RL Anger

[mietze]

Sorry to break it to you, but Trump is by no means the most hateful person we've had as president in the USA.

In addition, this hate isn't anything new. Or even surprising. The only people pearlclutching about the "new"
racial and gender bigotry are...well...pretty much spoiled-ass white people.

Look. I work with refugee resettlement and almost all of my professional career except for when I had my massage business has been working with people with some super horrifying and scary problems.

It is possible to know and understand that there are big and scary things to deal with in the world AND to be annoyed as fuck about what some asshole says on the interwebs.

It's like, kind of the usual state of being for most people, being able to be annoyed/sad/worried about multiple levels of things! Instead of only about The Worst Thing.

My very worst day working for CPS involved having to forcibly carry a four year old child who had been regularly raped by her father away from him with her screaming and clawing at me and crying for her daddy. It was pretty obliterating as a green observer who was just about to graduate college. But you know, when I got home, and discovered that my asshole roommate had eaten my good leftovers that were marked, I still was annoyed. Even though really in the scheme of horribleness maybe I "shouldn't" have been annoyed at that at all.

[surreality]

There's not really a question about how emboldened white nationalist, anti-semitic, racist, and 'men's rights activist' groups are by the current state of affairs, no matter how horrible people may or may not have been historically. For many posting around here, at least, this is the most extreme president and circumstance in this regard in their adult lifetimes.

That it's a wakeup call to a bunch of people who maybe weren't paying attention to the existing ugly realities before isn't something I'm about to complain about or disparage. People becoming more aware of what the hell is going on is a good thing, especially if the result is that they actually give a fuck about what's going on and try to do something about it.

[scar]

@Pandora said in RL Anger:

@Roz Well now you know. I didn't kill her, so 'Sticks and Stones', etc.

I find it telling that in a day and age where there's enough real hate out there that Trump is president of the U.S., people are having fits about terms like 'Kill yourself' and 'Drop dead' and 'Don't be a dick/cunt' that have been around for decades before they were even born. It's like people are thrashing about looking for something/anything to be angry about in an attempt to feel relevant while the world is burning. I can say whatever I want, and anyone can respond about it as angrily as they like, and then we all go about our daily lives without the exchange making a bit of difference to anyone. Useless, but we're going to do it anyway.

There’s a whole lot that’s been around for decades before any of us were born. Doesn’t make it any less repugnant. Not accepting being called a cunt is far from a cry for attention/relevance and ‘Go kill yourself’ is not an everyday expression.

[surreality]

@scar I don't think anybody -- including @Pandora -- is saying 'it's fine and dandy and totally cool to say shit like any of that to people', or that people should just sit there and take it and not fight back or cry foul.

The only argument I've seen about this is that it's not the same as using a racial slur, and that it's not considered as a nigh-universal consensus that they're on par.

Bluntly, there is a time and place -- namely, raunchy as hell TS or erotic writing, even the kind published and for sale in Barnes&Noble and so on available to the general public -- in which using the word 'cunt' is entirely valid when referring to the actual body part. Not many people would think twice.

You can argue 'referring to someone as nothing but a body part' is not cool, but in this case, it isn't the fucking word itself.

You can't swap in a racial or sexuality-based slur in the same way. You aren't going to just casually refer to the homosexual male character in a pose as 'the fag goes over to get coffee from the break room counter' or the black character as 'the nigger puts on her jacket and picks up her keys'.

You can, however, write 'she spread her legs and exposed her cunt' and whether you like that writing style or not, there is no insult being slung about whatsoever.

[Caryatid]

@surreality

...

Did you seriously just...?

[surreality]

@Caryatid Yes, I seriously did just say 'the problem is with reducing a person to a body part as an insult', not what word you use for the body part in question.

How the fuck is that complicated? Because it's not. Calling someone a 'vagina' is not exactly inoffensive, now, is it? Exactly.

[scar]

@surreality Thanks for interpreting.

[surreality]

@scar The examples should be horrifying, because they are.

That's because (outside of the cigarette thing in the UK) no non-slur usage of those words in modern day.

There are legitimate uses for all the body part names people react to, and have absolutely every right to react to.

In one case, it's the word. There's no acceptable use of the word.

In the other, it's not the word, it's the intent and usage.

Yeah, there is actually a difference. It's offensive to call someone a cunt, for sure. It's also offensive to call them a dick or a pussy or a vajayjay or a pisshole or a cumspout or fuckstick or prick or poon or any number of bizarre and creatively disturbing compound words that prove I have spent wayyyyyyy too long on Shang.

