"You woman!"

Long ago, Des Moines had a wonderful radio station that you could only hear if you had cable TV. At the time, the local cable TV franchise offered an FM hookup that not only gave you a good signal for local stations, but also brought in other stations as well, like Chicago's magnificent WFMT, and inserted a signal that never hit the actual airwaves, but went by the made-up "callsign" KBLE.

KBLE eventually made the move to actual radio with the call letters KMFG, and all was well in Des Moines radio until, shortly after the flood of 1993, one morning KFMG listeners discovered that the station had been sold and switched to a format featuring nothing but metal. It was the death of worthwhile commercial radio in Des Moines, and the corpse is still rotting.

All that is to explain how it was that I came to listen to "Mancow's Morning Madhouse." I didn't listen to it for very long, or perhaps very long at a time is the better term; I tended to cycle among the alternatives until I remembered why I despised them. In the case of Mancow, it was his being of the sick David Letterman school of "humor" in which the perpetrator features someone who is made to look stupid so that the audience and the emcee can feel smugly hip.

One thing stands out in my memory, though. Sometimes Mancow would include a person he at least said was his grandfather, and in one taped bit, this old man was berating someone, calling him names, leading up to his ultimate insult: "You woman!"

What kind of person must he have been, what kind of upbringing did he have to give him that sort of view of the world?

I'm reminded of it after seeing similar put-downs from a male avatar in SL. If the human behind the avatar is a man, I have to wonder the same thing, perhaps more so if he's younger than Mancow's grandfather--isn't this supposedly a more enlightened age? OTOH, if the human behind the avatar is a woman, I suppose it could be an attempt at verisimilitude by affecting the worst stereotypes of men, but if it isn't, what does that say?

UPDATE: KFMG has made a reappearance on MySpace--they have reincarnated yet again, this time as an Internet station!