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.
Racism.
While I was never into it myself thankfully, I let it pass a lot in my family. Being in university changed that though, it just feels too uncomfortable to have my family say racist shit in front of me while I have so many people of color as friends. I still struggle to call out their transphobia though but that is due to my own identity issues.
In my early life I was raised in Kansas fundie hell. I graduated to 4chan. To call me racist would have been an understatement; “proud white supremacist”, more like. (LOL I used the term “race nationalist” then)
Perhaps my proudest personal achievement has been unraveling that disgusting tapestry of who I was.
Good on ya.
I used to use “gay “ or “ retarded “ as negative adjectives, I no longer do because using someone’s being in a negative light is really mean, and I try not to be mean.
I was totally headed down the alt right pipeline. Throughout highschool I was depressed and lonely. I lost my faith which sent me to the online atheist community which ran out of content, so they started attacking feminists/sjws. I also just distrusted women because I got molested as a child by one and no one took it seriously. This had primed me to just eat up all the content from the MRA/antifeminist crowd. The youtube algorithm, which at the time was absolutely unhinged, pushed me to racist content which I just parroted because I didn’t know any better. I didn’t understand why things were the way things were, but I was taught who to blame.
What saved me was getting friends. These friends shattered my preconceptions, which sent me to the library, which got me talking to more people, which got me reading more. By the time I finished high school I just became utterly incompatible with the person I used to be. I couldn’t take back the things I said to people, but I could join their protests and speak up for them when I heard some heinous shit being said.
I watched a few Jordan Peterson videos out of curiosity, and I will also watch some Joe Rogan clips as well for the same reason. For a while, I was bombarded by alt right YouTube videos. It’s so crazy to think just a few clicks can lead you down that path. I was older when I watched so it, so I could obviously discern their real message, but if I was a younger man it would be harder. The algorithm almost seemed to slowly introduce more and more extreme views.
Watch the Pangburn videos of Jordan Peterson debating Sam Harris. It’s easy to see what a word-salad regurgitating sophist blowhard Peterson is.
Used to use the word ‘retarded’ to describe people doing dumb things. Then I realized that not only was it hurtful to people with Down Syndrome - it was inaccurate … as a person with Down Syndrome would not do the things I was attributing to the phrase.
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 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
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.
Yep we used to use “that’s gay” all the time. Never meant other than that is stupid.
Quite a few. I grew up in a conservative, racist family. It took me a long time to unwind the problematic casual phrases I grew up with. I’m not proud of it, and I occasionally cringe looking backwards. I realize now the tremendous weight and damage those phrases could do. Now I just try to be better day by day, and to make sure I don’t perpetuate those damaging habits in my own children.
Apple products. When it started to take away the ability to tune the noise cancellation feature on airpod pro, I decided that’s it. You can nerf it to say its for the best interest for everyone. But I’m the consumer who paid full price who asked for the feature that was to isolate the noise, not a fucking compromised NC because you say so. You can at least have the decency to let me tune it myself, but no, Apple decides whats best. So fuck it.
The elitist attitudes surrounding Apple products is so unbelievable. “OMG, I have an iPhone!” Yeah, you have an iPhone, so what? You’re the best? You can FaceTime your friends, despite you and your friends probably having, like, 7 other apps to do so? And no UI customizability or jailbreaking?
I’m just unable to understand the Apple/iOS hype. It makes my eyes roll. I’m content with my Samsung and Android, thanks.
Gay people. When I was much much younger I remember telling a friend that while I didn’t have a problem with people doing their own thing, I still didn’t like gay people. My friend said I hope when you have kids they’re gay. Guess what happened and how I feel about it now. I was such a dumb ass. When my kid came out to me I wept for joy at their bravery. I don’t take hard stances on my opinions now and try to remember that my perspective isn’t ultimate or necessarily right. There’s always a chance that I’m wrong.
You really tempted fate, there!
There weren’t many gay people when I was growing up. At least not openly. I was first introduced to some gays at a gay bar. They basically made me feel like a juicy steak in a meat market (not in a good way). Several comments about my dick within 10 seconds of meeting them.
