Is it just me or has open, blatant queerphobia and misogyny gotten really bad lately? What the hell happened? Did everyone just suddenly decide to become hateful pieces of shit during the...
Is it just me or has open, blatant queerphobia and misogyny gotten really bad lately? What the hell happened? Did everyone just suddenly decide to become hateful pieces of shit during the pandemic? God damn I hate the future.
The prejudices have always been there, but there was a period of time back in the 00s and even the early 10s where being a jerk to someone else made that person look like a jerk. Being openly...
Exemplary
The prejudices have always been there, but there was a period of time back in the 00s and even the early 10s where being a jerk to someone else made that person look like a jerk. Being openly hateful, regardless of the reasoning, had a jerk-like quality to it and came with a social cost. This acted as a counterbalance to the underlying prejudice.
In the mid to late 10s though, we saw the Twitterification and Trumpification of American society at large. This had the effect of restructuring the idea of being a jerk and allowed those underlying prejudices to resurface and become emboldened. When everything is a culture war, and your enemies are everywhere, and they're evil inhuman people undeserving of anything, then being a jerk to them doesn't mean you're a jerk -- it actually means you're virtuous!
People who once might have experienced social pressures that mitigated their personal aggression and hostility saw, in the 10s, that pressure reversed. Instead of fighting those bad impulses, they were instead actively encouraged to be aggressive and hostile.
I think a really good example of this effect is Westboro Baptist Church. They were known in the 00s for publicly picketing funerals, shouting and carrying signs with extremely homophobic sentiments.
It feels paradoxical and very weird to say this, but I, as a gay man, actually appreciate the Westboro Baptist Church. From their internal perspective they thought they were doing the right and holy thing, justified in their culture war, but most everyone else, from an outside perspective, could see the social cost of their hatred. They ended up being a very strong example of what not to be -- a cautionary tale, an ugly mirror that showed what you looked like when you broke the social contract.
I lived in a very Christian part of the American south when they were at their height, and even though many of the Christians I knew had some doctrinal overlap with them in regards to their view of homosexuality, they couldn't square that with Westboro's overt hatred. I think it prompted a lot of self-reflection in people I knew, and, surprisingly, also a lot of compassion in them for gay people like me. In a world where hate has a social cost and kindness is a virtue, it's hard to witness someone being the target of such extreme bigotry and not have your empathy kick in. Westboro intended to spread hate, but they had a way of, paradoxically, triggering kindness.
I remember being taken aback when Westboro announced that they were going to picket a local funeral in our area, and some of our local churches and Christian organizations were the ones to lead and organize a counter-protest. I can all but guarantee that these groups still thought homosexuality itself was wrong, but they also couldn't countenance the idea of a group picketing a funeral for the purposes of hate. That was the greater evil. This is how things were back then.
In hindsight, it's clear that Westboro was actually just ahead of their time. The techniques and tactics that they used are basically the Twitter and Trump playbooks, only Westboro implemented them a decade or so too early. Unlike when they were operating, our environment has now shifted such that hatred is not seen as its own specific type of evil. It's instead transmuted into something positive, just, and so frequent as to be obligatory.
It's hard to overstate just how prevalent in our discourse this has become. It isn't a left/right issue. It isn't a partisan thing. It's now embedded in the unspoken rules of engagement that is our forever culture war. Expressing contempt for other people, acting in ways to explicitly spite them, and seeing all that as justified because they "deserve" it is just sort of fundamental to how we engage with others now. We expect it.
One of the emergent behaviors I've noticed on Tildes, both in myself and in others, is that people will try to route around this expectation. If I write something thorough, and I'm really clear with my points, and also say explicitly what I'm not saying by implication, and I use some weasel words to make my point less black-and-white, then maybe people won't respond with hostility! We're so used to conflict that it's pleasantly surprising when there isn't any. We flinch before any blows are even thrown, because we anticipate them all the same, and all the time.
Now, the problem with all of this (and this is an explicit example of what I said above, because I can already hear the conceptual pitchforks banging at the door of this comment) is that people will go "yeah, but what about those people who do deserve the hate?"
This is a hard question to answer.
I think it's hard because hate is something that has become so embedded that we've lost sight of what it really is.
When you hate someone, it takes a toll on you. You have a visceral emotional and even sometimes physical response. It's not a good thing. It's not empowering. It's not beneficial in the slightest.
Hate is also largely ineffective. Take a moment and consider someone that you hate -- someone specific.
Now, ask yourself: does this person even know I exist?
For some of you, the answer might be yes. It might be an ex-partner or an abusive family member or someone for whom the nature of your relationship warranted an extreme response in yourself: outright hatred. There is admittedly some utility to hate in those relatively rare situations.
But if I had to wager, for most of us, the answer to that question is probably no. Who are probably the common answers -- the most hated go-tos? People like Trump. Musk.
There is no relationship there, but hatred is a way of creating and maintaining one anyway. A bad one. A detrimental one. They don't just live rent free in your head, they fuck up the apartment and shit the bed on the regular, and the worst part is that they continually make things so awful for you while you have no -- literally zero -- effect on them. Hatred is effective only at sapping your energy. It's a cynical, destructive force.
The modern internet has done a good job of making us think that hatred isn't self-inflicted though. It always tries to externalize the locus, feeding us reasons to hate things and examples of hate-worthy people. It gets us hooked on the rush we get when we feel judgment enter our thinking. If we get that little nudge from our conscience that says "hey bud, just noticing that maybe we're not at our best right now and maybe this is a little wrong," the internet instead pats us on the back and says "no but see, this really does deserve to be hated -- don't listen to that other guy."
It doesn't stop there though. It keeps going: "honestly, by not hating this person you're seeing on your screen, you're actually compromising your values and hurting other people. It is your obligation and duty to hate them."
Remember when I said that hating used to have a social cost? It now has social capital. Not hating is what now has the social cost. After all, if it's your duty to hate someone, then not hating them means you're neglecting your responsibilities. You're delinquent at your post. You're allowing harm to come to others. You're part of the problem.
This last part is the turn that scares me. Terrifies me, really.
I think its easy for the bulk of the left-leaning people here on Tildes to look at obvious, prejudice-based hatred like the queerphobia and misogyny that you brought up and see it as wrong. It's obvious to us.
I think it's much harder for us to look at hatred for someone like Trump and see it as wrong. (No, this is not a both-sides argument.)
What I'm trying to get at is that we have a much harder time evaluating hatred towards Trump as wrong because hate has become so mainstreamed that it is effectively praxis. It is seen as virtuous; it is seen as justified; it is seen as necessary.
Which brings us back to the root issue: why do we see such overt hatred from the right now? Why don't they see it for what it is? Because it became part of their praxis.
That's the fucking terrifying thing. Obviously for the political implications, but also on a human level -- you know, that level that we always forget about because we're too busy living in the anti-personal hate-driven culture warzone that is the modern internet and, now, by extension, even much of modern life? It's scary in a dark, twisted, uncomfortable Black Mirror kind of way.
There's another question we can ask ourselves. It's a really simple one. I like it because it cuts through all the bullshit I've said here and gets to the heart of the issue:
Are hate-filled people happy?
The answer is, of course, no. Hate doesn't leave room for happiness. It overrules it. It substitutes vindication for joy and tries to convince us they're the same thing. Enough repetitions and we genuinely start to believe it. We lose sight of what happiness actually is, because the only way we can feel good is through spite.
I don't want people to lose sight of happiness. I don't want people to hate. I don't want them to hate even when they feel that people deserve it. Even (maybe even especially) when things are scary right now and we're staring down a dark, uncertain future. I want everyone -- literally everyone, regardless of your beliefs or leanings -- to be able to find joy that isn't based in spite. A big part of that means evaluating the hatred in your own heart. Is it working? Is it achieving what you want? Is it worth the cost?
And I know that pretty much the entire internet and world out there right now tells you that, yes, it absolutely is.
And I know that I’m only one lonely little creaky voice out there, but I want to ask you: what if it's not?
