Note on ‘gash’
I began writing a Facebook comment; in the process it strayed so far from the genre as to desert it.
so apparently where a friend of mine works at a broking firm in the city the favourite misogynistic insult is to call human females ‘gash’, as in ‘top gash at the party last night’ or ‘the place was swimming with gash’
i had by the way heard this before and it had registered as a mass noun, which is how it’s used at your friend’s firm. the strength of the offensiveness of the word abides in this detail of grammar which has the effect of rendering human individuals into a substance whose name is a metonymic caricature of their most immediate point of physical distinction from the naming men (and to an extent their psychosexual bête noire). it strikes me its function is to perform an aggressive sort of joint exorcism of the possibility of empathy which follows prejudice’s typical procedure: that is the unnerved denial to an alien group of the thick irreducible selfhood the prejudiced undergo in themselves. for these men women amount to a phalanx whose movement as a unit traces the shape of a giant cunt – entry to which things is after all the purpose of every involvement of broker with girl. the success of this word sees the force of the feminist complaint of ‘objectification’ manifest in the deep circuitry of language.
