I prefer the terms hetero and cishets
Neither are good
Even if one is âless badâ according to some made up metric you decided on, why would you want to stoop to the lesser of two evils? Why donât we all just not use someoneâs sexuality against them?
Yeah youâre right. One has been much more widely used. Then it fell out of favour in a big way when people realised how stupid, cringey, and damaging it is.
It went from being said nonchalantly by everyone to now almost exclusively being used in an ironic fashion by people who arenât straight. I know I do.
Letâs not try to have some kind of weird, pathetic culture war with straight people as some kind of quest for retribution.
Insults are a conversational, social, and emotional weapon. Weapons have valid uses, for example in self defence.
The use of many weapons has effects beyond the immediate violence they do. For example if you buy a gun from a cartel, you help them scale their business and sell more guns, leading to more gun violence. Likewise if you use slurs against marginalised communities, you reinforce the stigma and make the slur more potent, increasing the violence done later. Youâre emboldening an infrastructure of violence in both cases.
If you insult someone by calling them gay, you hurt them and you also hurt all gay people. But if you insult someone by calling them straight, you hurt them without hurting all straight people. Because you are not emboldening an extant infrastructure of violence.
Listen to your mental gymnastics. Just donât insult anyone with their sexuality. Period. You could take it even farther and just say âdonât insult anyoneâ Seems pretty safe to me.
You could take it even farther and just say âdonât insult anyoneâ Seems pretty safe to me.
That suggestion seems to be beyond your capabilities, since you began your comment with a sarcastic quip intended to insult my reasoning capabilities.
Both can be funny in the right context. Furthermore, using âstraightâ as an insult doesnât uphold any kind of systemic oppression, so I have a hard time reading it as anything other than a joke.
The most problematic thing about it is that it is reminiscent of homophobia, but yâall gotta learn to make the difference. Giving bigoted straight people a taste of their own medicine in a context where it cannot possibly hurt them (unlike actual homophobia) is funny.
