What is going on with today's women, especially in America?

Foul mouthed, slutty-looking, tattooed, pierced trash talking vixens with almost absolutely no sense of modesty or shame. The average American women is beginning to resemble a male biker or a pole-dancing stripper than the respectable mother/daughter/sister of the family that we once knew. Isn't feminism great?

You've come a long way baby.

http://news.morningstar.com/all/ViewNews.aspx?article=/ACQ/ff8080813489486e01352903b0b24540_univ.xml

News: McClatchy-Tribune Information Services provided by: Detroit Free Press
Foul-mouthed females: Why are so many women so comfortable being coarse? [Detroit Free Press]

Jan. 29--Joan Rivers goes on "Good Morning America" and compares Angelina Jolie's Golden Globes gown to a used feminine hygiene product.


Jane Lynch and Tina Fey high five each other after making a penis joke on the nationally televised broadcast of the Golden Globes.
Miley Cyrus poses with a birthday cake designed to look like a part of the male anatomy, and the photos show up all over the Internet.

From morning to night, we're bombarded with crassness and vulgarity on television -- reality and otherwise -- in magazines and via blogs and Twitter.

And it's notable not only because there's so much of it and because it's so gross, it's noticeable because these days the worst offenders aren't men -- the very group that has a history of going for quick laughs with dirty jokes and shocking language.

These days, the worst offenders are women.

Being ladylike, it seems, is a thing of the past.

It's not that women are new to swearing or telling off-color jokes or repeating brutal gossip or engaging in bad behavior. "I grew up in Brooklyn, New York," says Regina Barreca, a feminist scholar, humorist and English professor at the University of Connecticut.

"The aunts would tell dirty jokes -- only to other women, only in the basement kitchen. They would pretend they didn't understand them when they first heard them. Then they'd repeat them and laugh with other women."

It's just that now, many of us are loud and proud of it. We expect Rivers to be vulgar on late-night cable, but on a morning news show? We are bolder, braver and bawdier.

"There may be fewer filters," Barreca says. "I think there is less a sense of fear of public shaming. We've got all kinds of other things that are permissible. In a way, those are hard-won rights that women have been able to sort of gain ... where we've been able to speak up and be ambitious and be sɛҳuąƖ and control parts of our lives."

The vulgar language, the bluntness, the crassness, she says, is a way of further testing boundaries.

As is often the case, it's younger women who are most likely to test those boundaries.

Stacey LaPlante, a Chippewa Valley ninth-grade teacher in Clinton Township doesn't hear a great deal of profanity from her female students, but she does find them to be especially blunt and critical of each other.

"They say stuff that I would never have said at their age. They're much more open," says LaPlante, 41, of Macomb Township. "Somebody will say, 'I can't believe she's dressed like that.' Where our generation, we might have whispered it, but we wouldn't have said it right out loud."

She adds: "I think that might be this generation, the way they're connected to social media. They're typing it on Twitter, on social media. It just pops out of their mouth the same way. I think people are definitely changing. I don't know if it's social media, if people are just busier, if parents aren't teaching manners any more."

Or if reality TV is partly to blame. (LaPlante no longer allows it on in her house because she fears it creates a bad example for her 10-year-old son).

There's no denying that reality TV is a showcase for bad behavior, especially among women -- fistfights and f-bombs on MTV's "Mob Wives," bullying on Bravo's "Real Housewives of New York City" and grandmothers knocking each other down in the hospital after their grandchild arrives on Lifetime's "One Born Every Minute."

"Young people have grown up today with reality shows," says Jennifer Pozner, author of "Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV" ($18, Seal) and executive director of New York-based Women in Media and News.

The problem is "these shows are marketed to us as if they are simply reflections of our day-to-day lives," Pozner says. And reality TV is "not indicative of women in the culture. Narratives are crafted before they even find the people to cast. And then they cast with a very, very specific set of tropes and stereotypes in mind. You've got the bitch. The slut. The good girl who cries all the time -- the weepy waif. You've got the angry black woman."

According to a recently released study by the Girl Scout Research Institute, girls who watch reality TV expect and accept more conflict in their lives and are more prone to being focused on outward appearance than inner beauty.

Among the findings:

-- 72% of girls who watch reality TV say they spend a lot of time on their appearance, compared to 42% of non-viewers.

-- 68% of girls who watch reality TV say that it's in girls' nature to be catty with one another, compared to 50% who don't watch reality TV.

-- 28% of girls who watch reality TV say that sometimes you have to be mean to get ahead, compared to 18% of the girls who don't watch reality TV.

"I see a big problem with ideas changing in ways that will encourage girls and women to think that they should expect and accept being constantly seen as competitive with other women and expect and accept if they're not super skinny or they haven't spent $10,000 on a pair of earrings (that) nobody will value them or that the way to get what they want is to be violent," says Pozner.

"I don't tend to see big warning signs or get too concerned if women want to make dirty jokes or if women feel more comfortable or less nervous about using the same words that men do," adds Pozner.

Aimee Spencer, a local entertainment publicist who took charge of organizing the dropping of the "D" in downtown Detroit on New Year's Eve, was having difficulty getting a bouncer to follow her instructions to allow members of the media into a reserved area.

"This happened, like, 10 times," says Spencer, 37, of Royal Oak, who was 19 when her mother washed her mouth out with soap for swearing. Finally, "I said, 'Are you not f-- listening to me?' "

And after that, she says, "I didn't have a problem the entire night."

Women have long been expected to be polite, our use of vulgar language stands out, says Camelia Suleiman, a visiting assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania who has studied the difference between the way male and female politicians speak.