Edit: If you want an example of this, see 'Aquarius' on Netflix. It is not easy to watch. It is set in a time in which this language was in common use, and they absolutely use it. It is jarring as fuck, and rightly so.

[Roz]

@Pandora said in RL Anger:

@Roz Well now you know. I didn't kill her, so 'Sticks and Stones', etc.

I find it telling that in a day and age where there's enough real hate out there that Trump is president of the U.S., people are having fits about terms like 'Kill yourself' and 'Drop dead' and 'Don't be a dick/cunt' that have been around for decades before they were even born. It's like people are thrashing about looking for something/anything to be angry about in an attempt to feel relevant while the world is burning. I can say whatever I want, and anyone can respond about it as angrily as they like, and then we all go about our daily lives without the exchange making a bit of difference to anyone. Useless, but we're going to do it anyway.

I'm not having a fit. I just think you're a pretty toxic person. It doesn't actually require that much emotional energy to come to that conclusion. Don't worry! I spend a lot more time thinking about Trump than you. Just because widespread hate, bigotry, and violence exists doesn't mean I don't pause when someone's acting like an asshole in my immediate vicinity.

@surreality said in RL Anger:

@scar I don't think anybody -- including @Pandora -- is saying 'it's fine and dandy and totally cool to say shit like any of that to people'

By all means, please find a quote from Pandora that suggests that.

[surreality]

@Roz I keep reading 'I don't care if it offends someone', which is different from 'this behavior is not offensive or potentially offensive'. It's not exactly a great difference, but it is a difference.

One argues for universal acceptance of the behavior being OK, the other is... well, 'I don't give a fuck if people think this is OK or not'.

Neither is exactly fantastic <coughs and chokes up some coffee on the understatement>, but between the two, I'll take the latter as the lesser evil, because encouraging the acceptance and spread of shitty things is high on my list of 'things to try to not fucking do if aware of it'. I mean, there's an argument for the whole 'behavior encourages more of the same', sure, but that's still less impactful than someone saying 'this is totes cool and everybody should be on board with it, yay!' and cheering it on.

[Roz]

@surreality I'm going to go ahead and keep making the assumption that if someone loudly and publicly indicates a lack of remorse for specific actions that they don't think the actions were wrong. I generally think it's a pretty safe assumption.

Honestly, I find your continued defense of purposefully bad behavior pretty baffling.

[surreality]

(Double post 'cause I prefer not to edit and convo is fairly quick moving, so... uh, it may or may not end up as a double post.)

@Pandora has a point, though, that people do consciously, knowingly, and intentionally say nasty and cruel shit about others all the time. All the time. There are personal attacks all over the boards. Not calling out behavior as shitty/stupid/etc., but calling people shitty/stupid/etc.

It doesn't require a slur, it doesn't require body part names, it doesn't require any name-calling at all, it doesn't require any •ism behind it.

The recent focus on name-calling seemed weird to me for precisely that reason. This convo highlights things like 'I hope you die' and similar non-name-calling things, which is actually, IMO, productive and refreshing.

Avoiding personal attacks is a laudable goal but I don't think it's a realistic one, particularly for 'anger' threads or hog pit posts. Plenty of people just don't have the maturity to not attack the poster rather than the idea, and as much as I wish we had a magic 'omg please be a mature adult' pill to hand out, well, yeah, we don't.

There's a whole argument about safe spaces and freedom to be offended or be offensive, but... fuck all of that, frankly. This is not a safe space so far as I know, and that means there's going to be some distinctly smelly shit thrown by the screeching howler monkeys sometimes. There's similarly nothing stopping people from standing up to it -- in the same vein or otherwise, though. If there was, that would be a much bigger problem than the ones already there.

[surreality]

@Roz I am explicitly not defending it. I am saying it is:

@surreality said in RL Anger:

Neither is exactly fantastic <coughs and chokes up some coffee on the understatement>, but between the two, I'll take the latter as the lesser evil, because encouraging the acceptance and spread of shitty things is high on my list of 'things to try to not fucking do if aware of it'. I mean, there's an argument for the whole 'behavior encourages more of the same', sure, but that's still less impactful than someone saying 'this is totes cool and everybody should be on board with it, yay!' and cheering it on.

That sure is a valiant defense. <headscratch>

[Ganymede]

@surreality said in RL Anger:

Calling someone a 'vagina' is not exactly inoffensive, now, is it? Exactly.

