I just want to let everyone know that the mods are watching this thread. I am interested to see the conversation around this comment.
I’m not endorsing the comment or the thoughts on it but I think the conversation around the comment is valuable and I’d like to see it continue.
I wasn’t going to say anything, but, since you’re soliciting opinions…
I think that this is entirely accurate, but take the opposite conclusion from it: it can be both misogynistic and homophobic, because the insult plays on patriarchal norms.
I’m reminded of the scene from the Firefly episode “Heart of Gold,” where one of the sex workers betrays Nandi and the others to Burgess. After she and Burgess tell the crowd about Serenity and her crew helping Nandi and Petaline, he has her get on her knees and “show them what a woman’s place is.”
So, the idea here is that it’s a woman’s place to give pleasure and a man’s to receive it. What does that make a man who gives another man pleasure? Obviously, it makes him less of a man, which plays right into other, similar homophobic tropes (any man who shows a healthy range of emotion is gay, who isn’t into sports is gay, who succeeds academically is gay, who enjoys art is gay, who speaks eloquently is gay, etc. ad nauseum).
And even if you take all of that dynamic out of it, the patriarchal notion that women (and un-manly men) are supposed to give pleasure and manly men are supposed to receive it, even if that’s not a factor at all… I can’t see how, at the very best, it isn’t a form of kink-shaming (and a particularly disturbing one at that) to imply that giving sexual pleasure lessens a person.
Perhaps this should be moved to the “Proposed Rules for good behavior and consequences for misbehavior” thread.
0 voters
I started with Trump’s remark that he loves Kim, and saw him fawning over yet another dictator. It occurred to me that Trump cheating in a relationship (which he has done IRL) could be compared to his relationships with the world’s dictators. I put in the sex part to display the superior-inferior role he seems to have with people (i.e., he displays a superior attitude with most people but looks up to dictators), but that’s just him. It’s an attempted insult of Trump’s attitudes, not anyone else’s.
I can see how this kind of sex can be used to shame women or gays, but that’s not the point of the joke. If anyone sees insults toward gender roles or sex-shaming, isn’t it on them for broadening the meaning of the joke unnecessarily? Aren’t they taking the remark and inserting their own biases into it? This is why I was so horrified by the complaint and gave an immediate apology that I later came to wonder about.
Or perhaps I’m just not being politically correct enough, a term that was first used by leftists to refer to what they considered over-the-top complaints by people even more to the left of them. Frankly I think the original complaint was in this category – an immediate comment of “you’re not leftist enough!”
Frankly this whole episode has made me extremely upset, and I’m wondering if this is really the “safe” place it’s meant to be. I’ve lurked here the past week but not contributed anything due to severe depression brought on by this and by some medical things - the latter mostly resolved. I’ve considered leaving several times.
I apologize for making you feel unsafe here. It was certainly not my intent. In retrospect, I should have been clearer that I certainly didn’t attach any ill intent to what you were posting: I only wished to convey that there might be unfortunate, albeit clearly unintended, implications to the joke/insult.
This is not the first time I’ve said this, and I’m sure it won’t be the last: there is no such thing as an insult that only cuts one way. If you insult Trump by calling him a sack of shit, you’re necessarily saying it’s a bad thing to be a sack of shit. An insult always cuts at both the person you’re insulting, as well as whatever or whoever it is you’re comparing that person to.
And, for a lot of things, that’s plainly obvious. A sack of shit, for example, is noxiously odious, it sticks to your skin and stains your clothes, and it carries diseases and insects and is just generally foul and to be disposed of at the first opportunity (unless you’re using it to fertilize soil). The problem is that people often drop insults as if it’s self-evident that being [insert insult here] is bad, and they don’t take a moment to reflect on that.
For instance, calling Trump a moron, or an idiot, or an imbecile, or a retard (words spoiled for @MarjaE’s sake, as I know she particularly doesn’t like them) or any other of those words that imply that being born less intelligent makes you less human. Or calling a school shooter a “nutjob” or “crazy” or “insane” or any of a series of words that make it look like mental illness is what caused their violent spree.
People, myself included, just don’t think before lobbing that kind of insult. People reuse the insults they learned on the schoolyard without reflecting about why those insults are supposed to be considered insulting.
And that’s why — and again, I’m sorry for making you feel otherwise — I think you can criticize the insults someone is making, without it necessarily being intended as a criticism of the person making the insult. Because this shit is habitual. It’s subconscious. And most people just aren’t in the habit of thinking of insults as things that cut two ways.