But I don't hate them because it feels like the right thing to do. I'm under no illusions that it's helping the situation or bothering them at all. I hate them because they've hurt me and they're...
But I don't hate them because it feels like the right thing to do. I'm under no illusions that it's helping the situation or bothering them at all. I hate them because they've hurt me and they're hurting people that I love. It doesn't feel like a choice to hate them, it's a reaction to seeing the lives of people that I care about (and people that I don't know but care about in the abstract) become measurably worse, or even end.
I suppose someone on the other side could say the same thing, but there's just no logical backing behind it. Of the harmful policies that the Democrats are engaging in (ex. sending weapons to Israel) the people they don't hate have even more harmful policies. It makes sense to hate both groups, or to hate the group engaging in the worse behavior, it doesn't make sense to only hate the group engaging in the less-bad-but-still-terrible behavior.
I'm also a pretty happy person, most of the time. I do credit quite a lot of that time to no longer living in America. But when there is an emotion getting in the way of my happiness tied to Trump and the American right wing, it's not hatred, it's fear. Again, that was especially true when I lived in America.
I'm not making a choice about my emotions based on praxis. I'm making a choice about my actions based on praxis, who I donate to and how I vote and what community organizations I participate with, but I would be doing all of those same things whether I hated Donald Trump or not.
So what you're asking me to do with this comment isn't to return to a natural emotional state stop actively trying to hate some people for no benefit to myself. You're asking me to suppress a natural emotional state that reasonably comes from being harmed, despite the fact that it would be unlikely to improve the outcome on the situation. Further, you're comparing my reasonable, justified, fear and anger, to the fear and anger of people who have at best been lied to, or at worst chosen to hate people despite those people not doing them or anyone else any harm at all. Again, I hate Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis and most of the Supreme Court, because they've actively and demonstrably made life worse for me and people that I love. That's not comparable to someone who hates Joe Biden because they believe that he's a pedophile based on zero evidence. That's not comparable to someone who hates trans people because they believe that they're mutilating children based on zero evidence. That's not comparable to someone who hates Greta Thunberg because they believe that climate change is a hoax, or worse, because doing anything to slow climate change would cut into their profits.
If Trump and DeSantis were just guys saying stuff, I wouldn't hate them, because I wouldn't fear them. I mean, as long as I wasn't trapped in a room with them or anything. But they have power over the people that I love, and unfortunately, over the world. Therefore it would be unreasonable for me not to fear them. And because I fear them, I hate them. Not because I think it makes me cool or virtuous. Because I don't really have a choice.
I appreciate your response. I know it can be super intimidating to engage with a wall of text like mine, especially on frought and difficult topics, and especially at a time like this, so thank...
Exemplary
I appreciate your response. I know it can be super intimidating to engage with a wall of text like mine, especially on frought and difficult topics, and especially at a time like this, so thank you for taking the time to talk to me about this.
Believe me when I say that I understand where you're coming from. I hate Trump too, though "hated" is probably more reflective of where I'm at currently. Do I have contempt for the man? Yes. Do I have contempt for what he stands for? Yes. Am I worried that we're slow-walking into another administration under him in which he has carte-blanche to do awful things? I'm terrified.
In my comment about hate above, I'm trying to talk about the mechanism of hate itself. I saw your other comment below where you talk about the imbalance of hating someone based on falsehoods versus hating someone for legitimate reasons, and I agree. I promise you my comment is not meant to be a "both sides" thing or a false equivalency. I fully think that the hate that I see and have seen my entire life from right wing sources far outpaces anything I see from the left. I say this as a gay guy who grew up in the shadow of AIDS in the American south and left specifically because of the hate that I faced and witnessed there.
What I'm trying to get at is the idea that hate is an insulating process that attempts to seal itself into people over time. As it does this, it increasingly justifies its own existence until it no longer needs to do any sort of justification because the person is already so accustomed to its distortions that their own values are lost.
I have some (well, many, unfortunately) family members who are very Trumpy. We were at a get-together when the news of the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg broke. One person there reflexively cheered, then, in the lag between her response and some consequent self-reflection, she clapped her hand to her mouth and apologized. She, a pro-life person, was openly cheering someone's death. That's not a normal response to death, especially not for someone who explicitly believes life is sacred. Her completely inverted response was a distortion from hatred.
You shared a lot about your situation, and it sounds like you're someone who feels hate but hasn't given yourself over to it. That's normal and human. I feel it too.
What the entire modern internet tries to do, however, is convince us that we don't have the capability to modulate it, address it, manage it, reflect on it, and even move past it. Hate doesn't have to take up residence in us, even if we feel it sometimes. Hate doesn't have to linger, even though it tries to. Hate doesn't have to become the root of who we are and what we do, but it absolutely will if we let it.
I wrote what I did not from some high horse but because I've spent my entire life interfacing with hate and having to hold back the tide from letting it consume my person. I've also witnessed many people who didn't, and I've watched it consume them. I don't want that for anyone.
Thank you for your response. It clarifies a lot of things. I do agree that we shouldn't foster hate. We shouldn't celebrate it, and we shouldn't allow ourselves to become mindless in it. We...
Thank you for your response. It clarifies a lot of things.
I do agree that we shouldn't foster hate. We shouldn't celebrate it, and we shouldn't allow ourselves to become mindless in it. We shouldn't allow it to be directed towards people who are associated with, but not instrumental in, the harms that come to us. Hatred is inevitable, but I agree that we must take care in what we do with it.
She, a pro-life person, was openly cheering someone's death. That's not a normal response to death, especially not for someone who explicitly believes life is sacred.
I actually think that's fairly logically consistent, and I fully understand it. When someone dies, they are disarmed. If they were hurting someone, they have to stop now. She believed that Ruth Bader Ginsburg was hurting people. It would make sense to be glad that she can no longer hurt people. I don't exactly want Ron DeSantis dead. I want him neutralized. If he died, I would be relieved, because he would be neutralized. I'd rather he be neutralized by seeing the error of his ways and choosing not to do any more harm, but the important thing is that the danger ends. Relief and joy can be just as closely linked as fear and hatred.
Where her and I differ is that I find her belief that Ruth Bader Ginsberg was hurting people to be extremely poorly reasoned. For a "pro-life" example, we have pretty strong evidence that banning abortion mostly just moves it around and increases maternal and infant mortality rates, and if you want to reduce abortions the best thing you can do is make contraception free and as easily accessible as possible.
I would say it’s not a matter of suppressing hatred you’re already rightfully feeling; as you say, there are very legitimate reasons for that hatred, and in general you can fight your feelings...
I would say it’s not a matter of suppressing hatred you’re already rightfully feeling; as you say, there are very legitimate reasons for that hatred, and in general you can fight your feelings your entire life and never win.
But modern Twitterified culture encourages us to stoke that hatred in ourselves and others, to throw gasoline on the fire continuously because the fire is righteous and correct. That part is optional. That part used to be frowned upon if not outright shunned, but now it’s celebrated.
It brings to mind a piece of wisdom I’ve picked up over the past decade: don’t trust anyone who wants you to be angry, upset, or scared all the time, even if you agree with them. It’s not that they’re wrong, it’s that continually stoking those flames takes a toll on you and ultimately leaves you with less fuel and motivation to do the boring-but-important work necessary to work on these issues in a healthy way.
Feelings are feelings. We have no choice about which ones we feel. Let them in, let them through, always. Talk about them, journal about them, meditate on them, process them.
We have some control over what we do with them, however.
I have a lot of friends in conservative circles, and these two types of things are said very very frequently. "Ive done nothing to hurt them and they're always hurting me and people I love" is a...
I hate them because they've hurt me and they're hurting people that I love. [...]
Therefore it would be unreasonable for me not to fear them. And because I fear them, I hate them. Not because I think it makes me cool or virtuous. Because I don't really have a choice.
I have a lot of friends in conservative circles, and these two types of things are said very very frequently. "Ive done nothing to hurt them and they're always hurting me and people I love" is a common refrain. Mostly they want to be left alone, but feel like they cannot.
