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.
In the 90s, anything bad was “retarded” or “gay”. Those don’t really fly anymore.
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.
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Recently started watching News Radio again, my SO was like wait “Joe Rogan? That Joe Rogan?” It is sad.
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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 think it’s that people who are into that kind of messaging are really into that kind of messaging and tend to binge-watch whole feeds. Engagement-driven algorithms present more and more of it hoping to get those ad presentations. I hope it’s not a nefarious conspiracy to boost right wing propaganda, but I suppose, without the actual algorithm, that we’ll never know.
Ive spent a good time in MRA subs. It’s not a bad thing. We need someone to bring to light the disparity in family and divorce court. We need people fighting for men’s parental rights.
There are people who go way too far into the red pill and incel territory. But MRA on its own has merits and are often fighting just for egality in the aspects of our society where women are given undue preferential treatment. There is nothing biological which makes a woman a more competent caregiver or more able to love a child. Additionally, society is changing and women are more likely to be in the work force, even in a relationship, making the idea of alimony dated.
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 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.
Now THAT sounds like a friendly work environment lol
That’s not funny at all. I would report Steve to HR immediately.
Steve is the HR manager
You’re not wrong, Walter, you’re just an asshole.
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
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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
I still say “That’s pretty gay” but only for things like rainbows or LGBT bumper stickers.
Yep we used to use “that’s gay” all the time. Never meant other than that is stupid.
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.
Growing 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 used to be a full on incel, it’s an easy hole to fall into if you hate yourself. I had to take a good look at myself and realize that I was the problem, and now I’m a far happier person
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.
I don’t go around using that word because of how many people find it disrespectful. But, and I ask this out of honest curiousity, why is it offensive in the first place?
I see it as synonymous with ‘idiot’ or ‘stupid’ when used colloquially. The argument that it’s a medical term doesn’t really hold as ‘idiot’ and ‘moron’ are also medical terms that refer to a lacking of intellectual acuity. In many ways ‘retarded’ has the same meaning both colloquially and medically. To be mentally retarded is to be mentally slowed or lacking that similar mental acuity that ‘idiot’ or ‘moron’ convey.
Retarded just means slow and it’s a perfectly apt description. Where I think people get confused is when retardation is linked with a specific attribute like physical retardation or emotional retardation, those convey very different meanings.
I’m not saying that we should start using it again, but that I find it odd how society has latched onto a very specific word and labelled it as bad in the matter of a decade. At the end of the day, any word that can be used to insult or demean, is rude. It’s not the word being used, it’s what is meant by them. The term 'Cis-gender ’ is also being used in a highly exclusionary way and often times is conveyed as an insult. However, it’s real meaning is not insulting in the least.
I agree that the issue is ahem idiotic. I just avoid using it now because I don’t like to offend people generally. But people should also have thicker skin. Jesus
That one’s still unfortunately commonplace. The term isn’t used in professional circles anymore because it now just means “stupid.”
Yea, I’ll correct anyone who says it. People may not love it, but there needs to be people calling out other people for shit. A little different direction, but still similar, is men calling out other men for sexist shit. Sexist men often don’t listen to women, but the moment their buddy says something they start to think.
You may lose a few friends doing this, but the people you probably want to be hanging out with will respect you more for it. I find people appreciate being willing to call them out, it takes guts. It takes a real man to call out sexist little boys, and also those who still use the outdated term “retarded” to call someone stupid.
I feel like ‘retard’ is insensitive to use in current times, but it will have a similar progression to the word idiot. Idiot used to be a medical term, and when used as an insult, I’m sure it was hurtful to the people diagnosed as an idiot by a doctor. Nowadays it is considered pretty tame. I am curious to see if 20 or 30 years from now the word still has the same hurtful connotation to it.
It is also a term used in physics. To retard as a verb means to slow. I feel like it can still be used respectfully in an academic sense.
As far as calling people out for using words in a hurtful way, I am all for it.
Fire retardant, for example.
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I have ADHD so I call my self retarded at work all the time when I fuck up (blue-collar job so that kinda shit Flys there more than at a white-collar job) It kinda helps me not feel insecure. I know people think that of me so by calling my self that constantly it doesn’t get to me as much
On the bright side, it was replaced with the much more fun Darwin award winner/finalist.
On the bright side, it was replaced with the much more fun Darwin award winner/finalist.
I used to play extreme music some 15 years ago and by God 80% of our humour was variations of calling each other f*gs. It’s quite sad cause we didn’t have an ounce of préjudice in us we were just wankers with dead end jobs and shit guitars. We met up with the boys a couple months ago and reminisced there was a lot of cringing…
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.
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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Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=ORp3q1Oaezw
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
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.
Pride started as a riot. Women’s Lib started as a riot. Peaceful demonstrations achieve nothing.
Nothing. Everything is still funny in the right or wrong context.
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I graduated high school in 2004. So many slurs back then. So uncomfortable with them now. Good riddance.
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.
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.
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
There were a couple of people who were “different” that, in hindsight, it was very obvious they were “confused”. Some of them came out later but were much less obvious.
I was in high school in the late 70s and early 80s. Nobody was out. But people kind of knew. One time I was on a train into the city (San Francisco), and I saw two students along with one of our teachers headed there. I thought that was kind of cool, but seemed also a bit dangerous and ill-advised at the time. I am fairly certain that our very popular senior class president was gay. Very sadly, he took his own life.
Did you tell them your name? Because I think that might have led them to make some assumptions.
You really tempted fate, there!
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 played Modern Warfare 2 at 16. That’s all I need to say. Not proud of my early internet years