I hope you don’t. I enjoy your contributions here, and think of you as a valued member of the community.
I haven’t been saying anything about this issue, because I am not very good at it. But I would be unhappy to see you leave, so if we’re hitting that point, I feel I owe it to at least try and offer some comment first.
The difficulty is that at least in form, I don’t think anyone has done anything so wrong here. This includes making the initial remark. xkxvi has explained her thought process, but it lines up with what I would have guessed – it was meant as a sleeping with the enemy kind of joke and not intended as anything against gay people.
The thing is that our words are always contextualized by the broader world. It’s not just a matter of inserting one’s biases into it, but in seeing how it ends up interacting with biases. I’ve heard puns and jokes that only in retrospect are making fun of black people’s speech and names. There are enough sketches that seem funny on their own but taken together are plainly promoting some stereotype. It’s like how there’s nothing wrong with the black guy dying in an action movie, until it turns out the black guy always dies in action movies.
Such problems can be really easy to trip over, and I think it is reasonable to say that happened here. There are lots of Trump/Putin sex jokes out there from both America and Russia, and when you look at them as a whole, they do reflect their widespread homophobia. They quickly become not just about the two being inappropriate close, but tinged with the idea that it is shameful for one man to sexually submit to another. So I think it is reasonable to consider that even an adjacent joke might add to homophobia, as a different question from whether that was its intent.
I agree such a call out could definitely be done via PM, but honestly that wouldn’t have occurred to me. Precisely because it’s not really a personal concern about the poster, but a public concern about how such comments are contextualized. It happens fairly easily, and I don’t think it reflects badly on anyone who tries to do better. And here there was a straightforward apology for the misstep, which I imagined would settle it, with no hard feelings or opprobrium.
Except maybe something like it happens needed to have been said, because plainly there are hard feelings and kxkvi feels opprobrium has unfairly been attached. Looking back I can see how what I’d thought of as impersonal discussion would as easily be thought of as personal faulting by someone involved, which is unfortunate because the second isn’t appropriate. And that, too, is an easy misstep to make – one I expect I’ve done a lot without knowing – especially in text. You can have everyone be entirely well-meaning and still have people feel ill-treated.
I wish I had an idea of how to better avoid that. But again, I’m not very good with this kind of thing. So I just wanted to say to everyone involved that I understand where you were coming from, and I’m very sorry it worked out to anyone here being hurt.
This is what gets me, because I did take it as a “sleeping with the enemy” remark. Such a remark doesn’t make one anti sex, and for two men being involved doesn’t make it homophobic – not if all parties involved are truly accepting of gay as a normal thing to be. Which we are, aren’t we? I thought we were.
I’ve got a whole set of IRL friends I don’t hang out with much anymore, even though I agree wth then on most things, because too many of them are too busy interpreting the most unkind, least progressive version of each other’s words. Don’t say “dude” because it was a homophobic slur before the 1930s. Don’t say “that’s just daffy” to mean weird, for the same reasons. All words always retain their most hurtful meaning from any point in their history, no matter what the speaker intended and how clear it was what they intended.
Basically signifiers no longer float.
And you know what? I’m all for mending my speech to be more considerate. I’m all for inclusiveness.
Picking over meanings and intentions which were clear in the original context is not those things. It’s just playing superiority bingo, and it destroys what it claimed to defend.
And if they weren’t clear, and if the speaker/writer operates in good faith, PM them, don’t call them out and embarrass them. Or ask a moderator to look at it.
Please stay on, @kxkvi. Your posts get me through the day sometimes.
Yep, and I guess:
You wouldn’t believe how much I’ve learned here (and at TOS too). Usually it was a matter of not thinking about it much, rather than overcoming animosity. Ignorance, which sometimes is difficult to overcome.
This was clearly stated but I simply couldn’t disconnect the two in my mind. Maybe analogous how beginning (and some experienced) writers get hurt by any criticism of their work, because they confuse it with an attack on themselves. After 25 years of writers’ groups I’ve manage learn how to avoid that at least. But I’ve never been accused of homophobia before, and though the complaint was not that but sort of adjacent, I found it very hard to get over it (of course as a kid I joked as much as anyone, and probably hurt people who I didn’t know were gay. Enlightenment came later.)
I’ve been silent on this as well, but mainly because I can’t figure out what to say. I’ve been thinking about this though, and I think I should walk back my “can add to homophobia even if not homophobic” comment.
