Why Don’t I Lighten Up?

Lindsay Brauner
Jul 24, 2017 · 4 min read

The audience roars with laughter. The guy on stage continues.

“I don’t like words that hide the truth. I don’t like words that conceal reality.”

These are the words of a man who crusaded — whether or not he intended to do so — in the service of sexual violence advocacy, political progress, and social change.

He was neither a politician, nor an activist.

He was a comedian, and that sentence is part of a famous routine that had his audience in stitches.

George Carlin

Many comedians — less recently, George Carlin, more recently, Bill Burr, Bill Maher — unflinchingly fight the nearly imperceptible process of language perversion that has long served as the smoke and mirrors with which we are all deceived.

Who deceives us with this insidious rhetorical obfuscation? And why?

The manipulation of rhetoric, power, and the perpetuation of rape and entitlement culture surfaces, too, whenever men tell women to “lighten up,” or when they ask, “Why don’t you smile?” Those, too, are euphemisms, for something much darker.

Carlin famously highlights the use of euphemism in burying the violence of war. After the First World War, he tells his audience, soldiers returned and faced the trauma of adjusting to a world that had no concept of the horror and death with which they were so intimately acquainted. They would relive the violence they had experienced, truly believing, at times, that they were back on the battlefield, living in a reality that no one else shared or saw.

Initially, this “condition” was called, “Shell Shock.”

“Simple, honest, direct language,” Carlin says. “Two syllables, ‘Shell Shock.’ Almost sounds like the guns themselves.”

Then, Carlin takes the audience through the many subsequent iterations of renaming “Shell Shock.”

Second World War: Battle fatigue. Korean War: Operational Exhaustion.

“We’re up to eight syllables now,” says Carlin. “And the humanity has been squeezed completely out of the phrase. It’s totally sterile now.”

Vietnam: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

“The pain is completely buried under jargon,” Carlin seethes.

Rape can become “sexual misconduct.” Various acts of assault become “fondling,” “grabbing,” or “groping,” and, “it’s not like he raped you.”

It’s more comfortable.

What is a man really telling a woman when he demands that she make a certain facial expression, or affect a certain mood?

We don’t want to use words that make other people cringe, words that themselves almost inflict a kind of discomfort, assault, or violence — as in Carlin’s notation of “Shell Shock” sounding “like the guns themselves.”

If we change the words, if we add protective rhetorical padding, we don’t have to look at the thing we are insulating against. If we can’t see it, it’s not there.

When we describe pain and shame and violence in terms that have been conveniently invented to make us all feel better, to ease the discomfort of the discussion of difficulty, we are apologists. We are complicit.

Similarly, when entitlement culture kicks in, and men attempt to dictate how women look, feel, act, through seemingly innocuous statements, we are insulated from the attempt to control and manipulate.

The perpetrators of violence and rape, racism and sexism — they’re protected by our refusal to look directly at what they do, what they say, and the pain that their actions create.

When we fall into the lynch mob mentality — the mentality of leaving no space for a discussion — we climb deeper into the abyss of the problem. We fire an authority figure for sexual harassment. The victim anonymously hides in fear of the stigma of the situation, while the perpetrator’s reputation is forever marred. We force the sale of a basketball team by a racist owner, for whom there is no possibility of redemption. Through the sanitization of language, we teach people to hide their prejudice, their bad behavior, their experiences of victimization. Trial may occur in the legal arena, but it most significantly occurs in the court of public opinion — and that of familial opinion.

We scream our disbelief.

She’s lying! He’s despicable! How could he say that, what a disgusting racist!

So racists learn to not say what they feel, men learn to be sure to sexually harass in person, not over text message or email, victims learn to hide, and we all engage in the theater, the performative tug-of-war between outrage and rhetorical sterilization.

We are angry about a problem that we won’t name. We impotently join the ranks of opinion-wielding groups. We are furious and closed to conversation.

And the problem persists.

Let’s break the cycle of this system. Let’s admit that sometimes (in the case of a first offense) a guy who sent suggestive text messages or emails deserves a public reprimand, and then a chance to be embraced back into his professional life. Let’s believe victims first, and above all. Let’s learn to be more compassionate, not more cynical. Let’s look at the rhetorical roots of the entitlement culture that normalizes male attempts to control women’s behavior, facial expressions, emotions.

Let’s refuse to “lighten up.”

But, when we feel like it, let’s laugh.

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