RHETORICAL ANALYSIS: @CT_HOES

“Twinkle Twinkle little slut, You like dick inside your butt” is one of many crude tweets by @CT_HOES, an account on the social media site Twitter seeking internet virality through humour-laden, sexism-ridden commentary on implicitly promiscuous high school and college aged women in Connecticut.

 Not being familiar with Connecticut, I asked my roommate, a native, about the demographics. “Each county is so different. Fairfield county [where I live] is like the yuppie, ‘we have a lot of money’ county. Then there’s New Haven county which is like trash, and the valley which is really trash. And then there’s just bumblefuck – you’re in the middle of nowhere and you feel like you’re in Kansas but it’s cold”.

 In fact, @CT_HOES tweeted on December 10th “After revealing myself as ‪@jamalabdel25 a lot of sluts don’t wanna be associated with me lmao”, which with a small amount of internet sleuthing connects readers with Jamal Abdel, a heterosexual muscle tee fanatic from Plainville, CT, a small town bordering New Britain fifteen minutes from Hartford. “Oh New Britain’s really bad. And gross” my roommate remarked. “Sex in New Britain is like magic, because the baby appears and the father disappears” @CT_HOES jokes. He retweets @Lauretaa321’s “Seeing all these tweets from ‪@CT_HOES is making me not wanna move to Southington lol ‪#OnlyForTheFamily”, and it’s truly a marvel what power one Twitter user could have over housing markets when the tech generation reaches middle age.

 Abdel relies on humorously defining and subsequently degrading a specific stereotype of sexually active Connecticut females, “CT hoes”, to gain social capital with his geographically close male peers. He uses enallage to assign certain women value in his tweet “Every girl deserves to be treated like a princess, except ugly hoes”, when he changes grammatical structure mid-sentence, beginning with the singular “girl” and “princess” and ending with “ugly hoes”, which devalues unattractive women  by referring to them en masse. His tweet “Some hoes have a face that only a penis could love” serves as a dysphemism which communicates contempt and sexism by way of leading the reader to anticipate a human subject with the verb “love” but instead detaches the genitalia from the man, using a synecdoche to convey lack of emotional bond in the implied sex. Interestingly, this tweet also employs the term used by the French feminist writers of the 1970s “phallogocentrism”, or the school of thought associating the phallus with logical reasoning that many feminists claim “colonizes” women and promotes patriarchal conservatism (Cixous). It holds that the personified penis’ assessment of beauty is absolute  by use of the word “only”, and logistically challenges any whole person to love one of the described women, given their implied unattractiveness.

 The manifestation of this colonization of thought in women can be examined through their replies, such as @audra_xox’s tweet “‪@CT_HOES is like the burn book in mean girls lmao”, a reference to Tina Fey’s 2004 blockbuster about high school cliques. The moral of the movie, as its main character puts it, is that “Calling somebody else fat won’t make you any skinnier. Calling someone stupid doesn’t make you any smarter”, which is a lesson learned through a “burn book” that is indeed paralleled by Abdel’s own caddy, surface-level diatribe for its reliance on gossip, intolerance, and sexism for social power (Mean Girls). In the movie, the burn book is a negative symbol of adolescent discomfort and frustration manifested in intentionally cruel and hurtful accusations, and the @CT_HOES account is no different in that regard, but the public perception among its followers seems overwhelmingly positive. “‪@CT_HOES you tell it how it is! I love this so much” Rachel Carmody (@iTz_rachel) exclaims just after her tweet “When I walk down the school halls I see: whore, whore, douche, whore, whore, someone wearing a tutu, whore, and that one normal kid”. The account’s female followers embrace phallogocentrism, using words like “whore”, “bitch” and “cunt” in excess.

 In this way, the rhetorical strategies used by Abdel @CT_HOES are immensely effective in propagating a culture of female subjugation, defamation, and limitation that seems reactionary to feminist social reforms, scientific advances in birth control, and the resulting increase in the number of temporary sexual partners held by women.

 None of which changes the fact that Jamal Abdel is a complete douche.

Jane Adams is a weathered soul with an internal locus of control and a crippling cigarette addiction. Her mind belongs to the woods, but she can be reached at janelydiaadams@gmail.com