queeranarchism:

chicklette:

qlazzarusgooodbyehorses:

foxsgallery:

shinelikethunder:

can we please bring back “in poor taste” as a concept

Because at some point it got folded in under “problematic,” and now every damn thing that has Unfortunate Implications or deals with sensitive topics indelicately enough to raise hackles or gores somebody’s sacred cow is treated as a grave injustice or a threat to society. Online activism culture has lost the vocabulary to express “this deals with touchy stuff in a way many people might find inappropriate, and you should probably avoid it if insensitivity on this subject gets you angry/upset, but it’s not promoting hateful ideas or demeaning people or affecting anything but my opinion of the creator’s sense of tact.”

I think this really an important post.

We’ve fallen into such a rut of “everything is right or wrong, no inbetween” that stuff that’s merely in poor taste is conflated with things that are actually offensively malicious.

this is so well worded like i been trying to say this for awhile thank you

Damn. This is the thing.

I also kinda dislike that people started saying ‘problematic’ when they could be specific about what someone did wrong. It becomes this vague scary thing that someone ‘said something problematic’ and you don’t know whether they passionately defended nazis or made a clumsy joke about retail workers. And because we don’t know what someone means but we do want to be safe a lot of us just assume to worst and avoid people labelled ‘problematic’. This makes is a very effective tool to bully out people for minor flaws and to reinforce purity culture and disposability culture.