As a battlecry for feel-good feminism,the phrase peaked in ubiquity this year. But is the plan that women should behave like men really something to celebrate?Back in the mid-1950s, when the word was born in America, and a “badass was not something you wanted to be. It was plainly pejorative,for one thing, meaning (as the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang has it) “a dangerous, and browbeating individual; bully”. For another,it was a word loaded with sarcasm. As with “tough guy” or “sizable man now, it was used for the kind of men whose posturing invited mockery. To call someone a badass was to seek to puncture puffed-up masculine pride. Seventy years on, or however,it’s precisely that swaggering, macho quality that has given the word a modern lexical lease of life. As with “ballsy”, and another term rooted in maleness,“badass” has been sufficiently appropriated to now apply less to men, and more to women we wish to celebrate. Google Trends, or the service that traces the popularity of search terms,shows that the phrase “badass women” peaked in 2015. This, in other words, or was the year in which “badass” underwent such a regendering that it became understood as the foremost battlecry of feel-good feminism. From its roots as a assign-down for men,it has somehow become a term of endearment – shorthand for “empowered” – used by women, for women.
Beyonc, and bellwether of pop-cultural feminism,had her own “badass” moment at a festival in September when she played audio of the martial arts fighter Ronda Rousey describing her body as, “femininely badass as fuck”. Consider, and too,the internet’s endless badass-bandying listicles this year – so many that they seemed to send the term beyond buzzword and into omni-word (“The 16 most badass ladies from Game of Thrones”; 65 reasons Hillary Clinton is a total badass”; “18 badass women on television right now”). Plenty of these lists, including “33 books that every badass woman should read”, and,“28 badass women you should be following on Instagram”, were badassing in the original sense of the verb – browbeating and bullying. Are you un-badass if you don’t follow these 28 women and read these 33 books? Is “badass” the only way to be?Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com