Sign Referencing Civil War General Is Sexual Harassment, Says Massachusetts Lawmaker

[EasyAce]

Rep. Michelle DuBois wants to remove a statehouse sign that reads "General Hooker Entrance" because it is an affront to "women's dignity"
By Elizabeth Nolan Brown
http://reason.com/blog/2018/03/16/hooker-sign-must-go-says-ma-lawmaker

Here's a twist on the debate over public monuments to problematic figures like Confederate General Robert E. Lee: A Massachusetts state lawmaker wants to censor references to the man who scored Civil War era wins against Lee and lots of other Confederate leaders. Her reasoning? That man's name is Joseph Hooker.

As we're all aware, General Hooker's last name became slang for "someone who has sex for money." Today, "hooker" is widely considered a slur by folks in the sex-work community. Yet as far as I'm aware, there have't been any sex worker campaigns to remove references to Joseph Hooker from public view—presumably because most well-adjusted people realize that words have different meanings in different contexts . . .

. . . State Rep. Michelle DuBois (D-Plymouth) . . . has been calling for the removal of a statehouse sign that reads "General Hooker Entrance" (so inscribed because it stands opposite a statue of General Hooker), which she described as an affront to "women's dignity."

. . . Of course, DuBois is positioning herself as a crusader against sex-based harassment and patriarchy. But attitudes like hers—which treat women as excessively fragile beings, and which posit that female "dignity" is diminished by even so slight an association with sex work as walking under a door that says "hooker"—just props up old-fashioned and patriarchal ideas about sex and gender.

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Every time you think the SJW crowd has gone too far, you get disabused of the thought.

What's next---some bat-brained SJW demanding that the late bluesman John Lee Hooker's name should be changed and that all his
in-print recordings should reflect it? Never mind that the man's been dead for seventeen years. To what should we change his name
. . . John Lee Hoover?

Oops. That would probably inspire some other bat-brained SJW to demand another name change for him, and maybe a boycott
of Hoover vacuum cleaners while they're at it. Because they share the name of the FBI director whose number one passion seems to have
been eavesdropping and wiretapping just about anyone he didn't particularly like. Never mind that J. Edgar isn't even remotely related to
William Henry Hoover.

---EA.

[Jazzhead]

Actually a hooker that's good at Hoovering is someone folks will pay extra for.

And the best reason to take down the side isn't to spare women's dignity, but rather to spare us all from constantly having to endure a very bad pun.     

[EasyAce]

Actually a hooker that's good at Hoovering is someone folks will pay extra for.

I'm not going to ask how you discovered that. ;)

And the best reason to take down the side isn't to spare women's dignity, but rather to spare us all from constantly having to endure a very bad pun.   

Some of the fun of signage is the pun factor, good, bad, naughty, or otherwise.





Back in the 1970s, there was a public service campaign to promote child safety in cars. The image was a kid in a seat belt; the language read,
"Have you belted your kids today?" The anti-child abuse crowd didn't appreciate the pun and the signs were taken down. William Safire noted
it in his On Language column in the Sunday New York Times, and finished the column by writing, "I have pasted a sign on my
dashboard: BELT THE KIDS! It promotes safety and keeps a few passengers in line, too."