It can feel like their fears are ridiculous and stupid, and mostly just fear of slippery slope stoked by strawmen arguments. But the fear which leads to hate is very real.
Whatever's been done to stoke their fears and hatred for decades is now being done to us. There's a sense of danger and all-or-nothing everything on the line urgency being pushed on us.
I don't think fear of hypothetical or fallacious things should be considered equal to fear of demonstrable, provable things. Fear of your kids being forcibly "transed" is not equal to fear of your...
I don't think fear of hypothetical or fallacious things should be considered equal to fear of demonstrable, provable things. Fear of your kids being forcibly "transed" is not equal to fear of your daughter not being able to receive a necessary abortion.
I understand. But to them, fear of their kid being told by teachers to get an abortion even if the kid doesn't want an abortion, is real and substantiated. It happened to a friend with a teen...
Exemplary
I understand.
But to them, fear of their kid being told by teachers to get an abortion even if the kid doesn't want an abortion, is real and substantiated. It happened to a friend with a teen parent this very year.
Fear of their elderly parents being talked into killing themselves is also real, that was my dad.
Fear of doctors urging them to abort their long hoped for baby because the scans turned up with Downs is also real: happened to two of my friends.
And to the conservative people, they don't experience hate crimes daily, and they don't even know anyone who experiences hate crimes, and so to them they think people hating on LGBTQ+ people is hypothetical and fallacious. But you and I run in different circles and we see it differently.
I'm not trying to argue both sides are the same. They're not. I'm trying to say that the world has become so polarized and our social circles have so little overlaps now that we can clearly see examples of "our people" being hurt, without seeing examples of "their people" being hurt.
Is it dumb for them to think a kid could be convinced to transition? Yes it's totally dumb and I tell them that all the time. Is it awful to learn nothing about hormonal blockers but fear they're being handed out like Halloween candy to every kid? Yes, it's stupid and please for goodness sake read up on it. Is it totally idiot to protest sex ed for their desperately needing sex ed kids? Yes it's moronic please teach them sex ed and save them from actual predators.
So I guess I'm not saying they're the same level of fear. Okay so your doctor is talking about abortion for the fourth time, that's cool, they can't forcibly sign you up for one.
But it does make you stay up at night crying your eyes out wondering if you're putting this baby through prolonged suffering and if your dreams to hold them is just selfish cruelty.
And the social workers and counsellors probably just wanted to give my dad options. But nowadays my dad is talking about it with me a lot about how maybe it'd be less drain on us kids if he just take the perfectly legal option suggested by professionals.
And my friend's kid can tell the teachers attitudes have shifted, and their friendships have cooled, for choosing the socially less acceptable option. It's a lot for a kid to be told point blank by an authority figure that they've thrown their entire future away.
Reality does matter to these people, and they can feel it and be affected by it as well.
But...who is the person they're justified in fearing and hating here? Because as far as I know, those aren't policies with any sort of widespread support or even a single well-known proponent....
But...who is the person they're justified in fearing and hating here? Because as far as I know, those aren't policies with any sort of widespread support or even a single well-known proponent. Absolutely, hate those individuals that said those things. That's no reason to hate people who just...live differently. People who want your friend to have the option to abort or keep the pregnancy, and want her supported either way. People who want your dad to have the option to leave this world painlessly if and when he so chooses or to stay as long as medically possible and not have to worry about what it's doing to his kids because they're receiving support as well. (Admittedly the establishment of the American "left" is not doing much in terms of that support and I fear and hate that about them, though they are by far the lesser of the evils.)
Even aside from the fact that none of these things are being forced, they're also not even policy. They're individuals explaining someone's options poorly. That's the fault of the explanation, not the options, and where it is the fault of the options (i.e. lack of support for teen parents, parents of children with disabilities, the elderly and families with elderly dependents) the left is far and away the group that is more likely to expand those options.
I'm very sorry that your loved ones had those experiences, and I agree that they are justified in hating the people that have harmed them, but I think if that's lead them to be conservative then they've identified the wrong people.
Hmmm it does get messy when things are policy vs when one can just feel the atmosphere is not welcome of them. In the article linked, nobody was booted off Threads. By Policy meta supports LGBTQ+...
Hmmm it does get messy when things are policy vs when one can just feel the atmosphere is not welcome of them.
In the article linked, nobody was booted off Threads. By Policy meta supports LGBTQ+ and by policy they don't allow hate speech etc. But in reality the article reports people feeling shadow banned or feeling not welcomed to begin with.
And I mean, before the whole mess with RvW, before it was policy to ban abortions, there was already a lot of noise and rumours and social pressure. These kinds of things sometimes do accurately predict policy. So, not all slippery slopes lead to an abyss, but it is also not wise to ignore/dismiss all slippery slopes until it's policy, right?
We're here talking about an atmosphere of unwelcomeness. Meta isn't having pop up messages of hate and hostility, but they're contributing to not yet substantiated fears of trans hate, and we can kind of connect the dots....
Sorry for being so clumsy with my words, but I mean that when we can feel atmosphere of unwelcomeness and unease, when we live in a place where people in positions of clear authority (Heath care providers, mental health workers, teachers) are clearly advocating one stance and treat you differently when you choose something different.....one can be justified to fear that policy change will soon follow.
So who should my friends hate?
Nobody, turns out.
Getting back to what kfwyre said in a grandparent comment: let's just not hate.
These people offered advice best they could go alleviate suffering. I think they're wrong. They didn't think they were pushy or being hateful, they think they're being compassionate and offering choices. But that's the thing when we get up to core moral choices: they're so central to us that offering choices even worded gently will hurt and wound us, and contribute to great unhappiness.
We can imagine the reverse being unpleasant and nearly oppressive cant we? If I were a pregnant teen and when I came back to class after my abortion, and I can see my teacher treat me differently than before, and out right tell me I'll regret it for the rest of my life......is the teacher just giving me options and explaining it poorly?
And the job of prenatal tests is to inform, and should people ask questions to provide answers. Imagine if the reverse happened and my friends decided to abort, and the health care providers urged with the same intensity and repetition for them to reconsider. That's not cool either right?
Sometimes offering choices when the person doing the offering clearly has made a moral judgement on you, especially repeatedly offering a particularly highlighted choice, doesn't feel like a free choice.
It's patronizing at the very least: clearly you haven't thought about killing yourself / your child before, since the choice is so clear to me, so here let me just reiterate it one more time.
But let's not hate on these workers, sure.
I think we all want to live in a world where people keep their judgement to themselves and don't treat you differently when they find out you've chosen something different, or when they find out you are something different than what they think is right.
For what it's worth, conservative people don't hate on particular queer people either. They usually hate on some nebulous cloud of forces pushing "the gay agenda". They're sort of right and sort of wrong. Their passions are perpetually fanned by folks hiding behind queer rights activism, and hiding behind abortion rights activism. There has been a concentrated effort for decades to make all of our lives miserable and place the blame on a rotating roster of people: immigrants, other races, other countries, queer people, etc.
The same is happening to us. Our health care sucks, cost of living is crazy, and democracy is crumbling. Really, a surprise pregnancy wouldn't be the end of the world that it currently might be in the states if health care was awesome and there's any number of social support and free childcare and several thousands of dollars a month per child. Right?
If the police would actually turn up and arrest hate crime committing people, it would be a less scary place to live in right? Imagine if we had properly enforced policies online to keep out haters, instead of what the article's GLAAD report found:
Characterized by fear-mongering, lies, conspiracy theories, dehumanizing tropes, and violent rhetoric, these posts — many by high-follower accounts — "aim to boost engagement, generate revenue, and seed hateful narratives about trans, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming people. These accounts profit from such hate, and so does Meta and its shareholders.
We're being squeezed in every direction, and then we're being fed a narrative that it's because of "those people". For profit!!
