest of the divisive PC bullshit logically follows, as this is America’s toned-down version of Takfirism, which is the prevailing religion of the Left nowadays. Everyone is an apostate, it’s all about race and gender, class doesn’t matter, and the white working class doesn’t exist. That about sums it up.

  4. Here is a listing of profs upset at use of the word ‘tits’. Although I take succor in Max Planck’s observation that “science progresses one funeral at a time”, I suspect a British student activist, Laurie Penny was on to something when she wrote:

    Of course, the old left is not about to disappear completely. It is highly likely that even after a nuclear attack, the only remaining life-forms will be cockroaches and sour-faced vendors of the Socialist Worker.

      • I hope I’m not ruining the rest of your day by pointing to a “debate” on what Laurie wrote with oceans of ink spilled in a manner that would have been familiar to medieval theologians (notice also that some of those addressed by name in comments section have literally been purged from the blog, i.e. their comments are no more). “Lenin” of London wrote the formulaic defense of status quo, something he won’t be doing any more now that he has–in a manner predicted by many–broken with the Socialist Workers Party of UK and is now selling his more polished wares–along with a much more respectable and telegenic haircut–to mainstream media outlets, a la Hitchens, who come to think of it was his subject of intense study over the last 2-3 years.

        • I never cease to be amazed at the amount of energy these recondite sectarian debates absorb. It was bad enough among us Maoists, back in the day, but the Trots are ten times worse. Their appetite for these internal donnybrooks seems to be literally insatiable.

    • It is highly likely that even after a nuclear attack, the only remaining life-forms will be cockroaches and sour-faced vendors of the Socialist Worker.

      You left out Mormons.

  5. So, the movie industry used Jolie’s tits (and ass) to sell theater tickets, now the breast cancer industry is using her tits to raise risk free capital investment–I mean, donation money–I mean, awareness! yet Fowler’s the “misogynist” for calling this out?

  6. Would the Hollywood “personality” St. Clair’s writing about be one Angelina Jolie, who had herself a pre-emptive double mastectomy after discovering what her chances for developing breast cancer were, causing all manner of mindless media ruckus in what had to be the non-news non-story of the year — kind of like Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl Flash? B’wah ha ha ha ha ha hah. I forgot all about that one, perhaps within 24 hours of it being screamed all over the place.

    But, aaaaaaanyway…

    Along with an understanding of color, tonality, linearity, composition, and how to work with various media, one of the most important things I learned in art school was how to appreciate a really nice rack. Drawing and painting naked chicks for upwards of four hours a day for four years will do that for you.

    It’s not that I don’t understand the concerns about objectification and the treatment of women as objects instead of human beings; what steams my beans is how so many feminists use that concern as a jumping-off point for the indiscriminate persecution of men for what is a basic, natural thing: the attraction to and adoration of beauty in a woman’s body, something that knows no ideology — when perhaps they should be spending some time going after the Entertainment-Industrial Complex and their fellow travelers, the news media, for brainwashing us into thinking that adoration and desire are “dirty”, and that our bodies themselves are “dirty”.

    That’s one of the things that irked me in all the years I spent working with the new wave of Leftie and anarchist types beginning with Seattle and A16. They were ostensibly divorcing themselves from tired old New Left dogma, yet the anarcho-feminists among them — like their Virginia Slims-smoking, Democratic Party-pimping ’70s “sisters” who came before — were relentlessly demonizing and pathologizing maleness — specifically, the perfectly natural tendency of a healthy hetero guy to pay extra notice to a nicely-ripened set of melons.

    As for me, I like tits — both the human female mammalian protruberance, and the word. It’s been in common usage for generations by both men and women. It’s a salty colloqualism that works well in the right kind of mature mixed company; it’s not as puerile as boobs, yet not quite as raw as knockers, gazongas, or hooters.

    • Yes. I like ‘tits’ much better than any of those. For one thing, it’s an old word, and for another, it’s a word that we use — or once used, anyway — for the corresponding organs among our other mammalian cousins. Kinda puts us in context, poor beasts that we are.

  7. Years ago, I read of this origin of the “sweat” remark: The cameraman on a Rita Hayworth movie mentioned there was a problem because the star was sweating under the lights. Her agent was present and admonished him, “Horses sweat, people perspire, Miss Hayworth glows.”

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