feuervogel | I thought this went without saying.

I am so sorry you're having to wrestle with this. D:

I like to think there's hope, because a few years ago I too still tried to defend my use of some unfortunate words, despite being Well Read On Language Abuse in other social issues... so maybe these people, too, will one day look back and cringe to see their old comments defending the right to cause others pain in the name of something trivial.

Well, the person who kept saying "my intent is good, your hurt doesn't matter, and you're misinterpreting it/overreacting/the meaning is totally divorced from that now" decided her desire to continue using ableist slurs was more important than our friendship.

I think calling someone an "asshole" is slander against the noble anal sphincter, which not only supports an important life-enabling function, but also contains many free nerve endings which when stimulated, feel pretty damn good. Its common usage as a derogatory slur reinforces the male heteronormative fear of the asshole being something sexually pleasurable, and encourages the semantic link between the anal sphincter and perversion.

:(

Yo, you're an asshole for saying that. Now I won't stop thinking about my fear of the asshole!

Assholes attack when you least expect them to. Especially when you've got your pants down in the bathroom.

Edited Date: 2011-02-02 08:43 pm (UTC)

This is why guys pee standing up and with their pants mostly on. Cuts the risk down by a half!

I have no idea if you're being serious, because this reads exactly like a parody that a person who intends to defend the status quo would write.

My point is that intent can be more damaging than terminology, and I do believe that over time terminology shifts. Do I think about physically and mentally disabled minority groups when I use the words "lame" and "retarded?" Not really. It didn't actually even occur to me that "lame" might have originally been coined that way until you pointed it out. Should people be so conscious of possibly offending somebody or something that they have to watch everything they say? I don't think so. There are places and situations where that sort of language is appropriate and place where it's not, just like saying "fuck."

Is being in someone's face and asserting a strict list of rules regarding language usage a good discourse to get them to examine their background and privilege? Nope, I don't think so, because it doesn't really get people to engage in discussion, just puts them on the defensive and pisses them off. And I also believe that intent is way more damaging than terminology. It's not what you say, it's what you mean when you say it, what you're choosing to pick about when you use language against somebody else. I don't believe that usage can change peoples' attitudes, but discourse and engagement can, and frankly, saying "You can't say this because it offends Group X" isn't discourse and it isn't engagement about attitudes either.

I will direct you to leora's comments on the previous post, where she explains how, as a disabled person, the term offends and hurts her.

I find your continued ableism displayed in my journal, where I have requested such not be displayed, incredibly disrespectful. I don't give a fuck what you use in your journal; it's your space. This is my journal, and I don't want bigoted language used here.

I'm sorry your friend feels that way, and I hope she knows that most people are not intending to slander disabled people when they say things like "lame" and "retarded," and are only intending to slander whatever it is they're currently slagging.

I find your insistence on slurs against marginalized groups be banned a bit short-sighted. It's possible to find slander against majority groups just as offensive. I also find your accusations of bigotry completely unjustified. There's a difference between bigotry—an active hatred and fear—and "too relaxed to really give a damn," and your insistence that anyone who doesn't follow your rules or your paradigm must be privileged, an asshole, a jackass, a jerk, and/or a bigot, reactionary and reductionist.

I'm sorry you feel that way.

Lame and retarded are terms that have only ever been used against crippled and mentally disabled people. By saying "this show is lame," or "that's retarded," you're reinforcing the notion that lame is bad, that retarded is bad. Maybe the mentally retarded or crippled don't want to be the go-to for all that's bad in the world.

Would you be defending "that shit is so gay"?

There is a definition of "lame" in the dictionary that makes no reference to any disability at all, and I know this has been covered in your previous thread and I completely disagree with most of the people who spoke out against it. Similarly, the use of "retarded" being like "stupid—" attaching a value judgment onto something that is used to describe a group of people is problematic both with good judgments and bad judgments. The problem is that people don't want to be boiled down to group and generic characteristics, no matter how you spin it, but its an unfortunate fact of life that our brains are designed to remember and associate salient characteristics.

I will defend to the death the usage of "that shit is so gay" and "you are so white" and "that's fucking retarded" so long as I know that the speaker themself doesn't hold the assumptions the language supposedly reinforces. If my friend says, "those shoes are so gay" but I know they're totally chill with homosexuality, then I don't give a damn, because the problem you're seeing is not something that's actually there.

If the problem is not actually there, and it's not reinforcing something negative with you, since you know better, and it's not reinforcing something negative with me, since I know better too, then you're just making an association, a misunderstanding that you shouldn't be and that was never meant to be in the first place.

In these cases, I really think that everybody should just be a little more chill. I think people should pick their battles, and there are much more poisonous paradigms in current society to be fighting against than the usage of "lame" and "retarded."

Edited Date: 2011-02-02 09:54 pm (UTC)

You are defending people who are hurting other people, at the expense of the people being hurt.

Why is that difficult to see? Why is it hard to change?

The people who are interpreting, in some cases, the use of this language being hurtful, are people who are misunderstanding intentions. If they are in the actual presence of such language and make their feelings known, then I do apologize for the misunderstanding. But a compromise needs to be reached both ways, and I feel that "Sorry, I didn't mean it that way" and "Okay, I was just checking," should be socially sufficient.

That aside, another issue of what is actually pissing me off right now is that

akiko is calling out me and

corneredangel as "dickheads" on her Twitter account. It's annoying to me that slurs against marginalized groups are not okay (women, racial minorities, people with disabilities, etc.) but slurs against say, males are? The association of "dick" with something that's bad is the same thing as associating "lame" and "retarded" with bad. Or is it just because males are privileged that it's okay to slag them for something they were born with and have to deal with? It doesn't make what you're doing any better.

The idea of turnabout has never been and never will be a viable or optimal reaction to marginalization. If she's going to be on somebody's case about usage of "lame" and "retarded" I find it extremely hypocritical that she's completely cool with calling someone a "dickhead."

It's this sort of behavior that really gets to me, which is why I think a good solution is just to equally slag everyone.

Edited Date: 2011-02-02 10:29 pm (UTC)

You don't see why a slur that is targeted at a disadvantaged group is more offensive than a slur that is targeted at the group with more social power?

Again, your statement is that your freedom to use potentially abusive language is more important to you than stopping people from being hurt. Intent doesn't matter. It really doesn't. If you hit someone with a car accidentally, they are no less injured than if you hit them intentionally. And once you have been clued into the fact that your language is hurting people, an insistence on continuing to use such language means that every time you do, you are deliberately engaging in hurtful behavior. It's meaningless to claim that you don't mean something to be offensive when you know that it is offensive.

You may judge for yourself what kind of behavior that is. If you are honest with yourself, it's not too hard to figure out. If you persist in this, well, let me be careful with my language here and not use any slurs. You will be an insensitive, dishonest, and flagrant enabler of ablism and bigotry.

In any case, I don't get the impression that you're interested in listening to anyone else on this front. And I've said all that I have to say on the subject. Feel free to reply or not to this comment, as suits you, but I am done.

Are they? I find your claim of not meaning to offend a bit disingenuous.

If someone steps on my toes, and I say, "Hey, you stepped on my toes and that hurt." and they say, "Sorry, I didn't mean to." and then they try not to step on my toes any more, then I will believe them that their intentions were good and they accidentally hurt me.

If someone steps on my toes and I say, "Hey, you stepped on my toes and that hurt." and they say, "I didn't mean to, so I'm going to keep stepping on your toes and you shouldn't be hurt by it because my intentions aren't to hurt you." and then they go around stepping on my toes whenever they feel like it, then I'm not going to believe that they actually care whether or not they hurt me.

So, it does seem like at the very least, you don't care whether or not disabled people are harmed by what you do. If you did care, then why wouldn't you try to not harm them? Your actions are in conflict with your statements. I'm not clear why people ought to believe that your intentions aren't to harm others given that. Can you tell me why I should believe someone doesn't mean to harm me if they outright tell me they will take actions I have told them will harm me? Or why I should assume good intent from bad actions when I know someone is aware of the fact that their actions are harmful? Why shouldn't I use the most obvious assumption that they mean the effect that they have been informed will happen from their actions?

Arright, lemme try sneaking in one more point here that I'm not sure has already been covered extensively (lord knows everything else has). I believe that, _in a magical egalitarian world_, a plan of simply slagging on everyone equally might be perfectly valid and defensible. The problem is we don't live in that world, and in the one we've got slagging on different groups has different consequences. The reason using "dickhead" as a negative is _less_ damaging than using, say, "faggot" as a negative is that very few people have been deprived of their livelihoods for having a dick*, whereas quite a few face that problem for being gay. Or black. Or disabled.

Now, that said, I'd still say a completely neutral negative term like "asshole" is even better, since everybody has one of those.

It may also be possible that there's certain private venues where you can actually be absolutely sure that not only does nobody actually mean ill-will towards any of these disadvantaged groups, but also nobody is subconsciously biased against them, and nobody is listening who's having a subconscious bias reinforced, or who is themselves disadvantaged and having a subconscious self-loathing reinforced, or.... etc. And then maybe any old slur could be used and really, actually not cause any damage. But that's gonna be pretty rare.

*To head off an objection here, I'm not saying nobody has ever been discriminated against for being male. But in our society as it currently stands, it's certainly a less severe problem than that of other marginalized groups. Kind of by definition of "marginalized".

Unless you're talking about radical lesbian separatists, men who have been discriminated against are usually those who are disprivileged/marginalized on a different axis: gay men, trans* men, black men, Asian men, etc.

Yes, it's possible to be privileged on one axis and disprivileged on another, or on multiple axes. It's called intersectionality.

How noble of you to defend the usage of "that is so gay." How brave. How wise.

One of the key examples that made me reconsider my opinion on this sort of thing a while back was the term "nigger-work". (Ugh... I have trouble even typing that.) Apparently, that was (is?) used in some places to refer to mindless, unskilled work that anyone could do; I assume that comprehensive dictionaries would list that definition (with no mention of its social context). I don't remember where I heard about the term, but the people who used it explicitly said that they didn't consciously associate it with black people at all: it was just the common term for that sort of work.

And yet, I absolutely believe that associating the term "nigger-work" with dull, menial labor would inevitably, invariably reinforce a deep-seated prejudice that black people are less competent than white people (quite apart from the use of one of the most vile words in the English language). And once I accepted that, I could understand how less blatant examples like "retarded" or even "lame" could have similar consequences for other groups of people (or be heard by them as similarly offensive or hurtful).

All that being said, I emphatically believe that most of this is not even remotely familiar or obvious to most people. (I wish I'd been aware of it earlier.) In general, people use the language as they learned it growing up, and they feel understandably defensive when someone else barges in to tell them that their speech is somehow wrong or improper. (After all, that person is implicitly criticizing their mothers, too, and all the rest of their friends and families!) So my preferred way to address this sort of thing is just to point out the negative aspects of the usage in question and trust that the person I'm talking to will eventually think through them and reach some ethical conclusion. In my experience, that approach tends to work out pretty well (with far more success and far fewer hurt feelings than any other approach that I've seen). So to that extent, I agree with your call to "be a little more chill". :)

I would LOVE to trust that people would think through to the consequences of their actions/words, but given the resistance displayed by multiple commenters to the idea that, regardless of all the intent in the world, there are words that actively cause harm to others, I am very skeptical of this idea.

No matter how many times Leora has pointed out that, no, no matter what you think, lame and retarded are NOT divorced from the slurs on physically and mentally disabled people, the digging in of heels still goes on.

That's true. Part of my strategy involves time, though: I try to plant a seed that may eventually lead the other person to change their mind. My experience has been that it's very rare for them to reverse course immediately, even if it doesn't take that long for them to come around after that discussion is over. (If nothing else, there are well-recognized forms of cognitive bias that make it very hard for people to change positions in the middle of a debate.)

And in fact, I saw what looked like a great example of that in the discussion on your earlier post:

thegreyghost was (as you say) digging in his(?) heels through all of the hard-hitting arguments and invective in that discussion. And then

leora made a calm and reasonable statement that her friend felt hurt by the casual use of "lame" and she explained some of the real effects of connecting broadly negative language to disabilities. And in the very next comment (http://akiko.livejournal.com/1081151.html?thread=3833407#t3834687),

thegreyghost finally said "I'm open to it". Personally, I call that a win, and I suspect that he'll wind up using "lame" less often as a result.

If my years of intense debate through the flame wars of Usenet taught me anything, it was that people essentially never respond well to harsh language, no matter how valid the reasons behind it. I became one of the most respected Tolkien scholars on the 'net not just by having knowledge, but by (usually) finding ways to communicate it well.

Sean is an interesting example. He's willing to reconsider his ideas once something contrary to them is presented.

Skuld, otoh, has no interest at all in changing her behavior. This is based on previous interactions in which she refused to quit using words a mutual friend found hurtful and told her so directly. It was the same "my intent is good, so your hurt doesn't matter" argument. Clearly, giving her time to reconsider was futile, because she has no desire to do so.

Since I've been named, I'll chime in to clarify a bit.

I mostly conceded in exhaustion, taking pause to reflect and regroup. Also because there's only so much I can dispute when approached by the person who is directly affected by the topic.

Additionally, akiko comes from a position that strongly opposes bigotry. While I'm not a fan of it either, I come from a position that strongly opposes censorship. It was on the message of her previous post that our swords crossed.

I don't know if we'll ever come to an exact agreement on this, but I'm willing to better understand her perspective. I believe that we both want a better world and we'll never defeat the enemy if we're at each other's throats.

Opposing censorship is important, I agree! When I see any of this class of issues presented in a tone of "You Must Not Say These Things", it grates on me and raises my anti-censorship hackles, too. But at its core, most of the aspects of this stuff that I fully support boil down to Wheaton's Law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wil_Wheaton#Wheaton.27s_Law): "Don't be a dick!" (Supplemented in this case by the frustrating warning that, "There are subtle ways of being a dick that may not have occurred to you.")

If someone simply forbids me from saying something, I'll usually object. But if someone tells me that saying that thing hurts them personally or gives a clear argument that it could do unanticipated harm to others, I'll take that into account when I choose my language in the future. And I don't consider that to be censorship at all.

I don't think it's censorship to say that "saying such-and-such makes you look like a jerk." And I don't think having commenting guidelines like

akiko's is tantamount to censorship.

Actually, intent is irrelevant.

If I smack you around with a lead pipe, it doesn't matter if my intent is to kill you or to try to massage your back lovingly. The damage will be done regardless of my intent. Intent is only relevant when deciding the correct course of punishment or preventative action to decrease repeat occurrences. If you are judging the harm of the action, intent couldn't matter less.

This is why we don't allow babies to play with loaded guns. Their intentions are great. It doesn't make it any less harmful. We expect adults to be capable of wielding things sensibly though, so we often allow them to do so. If you are so incapable of wielding words well that your intent is out of line with your actions such that your intent is good, but you are doing the equivalent of going around randomly shooting bullets at people anyway, then you are placing yourself in the category of the non compos mentis.

It makes me wonder why you would do that. Why don't you want to be responsible for your actions? Why don't you want to learn what the actual effects are?

It's all nice to say your intentions are good, but really, why should that matter to anyone if you're not a child?

If you are judging the harm of the action, intent couldn't matter less.

Sure, but we're not judging the harm of the action, we're the discussing how to evaluate the usage of one's words, and in the theory of communication, intent is always something that's important to take into account. I don't think you're going to have a realistic picture of the situation if you're only taking one side into account. I understand that some people are offended sometimes, but it's difficult in advance to take everything single thing into account. Sometimes the world would be a nicer place if people were just a bit more chill and accepting, instead of being self-righteous and confrontational.

By your loaded gun analogy,

akiko's problematic usage of the word "dickhead" is similar to my proposal of the usage of "lame" and "retarded." I find it a terrible double-standard that slandering one group is horrific and not okay, and then turning that around to some other group is completely acceptable.

But your intent when you use "lame" is to say that something is negative and bad, correct? You weren't discussing using the word "lame" to talk about a positive attribute or a medical disability. So your intent was correctly assessed and properly taken into account. So, where is the problem?

But "lame" in this usage is divorced from the meaning of "physically disabled." when I say, "Gee, that's sad," I am not trying to slander sad and depressed people, I am using a word that happens to have multiple definitions and applications. If I said, "Hey, that's pathetic," I can't really be held completely accountable for not knowing that somebody who thought themselves pathetic is then offended. The word "lame" is similar, there is a definition that is removed from physical disability.

The same that I use "retarded" when I think something is "stupid." I'm not slagging all retarded or stupid people.

and if you're misunderstanding what I'm trying to say, then it needs to be hashed out, or outright ignored. There we go.

Except that it isn't. The historical usage of the word lame is that it is used as an insult because it compares people to those with a disability. It is a metaphorical comparison of a physical lack to a different kind of lack. It mentally strengthens unconscious links between the view of people with one form of disability as being incompetent in ways that there is no reason to believe that they are. It causes emotional harm to people who have that disability. It makes it more difficult for people who are lame to discuss their disability (really, what word do you think a lame person should use to clearly describe the disability? The only other terms I know have roughly equivalent problems in their use.)

Whether or not you personally think it is divorced from the disability is rather irrelevant. It isn't. And you are held accountable because you have already been informed several times that there exist people who are lame who are harmed by this usage. Your response has repeatedly been that you are unwilling to do any research into the matter, and then to assert that you feel that there is no reason why you should change your usage. This is unsurprising, as you have done no research into the matter. But if you are ignorant, unwilling to do research, and unwilling to listen to others then why do you think that you are right?

I love you, and I'm sorry you've had to do all this 101 crap in my comments.

On a side note, if you want to do some research, this is a fairly easy to understand article that lightly touches on cognitive psychology and explains why such things are harmful. I think it will be understandable to laymen. http://disabledfeminists.com/2010/03/29/stigma-kills-a-concrete-example/

I'm amazed that you can still stand by this argument even when people have told you directly that using that kind of language is hurtful.

The proper reaction to being told that something you said was hurtful is "Oh, I'm terribly sorry, I didn't know. I won't do it again." I find it incomprehensible that you think the proper reaction is, "Well, I didn't mean it, so you shouldn't be hurt." You don't get to tell people what is hurtful and what isn't. That's not up to you.

Really, this is Courtesy 101.

Not that she can reply anymore, but after a mutual friend told her that he was hurt by her use of the words "tr*nny," "f*g," and "trap," Skuld said, "I don't mean it when I say that. You're misinterpreting and overreacting." Your hurt isn't valid, and my jerkishness is more important than you not being kicked in the gut when you read my journal.

She's very wrong in this, and has no desire to leave her 4chan bubble to see what the real world is like and that in this world, words cause harm.

If you say it's off limits it's off limits. But i'm a little confused. Does anyone actually use the word lame to refer to humans anymore? Outside of things like the bible, i don't think i've ever heard it used except in relationship to ideas and horses.

Have you read any of leora's comments on any of these posts? That will answer your question.

That is exactly what I said and why I'm in the doghouse. But I also agree to read the other comments.

You've also said you'd think about it, because you'd never heard it before. Which means you're open to the idea that, hey, these people are telling me this hurts them, maybe I should reconsider. And that's a positive step.

(I don't think anyone is arguing here against using lame in reference to horses, because that's the traditional meaning: inhibited because of injury. There might be someone arguing such, as there are arguments against the use of "lame duck session" of congress.)

leora's comment is kind of buried in the other post, but yes, people do refer to themselves as lame. I also don't hear it that way often, if at all, but I'm perfectly happy to accept it when people say that using it colloquially is hurtful.

I like the excerpt in addition to the word count on your word count posts.

And just in case it ever comes up, I'd appreciate it if you didn't swear in my journal's comments. Not that you would, but I thought I might as well mention it.

--Beth

I already try not to :) Even the TV-allowed swears.

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No glorious Valhalla would await us.

I thought this went without saying.

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