Hating on "them" is not the solution even though we're told all day and night our hate is the last thing keeping what little we have left from being disappeared as well. It's always been greedy jerkwads stealing our cooking and pointing at us to fight for crumbs.
Right, but the same people who are banning abortions are making healthcare inaccessible and and shredding social support. This just further justifies hating them. Right, but the same people whose...
The same is happening to us. Our health care sucks, cost of living is crazy, and democracy is crumbling. Really, a surprise pregnancy wouldn't be the end of the world that it currently might be in the states if health care was awesome and there's any number of social support and free childcare and several thousands of dollars a month per child. Right?
Right, but the same people who are banning abortions are making healthcare inaccessible and and shredding social support. This just further justifies hating them.
If the police would actually turn up and arrest hate crime committing people, it would be a less scary place to live in right?
Right, but the same people whose rhetoric spurs hate crimes are the people supporting the police in behaving the way that they currently do. The same people who are doing the hate crimes are often the same people who are being the police, to paraphrase RATM.
Imagine if we had properly enforced policies online to keep out haters, instead of what the article's GLAAD report found:
Characterized by fear-mongering, lies, conspiracy theories, dehumanizing tropes, and violent rhetoric, these posts — many by high-follower accounts — "aim to boost engagement, generate revenue, and seed hateful narratives about trans, nonbinary, and gender non-conforming people. These accounts profit from such hate, and so does Meta and its shareholders.
This further justifies hating the people bolstering not just capitalism, but this specific version of capitalism that we have where human lives comes second to money.
Your examples seem to bolster my point.
We're being squeezed in every direction, and then we're being fed a narrative that it's because of "those people". For profit!!
It is because of "those people"! Maybe you mean something different by "those people", but I mean "those people who have the power to hurt me and the people I love and are using it or have used it." I don't mean "some guy that disagrees with me somewhere." For each of the people that I am referring to for whom I feel hatred, I can name a specific act that they have done to cause harm. I'm not talking about a nebulous other. I'm frustrated by the nebulous other, I'm saddened by them, I am scared of what they may do as a collective, but I don't hate them as individuals. I don't know enough about them. I also know that they couldn't hurt me as individuals. Even as a collective, I would still have options for evading them if it wasn't for mechanisms like capitalism and our broken electoral system. I do hate those systems. I do hate the (specific, namable) people who have the power to improve those systems but don't, or even make them worse.
Hating on "them" is not the solution
Again, I don't hate them (or not hate them) because it's a solution or because it's a reasoned position that I think benefits anything. I hate them as an emotional response to them hurting me.
For what it's worth, conservative people don't hate on particular queer people either.
They absolutely do. Contrary to what you implied earlier, I do know quite a few conservative people, of varying levels of extremism. Mostly they're family, so I've known them my entire lives. They absolutely hate queer individuals, some of them to the point of claiming to be willing to do violence, though I know of very few specific instances of it. I did know one guy - haven't spoken to him in years for reasons that will become obvious - who we "agreed to disagree" with on homophobia. It was less abnormal at the time. He got out of prison recently after beating one gay man to death, and another to a point where he lost sight in one eye and hearing in one ear. I recognize that he is the most extreme end, I am not claiming that it's common among conservatives, but it does exist, I do have experience with it, and I have had many conversations with conservatives about their viewpoints. During these conversations I try my absolute best to understand them, and they typically are completely disinterested in understanding me or any evidence that may exist. They have different mechanisms for that. One sister is simply uninformed. She doesn't want to know any facts, and once told me that I "know too much" to talk about things with. She didn't mean "know" in scare quotes like, I'm overconfident in things I only think are true. She meant that she prefers to operate on intuition and how she feels about things, and I was making it too complicated by bringing up facts. I'm not assuming that, we discussed it. One aunt, much more extreme, is actively misinformed. She frequently sends me links to things like Natural News and Info Wars and other conspiracy theory peddlers. If I try to explain the logical holes, she tells me I've been brainwashed by the MSM. She's inoculated herself against learning anything. Those are two examples, I've got a big, mostly conservative family, if you'd like more.
In the article linked, nobody was booted off Threads. By Policy meta supports LGBTQ+ and by policy they don't allow hate speech etc. But in reality the article reports people feeling shadow banned or feeling not welcomed to begin with.
And I mean, before the whole mess with RvW, before it was policy to ban abortions, there was already a lot of noise and rumours and social pressure. These kinds of things sometimes do accurately predict policy. So, not all slippery slopes lead to an abyss, but it is also not wise to ignore/dismiss all slippery slopes until it's policy, right?
Well, no. The noise and rumors and social pressure weren't what caused the problem. They were there, but there were also active legislative and judicial attempts. Those were the things to pay attention to. There's lots of noise and rumors about universal healthcare, but that's not going to happen until there are legislative and judicial attempts. We knew that abortion was going to be banned after Roe v. Wade was overturned because many states had trigger laws, and others had been trying to bring cases before the Supreme Court for the purposes of overturning Roe v. Wade so that they could ban abortion. Not just because the school nurse was judgemental about someone terminating a pregnancy. There are plenty of things that there are rumors and whispers about that will either never happen. Basing your fears on rumors and whispers instead of the active attempts and stated goals of the people in power is not basing your beliefs on reality.
So who should my friends hate?
Well sure, if it's an option for them to hate nobody, that's great. It isn't productive and is clearly a negative emotion. In the same vein, they shouldn't feel sad about anything, or ashamed of anything, or angry about anything. They should, if they can hack it, only feel joy, or the determination to improve a situation so that they can then feel joy. Really, even the joy is unnecessary, but at least it isn't negative.
A big part of my point is that you can't choose not to feel emotions, and in some cases the emotion of hate is justified, and it would be unnatural not to feel it. If they do feel that fear, and feel that hatred, I would absolutely understand and find that justified. If they hate the individuals who, against the policies of their organizations, pressured them in a hurtful way, I would understand that. If somehow it is the policy of those organizations to exert that pressure, it would absolutely be justified to hate the people who set that policy and the people who are profiting off of it. It would be completely reasonable to hate the people who have constructed and bolstered the systems under which this sort of pressure may make sense to some people - for example, Ronald Regan for gutting the welfare programs that would support a family with a disabled child. I'm not saying they should hate those people. If they're capable of the stoicism to avoid it, that's great. But there's no problem with them hating those people.
There is a problem with them hating people who do choose to get abortions in those situations. There is a problem with hating people who want them to have choices about those situations, and would always be careful not to present those options with any bundled value judgement over which is the correct one for them. There is a problem with hating the people who are trying to repair the systems that would allow them to make their preferred choice, simply because they aren't trying to make that the only choice for anyone.
They didn't think they were pushy or being hateful, they think they're being compassionate and offering choices. But that's the thing when we get up to core moral choices: they're so central to us that offering choices even worded gently will hurt and wound us, and contribute to great unhappiness.
You didn't describe these situations as being gently worded, though. Were they? I do think it matters if the people delivering this information were attempting to be kind and non-judgemental and it was just an extremely tender subject for the people receiving the information, or if the people delivering the information were being judgemental and pushy.
But let's not hate on these workers, sure.
I actually don't have a problem with them hating those workers, assuming that they were actually being inconsiderate or indelicate.
If I were a pregnant teen and when I came back to class after my abortion, and I can see my teacher treat me differently than before, and out right tell me I'll regret it for the rest of my life......is the teacher just giving me options and explaining it poorly?
...no? Abortions can't be undone, at that point there is no option. You'd also be completely justified in hating that hypothetical teacher. It's extremely valid for your friend's kid to hate her teacher for mistreating her. It's just not reasonable for her to hate the fact that other people can make a different decision, the people that do make it, or the people that keep that option available.
And the job of prenatal tests is to inform, and should people ask questions to provide answers. Imagine if the reverse happened and my friends decided to abort, and the health care providers urged with the same intensity and repetition for them to reconsider. That's not cool either right?
Correct. The problem is the pushiness. I don't think I'm understanding your goal with these hypotheticals.
