group host / statement of purpose

[ellisonz]

176. +1

It was used this tonight in the Gungeon, I alerted on it as misogynist and the jury let it stand 1-5. I looked it up and it seems the primary connotation is misogyny with a subtext of transphobia that is really a sorta you really have to be in the know. This article doesn't turn up at all in the DU search engine and so I am going to go ahead and post it in GD because I found some of the responses to be very disappointing: let the term rot - http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002292298

A Plague of Pearl Clutching
How clutch the pearls became a lady blogosphere cliché.

By Torie Bosch|Posted Friday, Jan. 20, 2012,

Unless you’re former First Lady Barbara Bush, pearls may not be in style. But accusing people of clutching them is.

The phrase pearl clutching, which means being shocked by something once-salacious that should now be seen as commonplace, like sex, is ubiquitous on blog posts, especially in media geared towards women. For instance, a recent post on Jezebel called Girl Land author Caitlin Flanagan a “professional pearl clutcher.” Less than two hours later, another Jezebel writer called a sexy Calvin Klein ad “sure to inspire pearl-clutch-y local news stories across the nation.” The feminist website Feministe used the phrase in a blog post about privilege and oppression; another feminist website, Tiger Beatdown, used it to deride a Wall Street Journal writer who was panicking about the subject matter of YA novels. But the phrase isn’t just used in the lady blogosophere: A Washington Post columnist wrote dismissively last week about the “pearl-clutching that hippies’ parents did in the 1960s.” Basically, a writer who discusses pearl-clutching is saying, “I’m too blasé and worldly to be shocked by this.”

“Clutch the pearls” first appeared on In Living Color in the show’s 1990 debut season in an April 15 “Men on Films” sketch. After Blaine Edwards (played by Damon Wayans) waxes about how “daring” producers were to cast a male actor as the “female” lead in Dangerous Liaisons, his sidekick Antoine Merriweather tells him that Glenn Close is actually a woman, prompting Blaine to gasp, “Clutch the pearls!” The sarcastic phrase and its many permutations existed prior to In Living Color, of course; for instance, “she clutches her pearls” appeared in a 1987 article in an Australian newspaper about ladies who lunch. But it was the “Men on …” sketches that brought the phrase into widespread, albeit sometimes too literal, use in the early ‘90s, appearing, for example, in a couple of Billboard album reviews as well as a Newsday piece about—who else?—Barbara Bush’s jewelry in 1993.
Advertisement

Judging from the instances of “clutch the pearls” and “pearl clutching” that I found in a Nexis search, the expression showed up only periodically through about 2004, almost always as a pun about wealthy women and literal pearls. Take a 2000 episode of World News Tonight in which co-anchor Alison Stewart said there was “a lot of pearl-clutching going on” in the high-end auction business following accusations of criminal price-fixing. The expression then went largely dormant. There are only 16 Google results for “pearl clutching” between Jan. 1, 2000, and Jan. 1, 2004, though it did appear in a 2003 academic work called Speaking in Queer Tongues: Globalization and Gay Language.

More: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/01/pearl_clutching_how_the_phrase_became_a_feminist_blog_clich_.html