shinelikethunder:

theviewfromthegutter:

shinelikethunder:

can we please bring back “in poor taste” as a concept

Because at some point it got folded in under “problematic,” and now every damn thing that has Unfortunate Implications or deals with sensitive topics indelicately enough to raise hackles or gores somebody’s sacred cow is treated as a grave injustice or a threat to society. Online activism culture has lost the vocabulary to express “this deals with touchy stuff in a way many people might find inappropriate, and you should probably avoid it if insensitivity on this subject gets you angry/upset, but it’s not promoting hateful ideas or demeaning people or affecting anything but my opinion of the creator’s sense of tact.”

Agreed 100%. “Problematic” often turns everything into an all-or-nothing religious fight.

Adjacent to that, I have some feelings about how useful it sometimes is to use something like “Wanker” in place of things like “homophobic”. Because even if “homophobic” might be technically accurate, that’s when people pull out their “It’s not a phobia/I have a gay cousin/Why does everything have to be serious all the time!” BS. Whereas *sometimes* (and I’m not saying this always works, but I have experience of it working sometimes, and it’s a useful tool to have) – say Dave says something homophobic, you go “Dave, don’t be a tosser, come on.” then you’re still keeping it at the level it started on, in a language people can work with.

And this is not me saying “be nice to homophobes”. I have a vested interest in not being nice to homophobes. I’m talking about meeting and shutting them down where they are.

Another example – I was on a bus with someone I was vaguely friendly with from a course, in the way you get when you’ve been stuck together. He started leaning over the seat and trying to chat up this woman who wasn’t into it.

Sure, I could give him a lecture on sexism and women’s autonomy and all that, or I could go “Look, she’s obviously not interested, don’t be a dickhead. Sorry about him. Anyway, are you off to the match on Saturday?” and redirect. No, that didn’t solve sexism, and no, it doesn’t mean he won’t ever do it again. But it meant he stopped doing it that time, and he has another instance where his behaviour wasn’t approved of – in a way he could process. Chatting up women who aren’t interested = dickhead. No-one really wants to be a dickhead.

(No, I’m not claiming to have solved everything. I’m not claiming to have solved anything. But I think it’s worth having a lot of tools in your arsenal, and basic, “Meet people where they are” gets overlooked. I think it’s more important in the short term to stop shitty behaviour than it is to “correctly label” it as whatever -ism.)

I like this.

I particularly like it because it focuses on the actual offense being committed–talking shit about people who’ve done nothing to you, pestering a stranger whose interest is spiralling further into the negative numbers with every word out of your mouth. The gendered or homophobic aspect of it is inescapably there, adding a whole extra dimension to what’s otherwise a petty social misdeed. But that baggage is so heavy (and so heavily contested) that invoking it risks blowing up into a conversation about all the bad shit sexism/homophobia is responsible for in the world and whether one dude’s awkward attempt to chat somebody up really deserves to have all that laid on it.

When, no, the problem isn’t that he Did A Sexism in the abstract. The problem is that he’s pestering a stranger, and the sexism angle is “pestering a stranger doesn’t magically become not-rude just because she’s a girl you want to ask out” with a side of “arguably it is extra rude because she’s under extra pressure to humor you.” And tbh, often that angle is best kept in reserve until you go “don’t be a dick” to someone who actually uses “but it’s not being a dick if I do it to these people” as a defense. In which case, hey, they’re the one who brought the identity-politics gun to the knife fight.

I mean, that’s what this is all about, right? “It’s not okay to mistreat people or treat them as lesser just because they belong to a group whose mistreatment/exploitation/unequal status is woven into the fabric of your society.” On a system-wide level, it means reweaving the fabric of society to stop being organized around mistreating/exploiting/discriminating against the groups in question, but on an individual level, it means “jerk behavior doesn’t stop being jerk behavior when you do it to societally-designated ‘acceptable targets,’ and I am not going to honor whatever pass you’ve gotten for it in the past.” It’s not necessary to re-give that lecture every time, unless you’re dealing with a pattern in someone’s behavior or an actual expectation of impunity. Basic fairness is satisfied by, well, treating the jerk behavior as what it is.

(This focus on jerk behavior, and the excusability or non-excusability thereof, also seems like it could be expanded into an antidote to that callout-culture thing. That thing where someone is accused of Doing An Ism with zilch or near-zilch in the way of actual mistreatment of others underlying the allegation, which then authorizes a torrent of mistreatment and harassment to be aimed at them with total impunity. Because anything purportedly done For Grate Justice doesn’t count as mistreatment, or something, and that is one hundred percent not at all a suspiciously-familiar-sounding rehash of the same shit we’ve been fighting to get rid of. Turning the tables and making the dominant group into the acceptable targets may be what the dominant group is viscerally afraid of, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually the goal, and I wish online activism weren’t so dysfunctionally wedded to positions that turn it into the strawman liberal bogeyman some of these these kids’ parents told them scary stories about.)