As I think I said to someone else, the only person that gets to determine whether they are offended by a term is the person who hears it. Whether that reaction is reasonable is another question entirely.

For @Pandora, she doesn't think that people should be offended because people calling one another dicks and cunts has been around for a while. That's not an unreasonable stance. For @Ghost, he (she? I always forget) doesn't think that he (she?) was saying something so dreadfully offensive so as to elicit a vitriolic reaction. The insult wasn't tossed at me, so I wasn't personally offended, but I can see why someone else -- like @saosmash, who works in public defense and has probably had to fight sexism for a long fucking time -- would take offense.

Calling someone a 'vagina' may be offensive, but I don't think any of us can point a stick at someone and say thou shalt not be offended.

[surreality]

@Ganymede Definitely. But the converse -- 'you must be offended' -- which has been thrown around a lot, too, is also headscratch-land to me.

[saosmash]

I admit if I usually ran into the word cunt in porn instead of having it screamed in my face by methheads in a jail my associations with it might be different, but I wasn't approaching it at the time as a glass jaw respondent.

[surreality]

@saosmash One of the things I always did before anything sexual would come up in a scene would be to check on language preferences, weirdly enough. It was just sort of a default to ask. Some folks only like flowery purple romance novel terms, others like things crude as possible... I can roll with whatever somebody prefers in terms of the writing style but I always would check, just in case. (It tended to be more 'action content' than language choices that'd ever be any sort of issue if there ever was one, which was super rare.)

There was a person I knew from Akashat, for example, who could not handle profanity. But it was only the 'classic' terms: fuck, piss, shit, damn, goddamn. Those specifically, at the time. She would write the most intensely lurid prose full of pretty vivid language (not flowery, either, full of all the cocks and cunts and so on you can pack in), but would actually disconnect in the face of a 'damn'.

And, really? That's OK. That is absolutely OK. And people should respect her enough to not use those terms around her if they're aware, absolutely, zero question about it.

I would have an issue with her insisting that none of those words are acceptable for anyone ever and everyone must feel the same way she does about them.

[saosmash]

My point was certainly never that anyone has to be offended by the word cunt. It WAS that that was a huge freaking escalation. And then people decided to go hurr durr he said cunt now the feminists gonna be mad and we got into pages of argument about that.

I mean the fact is ... there's a difference between "You must be offended by this" and "You must acknowledge that this is offensive to others" which I feel like is where the communications breakdown is here.

I'm not offended by cunt when it turns up in smut. I prefer it to pussy which I feel like is the least erotic word ever. It's not like the argument was ever that context doesn't matter, though.

[surreality]

@saosmash Yeah, that was partly what baffled me about that whole thing. You weren't saying 'everyone must' despite it being said to you and you being understandably offended, though some other folks were going there. That's where I sorta went '...uh hold up a minute here'.

ETA: This sums up my take on it, roughly:

Whoever: "I am offended by that."
Whoever: "I am not offended by that."
Me: "OK. I will/won't do that around you." (whichever is appropriate)

Whoever: "You can't be offended by that!"
Whoever: "You must be offended by that!"
Me: "Fuck you and the self-important bullshit you wrote in on." (and, no, I probably won't feel bad about this at all)

[Meg]

Where did anyone say that you /must/ be offended by that? It was said that it was a term that was highly offensive, ie a lot of people would find it offensive, not all. Like, I really feel that someone read into the posts things that weren't there.

No one said you /must/ be offended by telling someone to 'Kill themselves', either. But holy shit, are a lot of people going to find that offensive. No one has to find 'nigger' offensive, either, for example. But it is an offensive word for the majority of people. I could keep going on and on.

You don't /have/ to be offended by a word and you can still acknowledge that it is an offensive word to a lot of people. If you didn't realize it was an offensive word (ie hey, i fucking used the word 'gypsy' for most of my adult life without realizing that it was a slur), then that doesn't negate that it is an offensive word to a lot of people. In that case, you still don't have to be offended, but you can acknowledge that it is an offensive word and either choose not to use it or choose to keep using it.

But I am honestly baffled where people said or implied you /had/ to be offended by it. Labeling a word as 'offensive' is not equal to saying you have to be offended by it. And yes, the context matters on what word is offensive. Saying 'fuck' on a message board is not offensive, saying 'fuck' at work could be offensive. Saying 'suck my dick' if you have one and you're in a private intimate moment with your chosen partner is not offensive, screaming out the window of my car to a woman walking on the sidewalk is.

These are not hard things to grasp. Idk, man.