And because vulgar language stands out, women need to be especially careful of how they speak and realize that there is a difference between a few well-placed swear words and an all-out assault. "A woman will be judged more severely through the way she's speaking than a man would," says Suleiman. "An outspoken woman, we're quick to call her a bitch -- I want to see an equivalent of a guy being called that -- or she would be called a diva. I don't hear these names about men."

Carol Bartz -- who told Fortune magazine she was "f-- over" when she was ousted as CEO of Yahoo -- is hardly the first executive to swear. Yet her use of foul language is now part of her identity; media reports often describe her as "profanity-spewing."

For better or worse, women are different. The crassness that has become part of their lives is very male in tone. When women take on male characteristics, they lose themselves.

We're not embracing our humor, our feminism; we are following in the footsteps of men.

And isn't it about time women stopped doing that?

Contact Georgea Kovanis: 313-222-6842 or gkovanis@freepress.com

___

(c)2012 the Detroit Free Press

I think that those of us women who do believe it is important to be ladylike can set an example for those around us.

If I understand the article correctly, the reason women are so vulgar today (which I suppose is a leap to just admit these days, so I guess that's good) is because they are trying to be like men, which of course implies, that men are naturally vulgar.  Furthermore, the article implies men's vulgarity is just an expression of their competitiveness and so now that women are competing in the workplace and every place else with men, they are taking on competitive traits (like vulgarity) too.  I'm not sure I agree with everything the article is saying.  

I have a few problems with it.  First, if women used to compete for a husband to support them, shouldn't that competition have encouraged vulgarity too?  Second, who says competition/trying to get what you want has to be vulgar?  

I see another explanation for the increase in vulgarity among everyone.  Our culture has abandoned morality.  So now, we operate on the assumption, that might makes right (love your neighbor or do it to him/her before they do it to you).  Getting in somebody's face is a challenge and can be  effective, particularly if you are actually capable of winning the fight.  I know feminism has "empowered" women to win lots of those fights with men, that they didn't used to be able to win, but that doesn't explain why women and men have become so competitive/uncooperative in the first place.  Just look at how people drive today.  Is it female drivers or is it that everybody hates everybody?  What drives a wife and mother to get revenge on her husband by abandoning him and taking his kids away from him?  It ain't love.  

If you love somebody, you look for solutions where both of you come out as winners, not where you can just take all the goodies and leave them nothing but their tears.  

It was in "Quo Vadis" (1951) where Nero gives the thumbs down to the wrestler who has his opponent in a headlock and so he snaps his neck.  That says it right there, can we wrestle for a blue ribbon or does the winner get to kill the loser?  Can I compete, but only within the bounds of morality or can I do whatever I want?  Naturally, loosening the bounds of morality is enticing to the strong and terrifying to the weak.

"Women's Empowerment" is completely dependent on The State.  Without state interference, women would be subject to men, which, without the bounds of morality, could be cruel indeed.  

We live in a culture where large numbers of people (obviously a huge proportion of those people are young women) believe that sodomite "marriage" should be recognized.  But that men who like younger women are "creeps" who are to be made the targets of their venomous sport.

Why would people with no sense of propriety have any sense of delicacy in their language?

Marcelino said it exactly: the state, with the collaboration of the "chivalrous" "conservative" males, have made women untouchable, released them from the authority of good men, so now they despise good men and try to please wicked men.

Not all women are like that. I don't particularly go out of my way looking for "nice" women, yet I still manage to run in to quite a few.

No one ever said that they were all like that.

It's a general trend.

There's an acronym for that expression you used btw.  NAWALT.

Marcelino said it exactly: the state, with the collaboration of the "chivalrous" "conservative" males, have made women untouchable, released them from the authority of good men, so now they despise good men and try to please wicked men.

Catholicism has always valued women in a different way from American society. This is important to point out, because the origins of the society in which people in the USA live are not Christian but Masonic (not Protestant). Women in that movement are segregated from the men, but they are given their own order (eg: Order of the Eastern Star), which, like all masonic organizations, is ultimately Cabalistic and Satanic. It is a fundamentally perverse and immoral cult.

This force in Western society is simply massive, organized and well funded. Now the Order of the Eastern Star would obviously not promote itself as debasing women but elevating them to some kind of respectability, but it is respectability in Satan's eyes. Therefore the method of worship proper to such members is to infringe upon every one of God's commandments. So it promotes its women to abandon their children, murder the unborn, sacrifice their best offspring to various satanic initiation rites that exist in the clubs that are set up for those children (eg: the bastardization of children in the scout/guide movement), and further the cause of women as followers of the Eastern Star (referring to Lucifer). These women therefore must be proud, shameless and hateful. This is the fundamental cause of the kind of behavior observed in women today.

What follows is that all organizations and people who subscribe to this ideology (in particular the Jєωs who run American media) further the cause by producing filth, non-stop, 24/7.

I think that those of us women who do believe it is important to be ladylike can set an example for those around us.

One would like to believe this would be the case.

The reality is, is that most vulgar women use you as an example of something they strive not to be.

It's all about being counter-culture (See normal) and rebellious.

And what's with these tattoos on every other women I see these days? And I don't just mean the younger females, I'm seeing more and more women over forty sporting some kind of "ink" on exposed parts of their bodies.

I believe women, like many guys are getting tats because it's trendy and they are desperate for attention. Especially females, they are so vulnerable to go along with any fad out there and are easily influenced to be accepted.

Tattoos on women are off putting, in my opinion.