When my mom was pregnant with my little brother at 40, the provider who told her about the pregnancy suggested that she terminate due to her age, and she was very judgemental when my mom declined. It seems justified to me that my mom would hate her - for the judgement and the ageism, not for being willing to perform an abortion.
Sometimes offering choices when the person doing the offering clearly has made a moral judgement on you, especially repeatedly offering a particularly highlighted choice, doesn't feel like a free choice.
Right, they shouldn't do that. It's better to be in that situation than to not have a choice at all, but it's still not good.
I'm sorry if I'm being blunt or repetitive, I'm trying to be clear and precise. I appreciate your engaging with me and taking the time to have this conversation.
I really appreciate chatting with you about this topic as well. And I can see that perhaps I do live in a very different level of threat than you do, and that to continue being stoic ---> passive...
I really appreciate chatting with you about this topic as well. And I can see that perhaps I do live in a very different level of threat than you do, and that to continue being stoic ---> passive in a crisis is not only unnatural, but detrimental. If there's smoke let's keep calm, turn off the burners and open some windows. But when there's a huge blazing fire that same approach just plain doesn't work, it's time to either break out the extinguisher or flee for our lives.
And I mean, you clearly have lived through situations of lower threats and reacted similarly to how I operate.......perhaps it really is simply a difference in threat level.
I can also share that I was also previously, and perhaps similarly, wrong on the topic of police violence. Oh let's be reasonable and calm and reach out and Kumbaya and all that. And all that rhetoric was likely stupidity to those on the front lines against police brutality and their illegal, unrestrained use of violence.
I'm putting this in a separate reply because I don't think it's relevant to the larger conversation, but it might be so just in case: It would be equally problematic for me, personally. I refuse...
I'm putting this in a separate reply because I don't think it's relevant to the larger conversation, but it might be so just in case:
Really, a surprise pregnancy wouldn't be the end of the world that it currently might be in the states if health care was awesome and there's any number of social support and free childcare and several thousands of dollars a month per child. Right?
It would be equally problematic for me, personally. I refuse to carry a pregnancy to term. If I became pregnant I would abort regardless of where I live. If I die in the process, that is preferable to me than to suffer through the pregnancy.
You absolutely have not spoken to any queer person who has grown up in a conservative environment if you believe this. I know tons of queer teens and young adults who were sent to conversion...
For what it's worth, conservative people don't hate on particular queer people either.
You absolutely have not spoken to any queer person who has grown up in a conservative environment if you believe this. I know tons of queer teens and young adults who were sent to conversion therapy or kicked out of the house by their parents. One of my peers was asked not to come back to my school in high school because he was gay. We avoided particular actors and programming because they were out as gay. My parents would have never let me have a sleepover at my friend with gay parents' place. And I grew up thinking that, among the conservatives, we were the nice ones because we were "love the sinner hate the sin" types and not literally beating gay people to death (which, incidentally, did happen some places and probably still does, albeit more rarely).
You're right. I did grow up in I guess a magical bubble where I only have friends of friends who have had bad things happened to them. There are plenty of personal stories where kids are rejected...
You're right. I did grow up in I guess a magical bubble where I only have friends of friends who have had bad things happened to them. There are plenty of personal stories where kids are rejected by their parents for not choosing the right career or having some form of mental illness. Ive seen plenty of kids pulled from sex ed or people have left churches for wrong view on baptism or how many spoons....or there were social gossip etc. but yea, folks with queer family just kind of....chugs along. There's also queer friends of friends who stopped responding to Christmas cards and stopped hanging out with my conservative friends because they don't feel adequately loved or accepted. (I know this last one is going to rightfully stem suspicions but for what it's worth I believe my friends. In one case it was because my friends continue to go to a church that isn't fire brimstone, but not affirming either. Maybe it's because my friend was being patronizing in that folks are gay only cuz they choose to be? I could believe that. They wouldnt argue, but the pressure atmosphere I wrote about could be there,nI imagine)
So no, not outright prejudice or hate speech or acts of violence. My apologies for having forgotten that personal bias.
For parents who reject their children, do they hate these children or do they think the rejection is some distorted loving thing they're doing? The love the sinner type nonsense you talked about.
I'm sure they think they love their children. They definitely feel the emotion, and they feel sad about what's happened. But if you hurt your child or abandon them because of a perceived flaw, you...
For parents who reject their children, do they hate these children or do they think the rejection is some distorted loving thing they're doing? The love the sinner type nonsense you talked about.
I'm sure they think they love their children. They definitely feel the emotion, and they feel sad about what's happened. But if you hurt your child or abandon them because of a perceived flaw, you clearly don't love them unconditionally. We all told ourselves we were "love the sinner hate the sin" people, but when the "sin" is a fundamental part of their life and your actions repeatedly harm them because of it... there's only so much you can hurt someone and keep saying you love them. In the end, I'm not sure the emotions they feel actually matter -- what really matters are their actions and how they treat queer people in their lives.
When I was growing up in that environment, one of my best friends came out to me. He described how he'd tried everything he could to stop being gay (he was vague but implied that it included doing things we otherwise disapproved of straight people doing, like watching porn). I loved him as much as I could love a friend, and I earnestly believed what I'd been taught about how gay people going to hell. I couldn't brush it off as being a choice when it was my friend confessing how upset he was about it and how he'd be straight if he could. I couldn't disbelieve someone I loved about their own experiences like that. (This, I wager, is a contributing to factor to why queer friends of friends would cut someone off who insists being gay is a choice -- it's essentially accusing them of lying.) As a result, the circumstance he'd been placed into, ostensibly by a God who loved him, struck me as deeply, cosmically unfair. I was distraught. I kept his being gay a secret from teachers and other friends, even when other people he told did not do so (which eventually resulted in his being asked not to return to our private school and attending public school starting the next year). I prayed for him every day and wondered how God could do this to someone, how God could make someone gay. This was the beginning of the end for my being religious, because I could no longer love a God who would make someone gay only to damn them. I remember at the time telling my mother (who remains steadfastly religious and probably still believes being gay is a sin) that even if that was how God is, I didn't want to worship a God like that.
There's a Bible story in which God commands Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac to him. Abraham dutifully complies and it's only because God stops him last minute to praise him for his obedience and tell him he doesn't actually have to kill his son that he doesn't go through with it. In the context of this Bible story, Abraham is said to love his son, and that's why it's such a big deal that he listened to God anyway -- he loved God more, as he was supposed to. Surely this is how Christians who reject gay family and friends see themselves. But I don't agree with framing this as love. I don't think someone who is willing to do things like this to someone can be said to love them, even if they earnestly believe God wants them to do that. Maybe this is just because I don't love God enough. But if so, it's not from lack of trying.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and insights. I, too, struggle to understand how it is that we're supposed to not just live, but to give thanks and praise for all the challenges that we are...
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and insights. I, too, struggle to understand how it is that we're supposed to not just live, but to give thanks and praise for all the challenges that we are given. It is often said that "God doesn't give us more than we can handle" and I am so glad to, as an adult, be finally told by good priests that that's pop culture rubbish. It's clear that many many of us were given far too much to bear and we break under the pain. What happens afterwards we will have to leave it up to the one who judges: either (1) there is no god in which case, we're all good; (2) there is a vengeful and hateful and god who does not redeem our weaknesses and does not care about those of us who have broken from what he gave us, in which case big finger do your worst, none of us can stand anyway; (3) or perhaps the stories of the loving Father, who runs towards us when he sees us from afar and puts his ring and cloak on us before he's heard our apology, who loves us even if we're unrepentant and angry and doesn't believe.
I find it very odd that all these parables were told of what God is supposedly like, only for the very self righteous to take up the mantle of the prodigal's hateful Older Brother, or the Pharisee who crosses the street to avoid the wounded, or the labourer who insists on skimming the wages of the last to be "fair", etc. And to insist that that is right and holy living.
In the end, I'm not sure the emotions they feel actually matter -- what really matters are their actions and how they treat queer people in their lives.
I think you're so right on this. Wasn't there the parable of the sheep and the goats, where many will be shouting Lord Lord and He will say depart from me I never knew you? In the end it won't be boasts (here I'm more guilty than most) but whether one really did give water to the thirsty, fed the poor, clothed the naked, visited those in prisons (not add to them!) and provided housing to refugees.
Love isn't going to be evaluated on professed feelings.
Preach! Ive thought what you thought for a long time now, but far less eloquently laid out :) Maybe a lot of Tildes people grew up left leaning, and they don't often get to see conservative people...
Preach!
Ive thought what you thought for a long time now, but far less eloquently laid out :)
Maybe a lot of Tildes people grew up left leaning, and they don't often get to see conservative people and how they think. Oh we're TOLD how they think all day every day: they hate us cuz they ain't us. But it's not real. The left has strawmen and we're not so immune to being dog whsitled at either.
It doesn't stop there though. It keeps going: "honestly, by not hating this person you're seeing on your screen, you're actually compromising your values and hurting other people. It is your obligation and duty to hate them."
I do feel like sometimes being on the left, we have our own virtue signal requirements. Like, it's not good enough that someone doesn't openly hate on LGBTQ+ folks, theyre just as bad if they are missing any rapidly increasing number of qualifications that secure their membership as allies.
Outwardly we'll say something like, we just want tolerance and to survive.
And then in reality we demand 1984 O'Brian level of "we love Big Brother" allegiance to all the latest and greatest progressive thought for any of it to count. Any bit of hesitation and you might as well be Westboro Baptist.
We are that way because we have ingested and been fed a steady diet of "they deserve hate, they're either all the way with us or they're part of the problem to be hated on"
Not hating on queer people is definitively the bare minimum you could do, and I would call it basic empathy rather than outward allyship. Edit: Also the inclusion of "openly hate" makes me want to...
Like, it's not good enough that someone doesn't openly hate on LGBTQ+ folks, theyre just as bad if they are missing any rapidly increasing number of qualifications that secure their membership as allies.
Not hating on queer people is definitively the bare minimum you could do, and I would call it basic empathy rather than outward allyship.
Edit: Also the inclusion of "openly hate" makes me want to clarify that just hiding your queerphobia beneath a thin veneer of civility (what I would call "inwardly hating" something) does not count you as an ally.
Yeah, it's like... I have family who don't "openly hate" on queer people but are absolutely homophobic and transphobic. Social pressure and a desire to maintain personal relationships with queer...
Yeah, it's like... I have family who don't "openly hate" on queer people but are absolutely homophobic and transphobic. Social pressure and a desire to maintain personal relationships with queer people in their lives (like me) have changed their behavior, but they still fundamentally believe it's a sin and would prefer that queer people not exist. The current status quo is worlds better than where it was when I was growing up, when acquaintances would get cut off by their parents because they were queer. But that absolutely doesn't make people like my family "allies" even if it's more palatable to interact with them now.
Sure. Prison labor camps are always nicer when you try and forget about the jailors and the world outside and instead concentrate on the little things. /s
Sure. Prison labor camps are always nicer when you try and forget about the jailors and the world outside and instead concentrate on the little things. /s
Elon gave full permission to nazis on X. Trump brought the haters out of the shadows and they feel empowered to be loud and proud. The Christian right has become increasingly aggressive.
Elon gave full permission to nazis on X. Trump brought the haters out of the shadows and they feel empowered to be loud and proud. The Christian right has become increasingly aggressive.
I wrote a huge nuanced comment about what I think is a major cause of this but I deleted it when I realized that the more words I added were making my point less clear and that this message won't...
Is it just me or has open, blatant queerphobia and misogyny gotten really bad lately?
I wrote a huge nuanced comment about what I think is a major cause of this but I deleted it when I realized that the more words I added were making my point less clear and that this message won't really be taken well by a lot of people.
I will simply say that homosexuality won acceptance with the love-is-love campaign, messaging that signaled to mainstream Americans that gay people wanted the same thing they did and arguing against two people simply wanting to love each other was so difficult that even many socially conservative religious people began to accept gay people either outright or in a live-and-let-live compromise of their values. Gay people showed straight people, we're just like you. Well, we've come a long way from those days and the way that gay people are portraying themselves in social media and increasingly in mainstream media are not at all conducive to inclusive messaging.
Do I believe that people should be allowed to practice what they want, consensually, in how they express themselves and practice forms of sex? Absolutely, 100%, and without judgement aside from occasionally finding something cringy. But do I believe that people should be showcasing this to wide audiences who find that content objectionable and socially abnormal? No, and I believe that the latter puts serious risk to the hard won acceptance of homosexuality. I think the fight for acceptance still struggles on but we are just not at a point in American society where it's okay to be that different and not expect people to start to form bad associations or even push back against acceptance in general.
I'm not arguing at all for people do go back into the closet, I think seeing two men walk romantically hand in hand down the street should be normalized and accepted without reservation but some of the things I've been seeing from fellow members of the community, both in public and online, are a far cry from that. I think others are correct that Trump normalized right-wing incivility and that social media encourages widespread incivility in general but I think we as a community need to take a hard look at how we portray ourselves to outsiders and understand how they are going to react to that, even when that reaction is not justifiable it's still the reality of the situation.
So what counts as "showcasing" here? Kissing my wife in public? Saying "my wife" in a casual workplace conversation? Existing in public as a trans person who doesn't pass? Getting a double...
But do I believe that people should be showcasing this to wide audiences who find that content objectionable and socially abnormal? No, and I believe that the latter puts serious risk to the hard won acceptance of homosexuality.
So what counts as "showcasing" here? Kissing my wife in public? Saying "my wife" in a casual workplace conversation? Existing in public as a trans person who doesn't pass? Getting a double mastectomy for gender-affirming reasons? Going topless at the beach? Breastfeeding a child in public? Wearing a short skirt? Wearing trousers at all instead of a skirt? How far do we have to go to appease people who "find that content objectionable and socially abnormal"?
I'm going to be charitable and assume that you're not just purposefully choosing innocuous examples. I'm also not talking about transgender people which is a subject I don't intend to reach with...
I'm going to be charitable and assume that you're not just purposefully choosing innocuous examples. I'm also not talking about transgender people which is a subject I don't intend to reach with this narrative. If we're going to be intellectually honest here we're going to have to admit that things exist on a spectrum and what is socially acceptable and abnormal can at some point cross over into finding wide disgust or condemnation, any inability for commenters to envision something more egregious than saying "my wife," routine PDA, or wearing trousers is a gross failure of imagination and doubly any failure for someone to be able to put themselves into someone else's frame of mind (in this case a normal American socially centrist or conservative individual) is a huge part of the political problem we face in the US.
What you call appeasing is at a certain point conforming to social norms or what I call, living in a society. Gay culture has always existed outside of social norms and, quite frankly, can be at times pretty extreme compared with what average people find acceptable in life or at least what average people feel is acceptable to disclose in real life. There are a lot of social norms that I violate as a gay man but I keep those private outside my very closest of friends, for whatever reason a lot of gay people no longer feel the need to keep those things private. And to be very clear, we're not talking about me talking about my boyfriend, holding his hand, or giving each other a kiss in public. If you imagine a line that wider society generally deems as acceptable and cannot imagine what things may constitute crossing that line by a margin large enough to turn public opinion against gay people, then I don't think me giving any examples would help this conversation at all.
My point is that this line moves. That list of things are all things that people absolutely can and do object to still. Many of them absolutely crossed that line by a large margin in the past and...
If you imagine a line that wider society generally deems as acceptable and cannot imagine what things may constitute crossing that line by a margin large enough to turn public opinion against gay people, then I don't think me giving any examples would help this conversation at all.
My point is that this line moves. That list of things are all things that people absolutely can and do object to still. Many of them absolutely crossed that line by a large margin in the past and in some places in the present. There are US states where I could not do some of these things safely. My mother still says "ew" whenever there's a gay kiss on TV. If queer people are required to stay behind a line of what society deems publicly acceptable, our only option is not to exist at all.
