Since the Pleistocene, when you tagged along on mammoth-hunting expeditions and complained about the flaps in your sealskin booties coming loose and the snow freezing your sensitive little tootsies, you have been among us. In those early days, when the survival of Homo sapiens hinged upon physical grit, your bullshit endangered our very lives. Dudes were lifting their spears, running toward woolly beasts—their feet weren’t warm either, mind you—while you were a safe distance behind, mumbling that you had something in your eye. Lest your feeble asses get the rest of the pack killed, they needed a word for you, a way to communicate what you are.
While we couldn’t have known it then, at this linguistic juncture our young species faced a conundrum as political as your fragility was burdensome. The hunters did the best they could. They asked themselves, what represents the smallest and weakest among us?
The ladies, they thought.
To be sure, woman humans could be quite swift; have impressive aim with a dart; spend entire days on their feet processing carcasses into hides, meals and tools; and survive newborn Homo sapien craniums tearing through their bleeding perinea. Heck, over in the Neanderthal camp, boss cave-femmes went hunting and cave-gents made clothes. But, smaller than their male counterparts as a rule, woman humans couldn’t shoulder as many supplies into hunt or drag as much bleeding meat back to camp. While powerful with finesse, endurance and childbearing, they generally weren’t to be called upon for tasks of brutish violence.
So, while packing for one fateful, perilous journey into the blowing snow, man humans looked over at you, clutching your upset tummy like the Italian soccer players who would be your descendants. One of them nodded your way and whispered, “Oog isn’t going, is he? He’s a fucking pussy.” Another agreed, “That little bitch is staying here.”
Such gendered pejoratives would suffice with little challenge until well into the next epoch. Now, however, like wisdom teeth and chest hair, they no longer benefit a species whose Holocene survival has less to do with mastodon-slaying, meat-gnashing and blizzard-hiking than with mental acumen. It turns out woman humans have that in spades—at least as much as do man humans—and they’re just kind of over being on the crap side of a gender-binary metaphor, especially when so many of them have been on the crap side of a gender-binary reality.
One such woman human we might call “Me” recalls a pick-up game of H.O.R.S.E. in a Kentucky gym where she shot hoops after spending long newsroom shifts being ostracized by an otherwise entirely male, entirely dull copy desk. She’d spent hours rescuing man-wrought infinitives from splitting and modifiers from dangling, and she just wanted to cash some jumpers, do you know what I mean? Then a stranger, a forty-ish man human with an eleven-ish boy human in tow, showed up.
“Game of H.O.R.S.E?” man human said.
“Sure!” Me said.
They fired free throw after free throw and, as the game wound down, each had four misses and thus carried the dreaded label, “H.O.R.S.”
Me stepped up to the line, dribbled the ball. She aimed, sank it.
Man human stepped up to the line, dribbled. He aimed. If he missed, that would be game.
“Dad,” boy human said, “if you lose to a girl, you’re not my dad anymore.”
Me felt kind of sorry for man human. But then she remembered an entire service station being scandalized the previous week when she changed the oil in her car, and she thought, fuck that noise. Miss it.
The shot went up.
BRICK.
Boy human stomped toward the gym door and slammed its metal handle like a little—well, you know.
“Good game,” Me said to man human and reached out her hand.
But man human left her hanging, turned and walked out like a—I’m not sure what, and here’s the trouble.
We need a new word for you, a pejorative that denotes weaknesses detrimental to important 21st-Century tasks such as shaking hands after a loss or finding milk in its natural habitat, the refrigerator, without asking, “Honey, where is the milk?” “Pussy,” “little bitch,” “sissy,” “pantywaist,” “little girl,” “like a girl” and all other vulva correlatives will no longer stand, even among those of us who have bandied such terms ironically heretofore. Conversely, the figurative having of “a pair,” “balls,” “nads” and all other scrotum correlatives will no longer do for denoting merit.
Your kind appears in all gender forms, and language will catch up to you. We haven’t found the word just yet. But know that Me is hunting for it.