It also bothers me b/c precision in language is IMPORTANT to me

[yvannairie]

At this point, I feel like my gut feeling of "jokes based on misusing a word are Bad and there are ways to communicate the existential absurdism most of them point to as the source of strife" has been validated enough that I'm just gonna. As a whole personally stop making those jokes.

"Men ain't shit" jokes are radfem dogwhistles. "Me, a gay, being inconvenienced is homophobia" has led to there legitimately being a class of people who think anything bad happening to queer people is "homophobic" or "a hate crime". And, well, we've always known self-deprecating jokes aren't helpful.

Comments

[hellofriendsiminthedark]

Mmm, I'm not a big fan of like "every experience I personally have is a universality of all gays," for example "gays can't read and can't drive" and "gays are fashion disasters." It's gotten to the point where people have had to legitimately explain the difference between "the gay community" as a broad ethereal conglomerate and "your local gay clique" as the people and trends you are familiar with and identify with. And young people who keep wandering into cliques and cultural pockets of gayness (because internet) that don't match their own internal experience end up questioning if they're even gay because they have certain hobbies or they dress a certain way or they don't feel the right kind of alienation/tenderness/whatever.

[yvannairie]

Yeah, I just commented on someone else's post that a lot of people seem to have taken "the personal is political" to mean "the personal is public, and must be subjected to a categorical imperative test, as the world must ever only be described in the most general terms". Nothing I mentioned is a problem on a small scale, but when it comes to broader conversations, conversations crossing over between cliques, like you mentioned, all of this makes it suddenly so that the language we use can suddenly start marking us as "other" and not worthy of having conversation with.

And, y'know... I've never talked right my entire life. So me doubling down on precision is me claiming my own, and making the demand that if people are gonna talk to me, they're gonna have to understand that that's the register I'm working in.

Might cut out hyperbole and sarcasm while I'm at it :P