Without examples of what you mean and how it's specific to queer people in a way that's responsible for turning public opinion against us, I can't think of any behavior that is egregious enough that society rightfully disapproves of even straight people doing it while also being sufficiently unique and common to queer people that it would remotely be justified to turn public opinion against them. My only recourse is to assume you're referring to the same things that other people who make similar complaints are -- and that's overwhelmingly people who criticize queer people for doing things straight cis people do all the time, or people who want queer people not to exist at all.
I can't read u/TreeFiddyFiddy's mind, but I think this Key and Peele bit encapsulates how...loud some queer people are: https://youtu.be/e3h6es6zh1c?si=O5tijzRnFKzx6icV I get that it's a comedy...
I get that it's a comedy bit, but I have known many queer people that turned their sexuality into their entire identity. I know people often explode out of the closet and calm down with time. Still, it's sometimes worth discussing what's acceptable to flaunt in public.
But when people are as loudly and aggressively straight, they might be equally held accountable by HR, but no one talks about banning straight marriage. So this is not a queer people problem. It's...
Exemplary
But when people are as loudly and aggressively straight, they might be equally held accountable by HR, but no one talks about banning straight marriage. So this is not a queer people problem. It's that same issue where the acts of any one minority are projected on the whole and "allyship" is conditional, which are majority issues. Or in this case, heterosexual issues.
This whole thread is "let's talk about what's acceptable" by mostly saying queer people can sometimes do "too much". But mostly with zero actual examples except a key and Peele sketch and a lot of suggestive eyebrow gestures. It's very "behave according to majority culture or lose your civil rights" purity culture junk. And it's right up there with " I mean if they would just act right, the police wouldn't harass them." Note how this can be about any minority population, including queer people?
I'm fairly certain if we were talking about race, and someone was complaining about Black people's "behavior" in such vague terms, someone else wouldn't come in and help explain their behavior using a Key and Peele sketch. But maybe I'm wrong and should expect to be disappointed. Black queer folks get double amounts of respectability culture expectation garbage in the first place
And yeah this is coming from inside the house, I get it. But it's still respectability bull.
It's quite frankly a very unwelcoming Thread for LGBTQ folks, and I don't really think that's what the title intended.
Honestly I wouldn't even be shocked if that circumstance happened. The bar for white people is on the floor when it comes to stuff like that lol. The only reason I'd be surprised is that Tildes is...
if we were talking about race
Honestly I wouldn't even be shocked if that circumstance happened. The bar for white people is on the floor when it comes to stuff like that lol. The only reason I'd be surprised is that Tildes is so white that I don't see the original conversation about race even starting.
But yeah, I absolutely agree, it's all unwelcoming respectability bullshit. When I first saw this topic on the front page, I misread the title as saying "LGBT and marginalized voiced are not welcome on Tildes" at first. Generally that's not true, especially in ~lgbt, but threads like this are enough that if I were a new user, I'd be put off.
Look as soon as I said it.... I know. And I hate doing an oppression comparison but sometimes it can make people realize the language being used is a problem. And this is why, though I feel same...
Look as soon as I said it.... I know.
And I hate doing an oppression comparison but sometimes it can make people realize the language being used is a problem.
And this is why, though I feel same sex marriage was crucial its prioritization was criticized by many in the queer community. We didn't break down restrictive systems we just slid into them. And that's important and also it isn't the ideal end.
I think focusing on marriage was crucial due to the legal protections it provides -- marriage has been a legal and financial union for much longer than it's been an expression of romantic love....
I think focusing on marriage was crucial due to the legal protections it provides -- marriage has been a legal and financial union for much longer than it's been an expression of romantic love. But my current residence permit is based on me being married to my spouse, so that part is much more salient to me. As a result, I side-eye queers (especially young ones) who call marriage equality assimilationist. I absolutely think it was also a huge force behind the wider positive cultural change that has happened in the US when it comes to attitudes toward gay people. But I agree that we are far far away from the ideal end, and we need to keep fighting for queer acceptance.
Agreed, ultimately it was necessary and crucial given our societal status quo but I do understand the criticism of it from a queer theory/liberation standpoint. I'm less satisfied with modifying...
Agreed, ultimately it was necessary and crucial given our societal status quo but I do understand the criticism of it from a queer theory/liberation standpoint. I'm less satisfied with modifying existing structures instead of reconstructing them and continually find myself obligated to both support and act in that manner in life so it's an internal dissonance I'm feeling and expressing here too.
Discussing how public behaviour affects how queer people are viewed seems like a reasonable topic for ~lgbt. It's funny you mention race since the underpinnings of respectability politics are the...
Discussing how public behaviour affects how queer people are viewed seems like a reasonable topic for ~lgbt.
My lived experience and discussions with homophobes that I turned into allies clearly aren't valued though, so I doubt any further discussion will make a difference. I've felt more than enough judgement in my life from other queer people for being happy and chill with my identity. We all have to fight discrimination in our way. I hope someday there's no more need to discuss discrimination against queers.
It's not funny, I mentioned what I intended. To quote from that link And I firmly believe that pride premised on how well we bow to dominant culture is not pride, nor is it acceptance. In fact,...
It's not funny, I mentioned what I intended. To quote from that link
Campaigners for LGBT rights have struggled with the issue of respectability politics. A distinction has been drawn between an attitude that celebrated and affirmed sexual difference in 1960s gay rights campaigns, and contemporary approaches that seek to reduce and underplay sexual differences. Gay people are portrayed as having similar values to the wider cisgender heteronormative society, which is considered "a pride ... premised on a nonconscious agreement with dominant views about what is shameful".[30]
And I firmly believe that pride premised on how well we bow to dominant culture is not pride, nor is it acceptance. In fact, I'm arguing we're not that different, we're just judged differently for it. The LGB movement is engaging in respectability politics too.
No where have I said your experiences aren't valued. But I do not feel that arguing to revoke or restrict rights is ever a reasonable response to "bad behavior" (and let's presume it is) from a minority. That isn't allyship and it's not supporting other queer folks. I don't love drag shows, which has a lot to do with me being a non-binary introvert who isn't comfortable with big displays of femininity in particular or really gregarious crowd work in particular. But thats my issue, and not an ethical reason for me to want to revoke the rights of drag queens.
We aren't even really having a discussion about the behavior because it's all been suggestion and hinting and "you know the type of queer person I mean." If we're talking about how to help convince individuals to be more accepting, that's certainly a conversation. If we're talking about how queer people should behave, I have been accused of "shoving it in people's face" for having a shaved head and rainbow glasses.
If we're going to discuss specific behavior and not comedic skits or eyebrow waggles I'd be happy to do that. But there is no response to the fact that the same behavior in "straight" culture never seems to lead to a demand to keep straight people away from children and I cannot get on board with condoning that ideology even by my silence.
I'm happy you're happy, so am I. I am asking us not to participate in shaming of others that are equally happy, rather than acknowledging there are some people that cross boundaries or live far more gregariously in all populations, and whether we like it or not, we don't think it's reasonable to harm that entire population for it.
There are similarly straight people who flaunt their sexuality to an annoying degree in public. No one says that the young cishet couple slobbering all over each other in the corner of the bar are...
There are similarly straight people who flaunt their sexuality to an annoying degree in public. No one says that the young cishet couple slobbering all over each other in the corner of the bar are making people reconsider straight rights. Whether I find something annoying or tasteless should not be the measure by which we just something as unacceptable in public, certainly not to the extent that we consider it something that's justifiably turning public opinion against us.
The portions of the population most likely to shift their opinion against queer people are people like my mother, people whose acceptance of queer people around them is already on shaky ground. People like that think that me referring to "my wife" in a casual workplace conversation is the equivalent of that sketch. No amount of policing how annoying or cringe or embarrassing other queer people are is going to win us acceptance from people like that, and it's certainly not going to win over the people who still don't accept us. The most straight-laced chaste normal-seeming gay person is still a faggot to them.
