Question: I'm an artist. My question is about language. I've found all my life, that there's something very profoundly missing from language, and that's women. I don't think that people are aware of the psychological effects that language has on experience, and I think that... Well, to give you an example, the word "mankind," even "humankind" is constructed in a male-centric way. The word "he" to describe everybody. I think that, if we're to bridge the social gap between art and science, wouldn't you say that it's important to socially reconstruct language?

LaRouche: No, I don't. Language is not the problem. I know this argument is often made. It's made often by the feminists, it has been essentially since, oh, actually earlier, but it became significant during the course of the 1960s. Before, it was there, you found it with leftwing groups and so forth, particularly experimental groups of feminists, who sometimes would come up with these elaborate schemes to try to explain that the problems of life, the problems of injustice toward women, were somehow rooted in mental states, which are problems of language.

Actually not. It's quite the other way around. The problem lies not in language, because the idea that language should be literal, itself, is a problem. Language -- a good language -- is never literal. It rather depends upon irony and metaphor, and also it depends upon a certain functions of musicality which are derived from, actually from bel canto, that is, physically derived from the principles of the body, which result in the bel canto norm, of the human singing voice. Therefore, it is what is conveyed which is the problem, not the language per se.

And that, in fact, all of us who write, or who study these matters, professionally, as we're forced to, as I've had to, particularly in dealing with philosophical and related question, realize exactly this distinction. The discussion of language being the problem, posed by the feminists, is wrong. That is not the problem. The problem is the connotations of the use of language, which contain the problem. And this is very clearly distinct. It becomes obvious in jokes. It becomes obvious in latrine-type jokes, barracks-type jokes, that sort of thing. Also, it becomes obvious in women. Now, feminists have played with this thing, about cosmetics and so forth, as being a kind of self-degradation. And then it goes to the other extreme, and that doesn't work either. A person tries to be clean, well-groomed in public, and the use of cosmetics to that degree, is something you can't contest with. That would be oppression, to make that an issue.

But then I see things -- I was just making jokes about this the other day, I was in Milan. Milan, which used to be an industrial center, has ceased to be merely an industrial center, in Italy, though there are medium-sized and smaller industries across the beltway of northern Italy, which are among the most successful parts of the European economy today, in part. But Milan has become a center of fashion. And you have poor girls, who are generally abused by lesbians -- that's the characteristic of the model market in Milan, is you have these girls who are super-skinny, you'd think they were recruited from the catacombs, they're so skinny, and they generally are abused, as the Naomi Campbell case illustrates, abused by lesbian women who prey upon them. And determine their careers. If they don't satisfy the desires of a lesbian woman, they can lose their career as a model, and so forth.

Then, these poor girls, who are out there trying to make a living -- and only a few of them are the superstars that make a real living -- these poor girls go out on stage, wearing strips of rags, which you thought were thrown away by the Paris fashion shops, walking in a peculiar walk, because they're so underfed, that they walk peculiarly, angrily but peculiarly, on stage. And it's horrible. It's a horrible degradation of women. And the things they wear are disgusting! It's rags. So, it's like skeleton walking on stage, wearing a few bits of rags, and it's called fashion. And this guy Versace, for example, his tradition, is typical of this problem.

That is what the oppression is, is the imposition of social roles upon, and attitudes toward, women, as merely creatures of this or that type, in acts of self-degradation. That in so far that these things become the connotations of the use of language, then language is a problem. The problem is not the need to reconstruct language, the problem is to shift the conception of man, from a creature who is used for the pleasure of others, into a person who is truly human, in a notion of humanity which is premised upon the distinction between a monkey, and a human being. And that's where the fault comes.

But most of these feminists, that I've known, when they've made the argument, they don't make the distinction between a human being, and an ape. And that's where the problem lies. They themselves, who are protesting most violently, against so-called male oppression, are themselves propagators of the infection whose results against which they are complaining.

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