Me personally? I’ve become much less tolerant of sexist humor. Back in the day, cracking a joke at women’s expense was pretty common when I was a teen. As I’ve matured and become aware to the horrific extent of toxicity and bigotry pervading all tiers of our individualistic society, I’ve come to see how exclusionarly and objectifying that sort of ‘humor’ really is, and I regret it deeply.
I don’t use the word ‘faggy’ to describe things that are faggy but not in a homophobic way. I also don’t eat squid or octopus.
I worked with someone who takes care of their older brother.
I don’t use the word “ret*rd” as a dig at someone anymore.
I honestly never used it as anything but playful banter but that word invokes a lot more meaning than I ever intended.
I know that now.
I worked for years with developmentally disabled adults. Saying that word even once was automatic termination.
The word does have medical/mechanical relevance but is so offensive nowadays that it’s worth not using it at all.
Nothing. Everything is still funny in the right or wrong context.
Have casual conversations with other guys about girls appearance, it is a good way to start a conversation and get quick sympathy from other men. But is definitely not right.
Oh god I’ve got so many.
My latest one is remembering that you can’t really fight fire with fire, unless you’re being extraordinarily strategic about it. Attacking bigotry for instance, simply makes it stronger, as it feeds off strife and fear themselves. Remembering why Michelle Obama said when they go low, we go high. Not out of any great preference, but out of a lack of viable alternatives in her situation.
You can’t actually “fight” it. You can exclude it. You can corral it. You can trick it into running itself off a cliff. But you can’t actually destroy it by combating it directly, because it feeds off the combat, just like Trump does. You have to outmaneuver it.
Pride started as a riot. Women’s Lib started as a riot. Peaceful demonstrations achieve nothing.
I routinely attack bigots on social media. I enjoy writing and their shitty views are basically writing prompts for me.
At no point have I ever expected to change the bigots mind. They’re not going to read a social media comment and wake up a new person – they’d lose their bigot friends and bigot family.
But I have changed the minds of spectators, and thats important. Which is why assholes should never be left unchallenged when they’re being assholes, especially on the safety of the internet.
I don’t think there’s that many spectators wandering around in true states of neutrality wondering whether their various conspiracies are true. Most people lean already, they’ve been already influenced. Thus, if not approached very strategically, you’re actually recruiting for both sides.
Remember, they’ve attacked rationality and logic themselves. The people who still put faith in rationality and logic, and thus can be convinced with it, were not particularly vulnerable in the first place.
“Conventional wisdom” is a thing. There are people who have adopted propaganda and misinformation as opinions simply because it never crossed their mind to challenge it.
Like the black musician who befriended all those kkk members and got them to retire their hoods and leave the kkk. It wasn’t by been mean and condescending he was very nice to them.
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There’s a WBC member that was being groomed for politics and he was turned by two Jewish guys while he was in university. They killed him with kindness. He wrote a book about it and there’s a great NPR interview with him and he talks about it.
… now that I’ve gotta google… lol
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Can’t think of too many, quite honestly. I don’t buy into most of the bullshit these days. Moving the goalpost all the time doesn’t change the underlying issues and yet that is all most people want to do - make a meaningless gesture to make them feel all warm and fuzzy inside even though nothing has changed.
As a millennial, we grew up with the phrases “that’s gay” and “that’s retarded” (which meant the same thing) and obviously we had to learn to phase those out.
While I never once meant “that’s disabled” or “that’s homosexual”… We obviously don’t say that stuff anymore.
I learned these real quick in the workplace as a young adult, around a coworker with a mentally disabled child, and with a coworker who was gay. The abstraction is what made using such crude language easy. As soon as I knew someone affected by the words, I snapped out of it.
Abstraction, come to think of it, is what permits a lot of bad behavior.
See, this is why we need more diverse representation in the media now. Manchildren always whine about “diversity ruining everything” when it’s really a truer reflection of America’s evolving demographics.
People don’t complain about diversity usually, they complain about bad writing. It needs to be part of a story and not just a checkbox
If hollywood could figure out how to make well-written diverse stories it’d remove the ability for bigots to obfuscate by lumping themselves in with people who just don’t like the writing
On it.
Huh
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Once upon a brighter time, gay was only colloquially used to convey happiness, unrelated to the sexual connotations there is today.
