Don't Ban “Bossy”

In alignment with your observation, this campaign is thought by some to be battlespace preparation for Hillary's 2016 presidential campaign.

(I didn't even know the "Ban Bossy" campaign existed, so I guess my comment is more about that and goes along with what the article is saying.)

Looking at the videos - to an outsider like myself, they look massively ridiculous. So there is a societal problem where girls are either not empowered to lead or are discouraged from leading by others. To stop that practice, we will get rid of calling them a specific word.

Words only have the meaning that we put into them. "Bossy" can be applied correctly or incorrectly. How is the word at fault?

I think "only in America" applies here. Instead of understanding that this is a complex, complicated issue in society, let's find a catchy campaign title and rail against intangible things. Oh aren't we all happy we have dealt with the problem in a format that we can easily post to our facebook wall instead of, you know, doing the hard work of actually figuring out and dealing with people on a deeper, personal level.

And yes, I get it, the campaign uses a reductive catchphrase to get a foot in the door and then deliver a more nuanced message. But I think a campaign set on a weird, possibly destructive premise may do more harm than good. It may lead people to think they're doing something when they're actually doing nothing apart from perpetuating a meme.

How about we all just stop and check ourselves before reducing others to adjectives in general? Grown-ups and children, women and men alike?

Maybe this tendency to grasp for the simple answer, the quick phrase at all times is the root of the problem and should thus not be utilized as a solution.

While feminists were busy telling the world about the dire need to ban the word “bossy,” the Iraqi parliament was considering the implementation of a new law that would legalize rape, prohibit women leaving home without the permission of their husband, and legalize marriage for 9-year-olds.

“If passed, the law will apply to Iraq’s Shia Muslims, the majority of the population. Provisions include prohibiting Muslim men from marrying non-Muslim women, legalising rape inside marriage by declaring that a husband has a right to sex regardless of consent, and prohibiting women from leaving the house without their husband’s permission,” reports Breitbart.com. The law, which has been denounced by Human Rights Watch as a violation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), would also lower the age of marriage to nine years old for girls and 15 for boys. Despite the fact that the law represents an egregious assault on women’s rights and wouldn’t look out of place in the stone age, you probably didn’t hear about it because self-proclaimed feminists were too busy concentrating on more pressing atrocities being inflicted upon women – such as people using the word “bossy”. http://www.infowars.com/new-iraqi-law-legalizes-rape-feminis...

Why am I not surprised you only heard it applied to men .. in the military.

EDIT: This entire thing is about young girls, not the military

Source, for those interested[1]. The bill was proposed in 1897 in the Indiana state legislature.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill