Me personally? I’ve become much less tolerant of sexist humor. Back in the day, cracking a joke at women’s expense was pretty common when I was a teen. As I’ve matured and become aware to the horrific extent of toxicity and bigotry pervading all tiers of our individualistic society, I’ve come to see how exclusionarly and objectifying that sort of ‘humor’ really is, and I regret it deeply.
I never realized how frequently I called things “lame” until I said it in front of a coworker paralyzed from a motorcycle accident. Hopefully he understood, but it just took that one glance telling me he heard it for me to stop. To try to stop.
Come on. Is that really a problem now? I get not calling people gay as an insult. But lame? I don’t even think of handicapped people at all when I hear that word.
When people talk about ‘privilege,’ this is what they mean. When you really stop to think about it, a huge amount of our casual insults/denigrations come down to slurs on anthropomorphized objects. If you believe that propagating such language is hurtful to the people the slur represents, you can make yourself crazy thinking about all the synonyms for ‘bad.’
Is it really awful? Who knows…probably depends on the degree, but one can imagine that someone actually living with whatever deviation, someone who spends their life with awareness that their ‘lameness’ means they will never be the Adonis- or Venus-like advertising model, might become hypersensitive to those words. I’m not saying that we need to shun people who use ‘sucks [dick]’ or ‘lame’ instead of ‘bad,’ but I appreciate the people who make that effort.
It’s kind of the bring-your-own-bag approach to inclusivity. Using your own bag at the grocery store isn’t going to influence climate change; stopping slur-based judgements isn’t going to end discrimination; but they’re things an individual can do to feel a little better.
I get that, I really do. Thing is, life is hard and arduous a lot of the time and I have way too many things on my mind to even link a word like ‘lame’ to a meaning like that.
And a lot of people DO shun other people for using this language, which I get when words like ‘gay’ are used as an insult.
I’d definitely not call myself privileged because I use the word ‘lame’ though.
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I still use “lame” to this day. What should I be saying instead?
I’m just gonna go back to calling everything gay and retarded now because my substitute word “lame” is now unacceptable.
Some of us never stopped! Join us. Soon the cycle will complete and those words will once again be acceptable, just like what happened with idiot and moron and savant.