| Did I ever tell you that I used to be a soda pop salesman?
It’s true. Back in 1981, I got a job as a sales rep for a very small company with a tiny office in lower Manhattan. Their flagship product was the first all-natural soda pop to hit the health food market. My job was to sell soda pop to independent grocery stores around the city and health food stores around the country. There were only five people working out of that office. Of those five, I was the only man. I was also the only one who was straight. Which is to say that my colleagues were all second-wave lesbian feminists. The socio-sexual orientation of my boss and co-workers didn’t matter to me in the least (and I guess mine didn’t matter to them, either). I actually welcomed the fact that my new job offered me a window into an unfamiliar world. I thought that working with these women would be a good learning experience. I was right. A week or two into my tenure, I strolled to work in a light-hearted mood, stepped confidently into the open office doorway, looked at my colleagues working at their desks, smiled, and, doing the most conspicuously comedic Groucho Marx impersonation the world had ever seen, I said, “Hello, goils!” . . . There was . . . a dramatic silence as heads slowly swiveled Medusa-like in my direction. The owner of the company looked directly at me and, with intonation as sharp and precise as the laser beams shooting out of her eyes, said, “Girls are female children.” . . . Externally, I acknowledged my mistake and apologized. Internally, I thought, “Okay, note to self: no sense of humor about this sort of thing.” But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that calling grown women “girls” really did have an unacceptably diminutive ring to it. This was how I first came to understand the power of language. I was reminded of this important lesson the other day when the phrase “underage women” was used to describe Jeffery Epstein’s victims. As Elizabeth Spann wrote in an NPR newsletter last December, “There is no such thing as “underage women.” They are girls. They are children. When the phrase “underage women” is used the effect is to soften the impact of a predator’s actions. It makes it more socially palatable.”
Public perception gets shifted when the language we use is strategically changed with deceptive intent:
Yoga philosophy calls this kind of language śāṭhya: duplicitous. Other Sanskrit words like parijalpa — “clever speech,” and jalpaiḥ — “by false speech,” are used to describe how language is used as a device for cheating. Bhakti-yoga literature describes such language as the poisonous semantics of the wicked. Using the linguistic façade of “underage women” to minimize the sexual abuse of girls is precisely the kind of poisonous semantics that wicked people use to attenuate the perception of their crimes in the court of public opinion. The opposite of śāṭhya is satyam: truthfulness. Yoga encourages speech that is truthful, beneficial, and pleasing. And the truth is that girls are female children, calling adult females “women” is beneficial, and calling out criminals who hide behind clever speech is pleasing to anyone who prefers justice for victims over protection for perpetrators. When our speech is simple, pleasing, truthful, and meant to be of benefit to others, we honor the yogic principles of non-harming, truthfulness and purity. Being aware of the power of language is also a way we can extend the meaning of yoga as the union of intention with impact: when we’re aware of how our choice of words lands with the people we speak to, we’re more likely to make positive connections. So, to the lesbian feminist inventor of America’s first all-natural soda pop, thanks for setting me straight. Wishing you all good fortune, – Hari-k |