Such a sad time we live in where everything becomes a sensitive topic that can insult and hurt.
To clarify before I get cancelled to oblivion 😂 - you want your diversity, fine with me, good for you, but please there is no need to be a touchy one and reserve a swathe of labels to get insulted by when it can clearly be decided upon context if it was meant to be insulting or not.
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I think you’re applying very limited and anecdotal definitions that most people don’t/didn’t strictly adhere to.
I still say “That’s pretty gay” but only for things like rainbows or LGBT bumper stickers.
I witnessed something at work a few weeks ago, that caught me off guard. One of the managers was asking for a favour off one of the lads in work, it’s a blue collar job so it’s never been PC, “Carl, need a favour, can you do such and such” “Can’t sorry Steve” “Go on lad don’t be gay” “Steve, I’ve been taking cock for the last 25 years and you asking me to stop for an extra hours work won’t stop me”
Everyone around just creased up laughing.
That’s not funny at all. I would report Steve to HR immediately.
You’re not wrong, Walter, you’re just an asshole.
Steve is the HR manager
Now THAT sounds like a friendly work environment lol
Yep we used to use “that’s gay” all the time. Never meant other than that is stupid.
smoking. growing up in the 80s, everyone was smoking - in bars, restaurants, airplanes, even hospitals.
everyone I knew, their parents smoked tobacco or chewed tobacco. I started smoking myself, around 16 or so, as did all of my friends & even people I didn’t associate with. it was just part of the culture - and yes, I was aware at the time that it was a dangerous activity, but kids are stupid.
and then around 15 years ago or so everyone stopped or switched to vaping. now I really only see homeless people smoking. it’s quite the culture shift.
“You got gypped”
Always just thought it was the same as being “ripped off” or getting a bad deal. Only in recent years realised that it was in reference to be swindled by a gypsy. I still wondered if the term gypsy was more to do with the lifestyle of the person, like a nomad, and not actually racist but no, gypsies origins are as Romani people. Have since stopped using the term.
Urban Dictionary has a bet each way as to if it is/was racist gypped/gyp’t but best not to use it I thinkGrowing up in the 90s, we would always say things were ‘gay’ even though we had nothing against homosexuals. It was just the thing to say. Yeah, definitely should not have been saying that.
I don’t have any regrets about making dead baby jokes when I was much younger, but definitely won’t be making them now with an 8 month old daughter.
when’s the cutover from baby to toddler?
My 17yo thought I was bullshitting him when we were talking about these jokes. He googled it and was speechless. I was kinda young when they were popular but remember vividly my uncle’s telling them often.
They’re very dark, but often quite surreal at the same time.
Wow, I always thought this was just like a middle school humour thing. Didn’t realize it was short lived (that’s probably a good thing though lol)
Misogyny in books. I was reading a Morse book. He described the woman of a couple from dyed hair to hammer toes but had no physical description of her husband whatsoever.
I know it’s controversial, but moving away from “guys” when I address a group and more or less defaulting to “they” when referring to people I don’t know.
They was practical, because I deal with so many students exclusively via email, and the majority of them have foreign names where I’d never be able to place a gender anyways if they didn’t state pronouns.
Switching away from guys was natural, but I’m in a very male dominated field and I’d heard from women students in my undergrad that they did feel just a bit excluded in a class setting (not as much social settings) when the professor addresses a room of 120 men and 5 women with “Guys”, so it just more or less fell to the side in favour of folks/everyone.
I’ve done ny best to shake out ableist, racist, and other harmful speech.
We may be able to speak freely but we are all held accountable for the words we say
Yeah, I hit my teens at the turn of the millennium. Saying “gay,” and all it’s synonyms, was just an everyday thing. I watched the movie Waiting the other day and was surprised at how they dropped the word faggot almost immediately and repeatedly, until I remembered that’s how people talked 20 years ago. It definitely made me think about how if you dial the clock back 60, 70 years, the N word was probably just as commonplace, and society has done a great job of getting rid of that. So I suppose I have hope that we can continue to wipe out hateful speech, we just need a minute.
I feel this is one of the big concerns around cancel culture. I said all types of stuff growing up as a millennial that was fine then, but probably wildly offensive in the future and not great now.
I played Modern Warfare 2 at 16. That’s all I need to say. Not proud of my early internet years
