SAINTS PRESERVE US

Needless Complications

Oh (insert non-gender-specific noun here)!

Netflix last weekend reimagined the world of entertainment. It streamed live comedy on a Saturday night. The event was a Chris Rock special. The comedian was the host of last year’s Oscar ceremonies which took place in March. You may recall a tame joke careening so sideways that one paragraph in his eventual obituary was able to write itself on the spot.

I didn’t watch the appropriately timed Selective Outrage. I didn’t even know it was on. Contemporary comedy hasn’t, with few exceptions, really resonated with me: The human condition is the constant and better jokes about our absurd state of affairs have been made before. I’m a laughter libertarian, nothing is inappropriate or off limits. Oh my, offense is entirely subjective. And, anyway, with few exceptions, my friends, family and colleagues have always made me laugh harder than any seasoned pro could.

Celebrity sissy fights don’t mean nothing to me. Monday The Globe and Mail published a review of Chris Rock’s Selective Outrage Netflix special. Normally I would’ve just turned the broadsheet page over to the national weather map, but the word “toxic” in the headline caught my eye. The real hook was a mysterious portmanteau neologism in the sub-head: “misogynoir.”

I thought, Qu’est-ce que fuck?

The critic, apparently more woke than a colicky baby boy on Viagra, complained that Rock’s riffing on his schoolyard spat “reeked of misogynoir.” The term was then defined parenthetically: “misogyny against Black women.” A free society is a dynamic society. Thank Dog for that, but sometimes it’s hard to keep abreast of changes, cultural and linguistic. Black women used to be African-American women and before that, black women, no cap. I never thought an ugly blanketing term like “misogyny” would need to be quantified or refined, specialized and personalized like an Amazon algorithmic shopping suggestion.

Does this mean “Brown Sugar” must be consigned to the dustbin more than 50 years after its debut on Rolling Stones Records because it constitutes misogynoir? Could it not merely be a louche and lascivious song about the sleazy underbelly of pre-Emancipation New Orleans? “I got 99 problems, bitch ain’t one,” is the only Jay-Z lyric I know. Seems like a compliment, but then again, “bitch” is definitely a misogynistic pejorative when I use it. Is it even fair to infer the bitch in question is Black?

Portions of contemporary society are hypersensitive, hair trigger. Prickly activists, academics, pundits default to outrage, so much so that even a couch potato can move fast and break things with a few keystrokes. I’m qualified to write about words because I used them frequently, almost daily. I’m qualified to write about arts and culture because I’ve consumed them my entire life. But I’m not sure that I know what I used to know any more. Are Ralph Ellison and Colson Whitehead great American writers or are they now great Black writers? The distinction makes no difference to me because I don’t believe it’s that important. They write what they write about and my life’s been that much richer for reading their prose. I’m not entirely comfortable with Sharpies being taken to lines that are slowly and relentlessly being erased. Did misogynoir really need to be coined for clarity? The root word is definitive, an absolute.    

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of etymology since 2013. The novella Of Course You Did is my latest book. Visit www.megeoff.com for links to purchase it in your preferred format from various retailers.