Last week, as an afterthought, I popped this short statement at the end of Feminism can be frivolous fun:

A parental afterthought – please stop calling each other “bitches”. You are just popularising the images from rap songs which glorify mistreatment of women. Parents battle to teach their sons to respect women and this undermines all our hard work.

Virginia Duke was interested in how the whole situation had played out and read all the articles involved. Thank you, Virginia for your input and your interest! Virginia’s comment on that article included the following:

Your parental afterthought, for me, and please don’t take offense, really highlights the leagues of difference between your generation and mine. I don’t know how old you are, but you write about being old enough to simply roll your eyes at the infantilism, etc. So I’m thinking you’re old enough. Anyway, without going into great detail, suffice it to say I’m a 35 year old educated white woman, I was raised in the military, have traveled the globe and I grew up on rap music. I also spent ten years working in the domestic violence/sexual assault fields. For me, the term ‘bitch,’ denotes a million things, but for whatever reason, images from rap music never even come into my frame of reference. But for someone from older generations or totally different cultural spheres than my own, I can see why it might. (Again, I feel like I have to say I’m not calling you old, just making an observation based on the tone of your post.)

When I wrote the paragraph in question, several aspects of society were running around in my head, most of which I have previously written about. I am going to try to demonstrate the interconnectedness of previous writings to show why I wrote that paragraph, where my brain was going at the time. Many of the readers who read that particular article were either not regular readers of this website and/or not Australians (hence local conditions may not be known to them), so I believe some explanation of my reasoning is in order.

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