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.)
This. Also, sometimes it’s best to just cut off the behavior, because often you’ll end up with someone who just tunes you out the minute you say a social justice “buzzword” they’ve heard someone on FoxNews make fun of at some point. Sometimes, you can’t make impassioned speeches about equal rights. Sometimes, you just have to call Dave a dickhead, and then move on.