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Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

I really dislike the B-word, but I think it's clear that the First Amendment protects its use.

That said, I wonder if an argument could be made that the B-word is a form of hate speech against a protected group (women) because it is dehumanizing (compares them to an animal in a degrading way).

In the private sphere, Facebook says it treats such speech as Tier 1 hate speech (see https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards/hate_speech) although I don't know whether it treats the B-word as qualifying. (I would argue it should, based on FB's own definition.)

Granted, hate speech is still protected by the First Amendment. So there are no legal penalties in the U.S. for using it.

But I wonder whether treating the B-word as hate speech in terms of our cultural attitude toward it might make its use less common.

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> I think it's clear that the First Amendment protects its use.

I'm not so sure. The Second Amendment's "keep and bear arms" doesn't protect my ability to buy and keep any gun I want, regardless of how obvious a reading that seems, so I wouldn't count on the First's "the freedom of speech" to protect the use of any words.

In context, it's between the freedom of religion and the freedom of the press, of assembly, and of petitioning the government. It makes sense that it protects advocating any political viewpoint. It does not necessarily follow that it protects words in general.

The judicial history of the freedom of speech clause is mostly about political speech, speech critical of the government, etc. Advertising is heavily regulated. Copyright infringement is illegal. Lying to federal agents is illegal. Obscenity is still unprotected (though very few things are considered obscene today).

And if we look at what the framers intended, well, many of them went on to vote for the Alien and Sedition Acts (which are widely considered today to have been unconstitutional).

I think there is a lot of merit in a constitutional protection of the right to say any word. It's just not clear to me that a law preventing you from saying a single word (any word!) runs afoul of the freedom of speech clause, specifically.

I find American English weirdly puritanical in some respects.

For instance this use of <letter>-word as a signifier for a thing you find so offensive you can't say out loud or even write down in a discussion even though in this discussion we're not actually applying it to a person or hypothetical person.

(I've not used it here as I think I can make this point without using it or hopefully causing offence).

We have to careful of branding words themselves "hate speech" without reference to context.

The particular word I think you refer to is perfectly legitimate when used in the context of the animal it describes.

In fact as I understand it's not so much offensive because it compares a person to an animal as it is because it's also a slang name for the world's oldest profession and implies ownership and coercion with regard to that profession (both of which I'd say were dehumanising in a different and more offensive way).

Banning the use of an everyday word in all contexts comes across not as about hate speech but as a way of an in group asserting control on others.

I feel the same about the C-word. In my culture, whilst still a bit blue for everyday use, it's much less offensive than in yours. We apply it in all sorts of situations that are not dehumanising.

Protected groups are a legal concept, while hate speech is not (in the US -- which seems most relevant, as TFA is in the context of a US state). So framing it in terms of a protected group doesn't really make much sense to me.

It's clear to me that in many contexts, "bitch" isn't used hatefully, so I'm not sure you'd have much success persuading any large group of people to think of it as hate speech (in a social, not legal, context).

"B-word"? Are you serious?

Don't give words so much power.

Trying to bend laws to ban words and speech you don't personally like is really not a good idea, in case it isn't blatantly obvious as to why: it will only be a matter of time before your speech is the target.

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