‘Ho’ – ho hum …

I just love my ‘hos”. Don’t you? For those less familiar with transatlantic English, I mean ‘dem rump-shakin”, bling shinin’, skanky, bad-ass bitches in bikinis strutting their stuff in Snoop Dog, R Kelly and Mister X, Y or whatever’s videos. Not that I need to see the merchandise first, I’ll still get the CD.

Call me a self-hating, misogynistic traitor to The Cause, but I just happen to like hip-hop. And call me a sorry excuse for a modern woman, but hearing­ rappers go on about ‘hos” and ‘bitches” hasn’t given me an attack of the Victorian vapours yet. Nor is it likely to, since I’ve just downloaded the latest Xzibit on to my i-pod.

I’m too busy grooving to the beat to read the (hardly) subliminal message — that as a woman, like all women, I have a secret ‘ho” lurking somewhere deep down inside me: just waiting to break out, lure him to my lair, and rob a ‘nigga” of his hard-won fortunes.

Ho hum —

Just when one dares to imagine that some women have broken free of the shackles of stereotyping, and are confident enough to recite the ‘sticks and stones” mantra as they go about their daily business, we find ourselves back in the Stone Age.

Here again we have a state wherein, for women, being called dumb, a spendthrift, a loser, a schemer, a Machiavelli or an axe-murderer still pales in comparison to being accused of having more sex and/or sexual partners than are acceptable by ‘decent” society.

The ‘ho” is now the talk of the town across the Atlantic, after MSNBC radio sports shock-jock Don Imus called a women’s basketball team a bunch of ‘nappy-headed hos”.

No less eminent personages than the right Reverend Jessie Jackson and Snoop Dog himself have been drawn in to a race and (to a lesser extent) gender fray. The internet, newspapers and cable channels are still carrying the story, weeks after the incident. It made it not only on to YouTube, but also onto the cover of Time magazine.

Naturally, everyone has an opinion, not least of all the women of the Rutgers women’s basketball team that Imus insulted. Speaking at a press conference a week after the controversial segment was aired, the players told of their ‘great hurt, anger and disgust” about the DJ’s comments, and ‘the racial categorisation they entailed”.

Most of the coverage and sound-bytes have gone on at length about the racism in the comment: a situation not helped much by the fact that the offender is a millionaire, graying, middle-aged white man. A white man whose show has gained notoriety and criticism for shocking content — pundits on the show last year referred to Jill Carroll, a journalist abducted in Iraq, as a potential suicide bomber.

That his words were demeaning to the players, not only as blacks, but also as women, has received significantly less attention — but not less loud voices. A phalanx of black American woman columnists have been writing of their ‘deep hurt and pain” — a coterie of local feminists have called for Imus (whose subsequent apology didn’t save him getting the chop) to undergo gender sensitivity training.

On the flip side, a black American ‘pride” organisation is selling lapel pins online: ‘Proud Nappy-Headed Ho”.

All this ‘ho” talk has got me wondering if I’m not perhaps mistaken in believing I live in the 21st century. Call a sister many things: yet you can be sure which will sting the most: telling that woman she is a floozy; a strumpet, slatternly, of ill-repute and, horror of horrors, loose.

What does it say for a woman’s measurement of her own self-worth when she is reduced from a sturdy oak weathering life’s storms (as black women are presumed to be, by nature) to a shrinking violet: cowed and broken by a crude insult?

Can’t help but feel we’re right back in the cave.

So, who likes being called names? Anyone who has survived the high-school quadrangle will know that the sticks and stones thing doesn’t wash. Accuse her of being a smarmy know-it-all teacher’s pet or the locker-room thief and you may just get away with it.

The near-total absence of an equivalent epithet for men speaks volumes. Call him a gigolo or a player and there will be hearty back-slaps of congratulations. But call a woman a bitch and she’s a quivering mass of humiliation.

Some of the Rutgers players went so far as to say that being called ‘hos” by Imus robbed them of their thunder in the game. ‘Our moment was taken away — our moment to celebrate our success, our moment to realise how far we had come, both on and off the court, as young women,” CNN quoted sophomore forward Heather Zurich.

Thank the Ho Heavens for fellow team member Kia Vaughn, who put the Imus insult in its proper place — the dung-heap of indifference. ‘I achieve a lot, and unless they have given this name of ‘ho’ a new definition, then that is not what I am.”

We have not moved, it seems, from a time and place where the measure of a woman’s virtue is approximated by her chastity.

Who says that insults are ever pleasant when one is on the receiving end: and being called a bitch or a ‘ho” is, it seems, less an insult than it is an accusation. One that must of necessity be countered, but (of course) never, never defended. That just won’t do.

After all, the image of the prostitute remains maligned, loathed and detested in society. What greater affront, they say, to womanhood than a woman who sells her body? When in truth, the transactional nature of so many relationships today — including between married people — make this a somewhat difficult position to sustain.

As Thackeray described it in Vanity Fair: ‘ … the moral world, that has, perhaps, no particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name.”