You Know How Misogynists Can Be!
You may have overheard something about Eavesdrop D.C.—it’s that Web portal that records those funny little tete-a-tetes heard on the streets of our fair District. Recently, a friend pointed out this recent snippet of conversation posted on the site, caught on the Metro’s orange line:
You know how women can be . . .
Female customs and border patrol officer (in uniform): “So I wasn’t surprised when he left his wife for his girlfriend, but I was surprised by the domestic battery charge . . . but, you know how women can be.”
I’m torn. Sure, the post is ridiculing the speaker’s “you-know-how-women-can-be” justification of domestic violence—and rightly so. But then I saw how Eavesdrop D.C. tags the post: Labels: Dumb chicks, Metro. Ahh, calling someone a “dumb chick”—the perfect rejoinder to any ignorant domestic violence comment.
The “dumb chicks” tag is a popular one on the site, and has yielded some other memorable eavesdrop sessions: One dumb chick in Virginia Square said she “can’t eat more than one M&M at a time” because she likes “to savor them.” Idiot! Another dumb chick, a high school student on a tour of D.C., was so dumb she wasn’t even sure what the Capitol Building looked like. “I thought thats what it looked like, but I was too embarrassed to ask,” the tourist was overheard saying. What a stupid woman!
To be fair to the eavesdroppers: There’s also a “dumb dudes” tag on Eavesdrop D.C. which is equally as condescending in its own dudely way. So far, there have been 15 posts in the “dude” category and 24 in the “chicks” category. I’m no mathematician, but I think these numbers prove once and for all what we’ve known all along: chicks are 1.6 times dumber than dudes. Recently, though, chicks seem to have gotten even dumber; the last “dumb dudes” post was on January 30, 2008; in that time, dumb chicks have been overheard a staggering five times. Impressive.
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5:24 pm
I think the tags “dumb chicks” and “dumb dudes” just indicate the gender of the speaker and nothing more than that. I think someone who would follow-up a comment about domestic abuse with “you know how women can be” does qualify for the dumb chick category. On our blog, we have two tags “dumb things guys say” and “dumb bitch parade”, but we’re very clear about the fact that the label applies to women who make women look bad as a whole.
12:47 pm
You’re right that they do indicate the gender of the speaker. I just think it’s interesting to look at how often people think women say dumb things, and how often they think men say dumb things. In D.C. right now, it looks like it’s more often women.
2:47 pm
Why do you (and Eavesdrop DC) assume that the domestic battery charge would have been against the man? Maybe the speaker was referring to a charge against the woman.
8:33 pm
Hey E,
Thanks for the comment. I was actually talking about this with the friend who referred me to the post—we couldn’t figure out if the charge was against the man or the woman. We did agree, though, that “You know how women can be” was a pretty bad justification for both violence against a woman, and violence by a woman. It probably speaks to the utter ridiculousness of the comment that we can’t even figure out what the hell she was talking about.