I prefer the terms hetero and cishets
My trick is I donât let what people call me bother me. I was raised with the old saying âSticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt meâ.
Thatâs where I believe you are wrong. Sure, things hurt my feelings. I grew up being picked on. But eventually, you realize itâs the other peopleâs problem and not yours. They think X⊠so what? Thatâs what they believe. Unless they intentionally damage your life by influencing coworkers, friends, and family, simple âname callingâ is useless words that only hurt your feelings because you care what that person thinks. And if that person is putting you down to try and make you feel bad, their words should not matter to you at allâŠ
I didnât say words. I said names. This person was called gay⊠as an insult. For whatever reason by some people. He shouldnât let it bother him because those people arenât worth the time of day to have such a narrow point of view that identifies a person as who they are by a single aspect of who they are rather than seeing the entirety of who they are.
Or you realise that the people insulting you are brain dead and not worth the energy is takes to process their sound waves.
When ive seen what makes them cheer, why would their opinion have any effect on me?
I call myself cishet sometimes, meant as an insult.
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.
How about we donât use any sexuality as an insult
Iâm bi, but most people donât know. Iâve been called a âbreederâ once as an insult, and it was a term being thrown around a lot years ago, I havenât heard it in years which is good cause I donât think those people realized the connotations of that word, especially used towards a person of color
I reserve that insult exclusively for people who engage in pregnancy and birth kink. Which I consider to be pedophilia.
So you mean the natural desire for people to get pregnant and have children? Huh, TIL that the vast majority of all people who ever existed are pedophiles for wanting children.
