We need to add the word “loser” to the list of words that are unacceptable for people to say if they wish to appear educated and sensitive.
Whenever I hear this word, I cringe at the breathtaking ignorance that use of the word implies. To my ears, hearing someone say “loser” is as shocking and unnerving as hearing someone use the R word or the N word.
Let me explain why I find this word so offensive — and bear with me because this will require some unpacking.
How the L Word is Most Often Used
The L word is most often used by women to describe men. In particular, watch any romantic comedy trailer, and you’ll often hear the female protagonist say something like this: “I need to stop dating losers.”
I’m sure if you have daughters or girlfriends you’ve also heard them casually remark, “Oh, he was a real loser” or something along those lines.
What these women invariably mean when they describe a man in this way is that he is unsuccessful. He doesn’t have a job or money or status or power.
Although I’ve occasionally heard the term applied to women, with the same connotation, the term is more often applied as a descriptor for an unsuccessful man — a man who is not suitable for dating, marrying, or reproducing with.
The Two Ignorant Worldviews Lurking Behind The L Word
The reason I find this term so offensive — and why you should too — is that it implies two very ignorant viewpoints:
- People’s success in life is something that they have complete control over.
- A man’s value in society is determined by his ability and/or willingness to fulfill his role as a successful, marriage-eligible male.
Concerning the first viewpoint, anyone who has made it to 30 should know that one’s success in life, or lack thereof, depends upon myriad factors beyond an individual’s control, including his or her genetics, early developmental environment, environment as a teenage, educational opportunities, race, parents’ educational attainment, and the general randomness of the universe.
Calling someone a “loser” who was, for example, abused as a child, dropped out of college due to financial circumstances, and works as a cashier at Target is as offensive as calling a developmentally disabled person the R word: both instances speak to an insensitivity about how our life outcomes and circumstances often have little to do with our personal merit.
Concerning the second viewpoint above — that a loser is a male who is not suitable as a husband because he cannot successfully fulfill the role of a bread-winning, responsible husband — just imagine if we applied the same term to women who either don’t want to get married, don’t want children, or are incapable of having children — that is, women who aren’t playing their traditional gender role.
Imagine your 38-year-old brother was dating a 40-year-old woman who, he learned, was incapable of having children. He comes home to you after breaking up with her and says, “It turns out she can’t have children. What a fucking loser.”
Does that hit your ears as shocking and ignorant? Well, that is how women sound to me when they describe a man as a loser because he doesn’t have a great job or he likes to go out with his friends to bars.
Or imagine your male friend breaks up with a woman because she wants to date around or because she’s unsure about having kids or because she’s skeptical of marriage. Imagine again your male friend says of this girl, “She’s a total loser.”
Scandalous, right? Well, that’s how women sound when they so casually pronounce men to be losers because they’re not husband material or providers or wealthy or on board with a woman’s marital and reproductive agenda.
People’s worth is not dictated by either their circumstances or how they choose to spend their life. Just as it would shocking to label a childless woman as a loser, it’s equally offensive to call a man without a stellar career a loser.
The reason, of course, that the R and N words are so offensive is that using the words, just like using the L word, implies an ignorant worldview. In the case of the R word, it implies an insensitivity to a medical condition beyond the individual’s control. And in the case of the N word, using the word implies an insensitivity to history and implies that the user of the word still thinks of African Americans as somehow less than human.
People are not their jobs or their childhoods or their medical histories. People’s value does not depend on how successful they’ve been, how many children they’ve sired or birthed, their overall fertility, their resources, or their height. Please stop judging and dismissing people on such inappropriate grounds.
America, it’s 2020. It’s time to stop using the L word. It makes you look ignorant and insensitive, and we as a society need to condemn this particular form of ignorance and insensitivity.