Today I have many gay friends that I enjoy their company but that was a huge setback for me.
It took one of those meat market experiences to make me self-reflect about how I treated women as a straight man.
Thankfully I was relatively young when it happened, but I’ll always regret how I treated women before then.
You know what, I never treated women that way but I certainly gained a lot of empathy for them after that.
Did you tell them your name? Because I think that might have led them to make some assumptions.
It’s crazy to me now that there wasn’t a single (open) trans or gay person in my high school in the 90s. I sometimes wonder who actually was, but wasn’t able to be themselves.
My high school class was in mid-'00s, and there was one girl who very much had that butch/tomboy vibe going on. I drifted away from the class, so only heard rumours after graduation, but I think she never actually came out as anything. On the other hand three others of us (two of whom, including myself, I never would have guessed back in high school) eventually came out as various shades of queer :D
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 use “guys” even when address a group of women. I feel it’s basically become a gender neutral term.
I never realized how frequently I called things “lame” until I said it in front of a coworker paralyzed from a motorcycle accident. Hopefully he understood, but it just took that one glance telling me he heard it for me to stop. To try to stop.
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.
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.
Pride started as a riot. Women’s Lib started as a riot. Peaceful demonstrations achieve nothing.
Grew up in the 80s and 90s. As progressive and openminded as I thought I was then…holy shit there are a lot of words and phrases I won’t touch any more because they sound archaic, racist, mysoginistic, or hateful today. Back then they were perfectly acceptable everyday things no one would bat an eye at. It does make me happy that at least in this small arena we seem to have made progress as a society.
(Should add that this is from a US perspective)
Nothing. Everything is still funny in the right or wrong context.
I no longer describe anything as ‘lame’ or ‘retarded’ or ‘spaz’ or their variants. It makes me sad ableism is so ingrained in even the most inclusive spaces even though the same argument has removed the use of ‘gay’ for the same reasons.
I also avoid dark or dry humour unless I’m confident the people I am talking to know it’s absurdist and not a serious opinion. I don’t always succeed at this.
Im really trying hard to stop calling shit retarded. im 40 dammit its just what we always said :(
I honestly don’t think it’s ableism. Languages evolve and retarded doesn’t mean a mental condition it literally means “dumb”. Most people don’t even know “lame” is related to a movement conditions and if you did a statistical analysis 99% of use cases are not related to the “original meaning”. People are just ignorant of how language works, especially since English is a global language.
Yeah, people made the same arguments about ‘gay’ and ‘fag’.
Retarded was the word of choice medically in the 60’s - 80’s for people with developmental disabilities. It derives from the Latin word Tardus which means slow or late.
Languages evolve, but the euphemistic treadmill is ongoing. The word ‘cretin’ derived from the word ‘Christian’, the person who coined it intended it to mean that people with cognitive impairments were still people worthy of respect. And now it’s just a straight up insult. Similar with ‘idiot’ and ‘moron’.
And these days you can look at wojaks which use physical differences like drooling or missing half a head or being physically unattractive in unconventional ways to indicate ignorance or stupidity.
Every word that people use to try to describe people with disabilities respectfully becomes a slur. That’s because of ableism. It’s just not talked about much.
More on this topic for anyone interested in the euphemism treadmill: https://humanparts.medium.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-mentally-retarded-e3b9eea23018
Would you then advocate that no one should ever use the words “idiot”, “moron”, or “cretin” ever again? What about “dumb”, or “stupid”?
(edit) - People are fun. They actually believe that no human should ever want to throw insults at another human ever again. Fascinating.
I try not to use any of those words, but it is hard as they are so prevalent in society, even in my progressive and inclusive circle.
I decided a while ago to substitute all those with the word “Turnip” - as in the vegetable. I doubt anyone could be genuinely offended by that and it sounds good when said - Don’t be a Turnip! try it out, its a fun word to use and people seem to be tickled by it.
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