It can add to homophobia because anything can add to anything else. The intent wasn’t to be homophobic and I seriously doubt @kxkvi is homophobic. We should trust each other here and work out our issues constructively rather than put each other on blast for not being Woker Than Thou™.
I can’t even say it’s a comment I wouldn’t have made, because I’m certainly not above being crass at times. I wouldn’t have attached to much to it though, because sometimes jokes don’t land. We have to strike a balance between attacking the joke and attacking the person.
I’d say that if such a joke “can add to homophobia” despite not being homophobic, then @kxkvi has every right to feel put on blast for being called out publicly for this, even though that was not @MarjaE’s intention.
I’d also say that @kxkvi has every right to walk back his apology, both because it was an edge case and because he wasn’t truly sorry. When we apologize, we should mean it. If we upset someone, we should try to understand why they’re upset and make an effort to not continue to upset them. A knee-jerk apology doesn’t address any of this.
I could not possibly agree with you more.
I’d been struggling for the words, and here you went and did a better job than I might have. Thank you.
And @kxkvi I hope you stick around.
Thank you @LearnedCoward and @nothingfuture.
All, you can’t imagine how much the support has helped.
Oh, yes. Mine was definitely an apology not thought though, I think because I was trying to avoid all the recent (and not-so-recent) nopology and almopology stuff (call out to @nimelennar for making a thread about a word I invented - did you know if you google it there are only two hits – here? Not up there with robotics, but whatever).
So that’s another lesson for me. Think before apologizing (and of course think before posting).
Please don’t. I know I’m not alone in regarding you as a valued member of this community.
I’m late to this discussion, and I understand the arguments against your joke. However, I think it can be interpreted as implying that Trump is so willing to submit to dictators that he will do things that are demeaning in his own mind, not necessarily in anyone else’s.
(Sex-related insults about political leaders have a long tradition. I remember there were jokes about Ronald Reagan’s alleged crush on Margaret Thatcher.)
I see a lot of that too, not that I’m saying people are doing that here. I’d argue for the most generous interpretation of any comment, especially among friends or acquaintances.
@kxkvi, you made a joke, some people got upset, you apologized. Let’s all move on. I just hope some of my less-than-thoughtful posts at The Old Place are now buried so deep that no one remembers them.
Thank you, @teknocholer, I appreciate it.
Yep that’s what I tried to say. Oh well. Like you said, time to move on. One takeaway, though, is that we ask that people PM a person who’s said something iffy, or notify a moderator, rather complain in a comment in the thread.
I still think private messages make criticism more personal, and less issue-al, and I still associate them with harassment I’ve experienced on other sites. I doubt I’m the only one to experience similar harassment.
So I would strongly suggest avoiding critical privte messages.
I am a little late, but I would also like to add to the “please stay”.
Like @gadgetgirl said:
I looked at it more from the “cheating” angle. Straight people cheat on each other. Gay people cheat on each other. Bisexual people cheat on each other… Hell, even asexual people. People cheat.
Other people read it differently. The question then becomes how to approach that. You’re a longstanding member of this community. Absolutely a “heads up, I know you probably didn’t intend this, but” PM or a word to a mod who could do the same would be a better choice than public blasting, because as a longstanding and active member of this community, we can be fairly certain that your motive is not to troll or harm.
None of us ever are or can be totally perfect and aware about all the implications of everything we say. Intent may not change whether or not a statement is hurtful, but it absolutely should inform how we respond. Coming out guns blazing is not the best response in most cases. Quietly giving a person – especially one who’s shown they’re not a troll – a chance to do better usually has better results.
Again, @kxkvi, I really do hope you stick around. And from the sounds of things, you aren’t the only one who should be making an apology.
Thank you, very much. Yeah, cheating’s gonna happen regardless. And Trump’s definitely proven himself capable of it.
I don’t think anyone needs to apologize at this point. We’re all learning, and with the support shown here I feel lots better. Thank you.
Same here! I think you’re a valuable member of our community, and I’d hate to see you leave us. I don’t believe you meant to hurt anyone.
I hope we can find ways to discuss language and expressions without making people uncomfortable. I feel like I learn better ways to communicate from talks like this.
Thank you, thank you.
Like buttons are one thing, but this has been overwhelming(ly good). I really appreciate it. I do feel a lot better about elsewhere now.
Internet relationships are still so really weird for someone who didn’t have them for the first ██ decades.