Wasn't talking about teenage PDA at all and you don't seem to want to engage with what I'm actually saying, so I'm inclined to agree we won't see eye-to-eye here.
Wasn't talking about teenage PDA at all and you don't seem to want to engage with what I'm actually saying, so I'm inclined to agree we won't see eye-to-eye here.
Even if they find it distasteful, they don't think straight people should lose civil rights for it. Which is why respectability culture is still part of the problem.
Even if they find it distasteful, they don't think straight people should lose civil rights for it. Which is why respectability culture is still part of the problem.
You could be talking about men kissing each other in a context where it would be totally acceptable for a man and a woman to kiss, or you could be talking about smearing each other in goat's blood...
You could be talking about men kissing each other in a context where it would be totally acceptable for a man and a woman to kiss, or you could be talking about smearing each other in goat's blood and riding naked and crusty on public transportation.
I'm sorry, I just don't see how anyone can engage with this opinion without examples. You could mean anything.
I think so much of what you're talking about exists in straight culture and media and relationships and no one is out here banning or hating straight folks for it. Strip clubs (bonus, a socially...
I think so much of what you're talking about exists in straight culture and media and relationships and no one is out here banning or hating straight folks for it.
Strip clubs (bonus, a socially acceptable work outing)
The Playboy mansion
Porn magazines and reading them "for the articles"
Page 3 girls in the UK
"Booth babes" and whatever the term is for "hot girls scantily clad with shots wooing you into clubs"
Boobs everywhere in Game of Thrones and other prestige television. (Straight people cannot keep the male gaze off women, it's obsessive and weird.)
Swinger and kink scenes that are in general dominated (in both senses) by straight couples and straight men.
Nudist beaches and nudist enclaves.
Legal marriage with underage girls
Fundamentalist LDS (which would be illegal marriages with underage girls)
Counting down the days til a female celebrity is "legal"
Oh and the crossdressing by cis women, wearing pants and such? I mean when it's gay women you expect it, right?
Some of this is just skeezy, some is just people living their life, some a crime but none of it makes people want to actually ban "straight marriage" or stop accepting straight relationships. And that's why I don't buy the "queer people demanded too much acceptance by being too out there" line.
I feel like you only need to check any comments on any post on Instagram to see that this is the case. The blocking of Mastodon servers is new for sure, but it really doesn't seem like Meta...
I feel like you only need to check any comments on any post on Instagram to see that this is the case. The blocking of Mastodon servers is new for sure, but it really doesn't seem like Meta themselves are willing to do any moderation at all on their platforms even before all the fediverse stuff.
Any comment involving any girl you can bet to see comments asking about OnlyFans, or complaining about what they're wearing, or any other classic 18th century sexism you can think of. Anything with any sort of rainbow in any frame of a Reel and you'll get classic casual homophobia. Most commenters on Instagram are probably the dumbest people in the world, and it's disheartening to read anything on the platform.
I've personally had to limit my own exposure to Instagram, trying to keep it under 1 hour a day if possible. It's just too disheartening to see that there still exists people that are like that in 2024. I've tried reporting many of the accounts to no avail, always denied by whatever "moderator" they have set up.
The comments section will kill your faith in humanity every time. That's true on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, pretty much any mass audience platform. Among the top ten rules of internet mental...
The comments section will kill your faith in humanity every time. That's true on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, pretty much any mass audience platform.
Among the top ten rules of internet mental health hygiene: Don't read the comments!
Surprisingly I feel like YouTube has been a bit better with their comments recently, not too sure if it's because I'm on the better side of YouTube or something. But yeah, everywhere else really...
Surprisingly I feel like YouTube has been a bit better with their comments recently, not too sure if it's because I'm on the better side of YouTube or something. But yeah, everywhere else really just makes me depressed. I always have this morbid curiosity of how dumb people can get, but it's probably better to just cut it all out nowadays.
I think YouTube really upped their comment moderation tools, both automated and non, so we no longer see the worst comments like we used to. My YouTube comment experience has become downright...
I think YouTube really upped their comment moderation tools, both automated and non, so we no longer see the worst comments like we used to. My YouTube comment experience has become downright pleasant.
It's funny, I used to have an extension that changed the YouTube comments to the reddit threads about the videos, but nowadays sometimes I'd rather have the opposite.
It's funny, I used to have an extension that changed the YouTube comments to the reddit threads about the videos, but nowadays sometimes I'd rather have the opposite.
YouTube allows video uploaders to moderate their own comments, so if you don't follow terrible people, you probably won't see terrible comments. It is sort of outsourcing the issue, but it seems...
YouTube allows video uploaders to moderate their own comments, so if you don't follow terrible people, you probably won't see terrible comments. It is sort of outsourcing the issue, but it seems to work out.
YouTube comments really haven't been that bad recently......? I think it's because edgelords aged out of YouTube comments, not better algorithms or moderation. And I say this because I remember...
YouTube comments really haven't been that bad recently......?
I think it's because edgelords aged out of YouTube comments, not better algorithms or moderation.
And I say this because I remember trying to report bad comments on YT many many years ago to absolutely no avail. The entire system was set up to ignore reports, it felt like.
On the other hand it might also be the kinds of videos I watch :/
Meanwhile, on my home feed I was just recommended a community post from MSNBC about a football player who's died and the overwhelming majority of comments there were claiming it's the result of...
Meanwhile, on my home feed I was just recommended a community post from MSNBC about a football player who's died and the overwhelming majority of comments there were claiming it's the result of COVID vaccines. Avoid the news channels, I guess.
I just choose not to look at most comments. I've had an Instagram for a long time, but other than posting my own photos and looking at photos from friends and family, I never really endlessly...
I just choose not to look at most comments. I've had an Instagram for a long time, but other than posting my own photos and looking at photos from friends and family, I never really endlessly scrolled. But since I don't have reddit accessible on my phone anymore, I've switched to endlessly scrolling Reels.
I didn't look at comments at first, but then I started getting curious...and hoo boy. People fucking suck. Whatever happened to, "if you have nothing nice to say, don't say anything at all?" I mean, I know it's the Internet; I'm not that naive.
The video or photo can be something cute and wholesome, like someone's cat lovingly licking their owner's face, and invariably one of the top comments (though not the most liked), will be some asinine, misinformed, rude, and/or mean comment. "OMG, you're a terrible cat owner! Your cat is going to die because you're letting it lick the germs and sweat chemicals from your face! Give up your cat and KYS."
Huh? WTF? So yeah, I just mainly skip over comments.
More importantly, there's a trans home DIYer that I came across who's got some pretty good tips for around the house. She does an annual charity stream to support trans youth. This year, I think she got kicked off/banned from almost all the platforms where she was trying to raise money, including Instagram. She's trying to do a good thing here, but these trolls and garbage people have to ruin it, by submitting false reports, death threats, and more. And the platforms just let it happen.
I really don't get it either. For me it's really about the morbid curiosity about how stupid people can get more than anything. I wish people would learn how to stop talking if they don't have...
I really don't get it either. For me it's really about the morbid curiosity about how stupid people can get more than anything.
I wish people would learn how to stop talking if they don't have anything nice to say, and I kinda wish there were more consequences irl with what you say online. But most of these abusive comments are probably bots anyways so -shrug-
I didn't know that the trans DIYer was banned on platforms :( I saw some of her videos every once in a while and really appreciated her presentation. That just makes me even sadder, that for some reason these moderation systems can be abused so easily but they can't seem to ban actual trolls or bots.
I used threads for about a week during the Kendrick/Drake beef. And just being on it did a number on my mental health. Deleted it and noticed Instagram having the same impact. Deleted that off my...
I used threads for about a week during the Kendrick/Drake beef. And just being on it did a number on my mental health. Deleted it and noticed Instagram having the same impact. Deleted that off my phone shortly after. My social media is now Tildes and some discord servers. I feel much better but I do miss the connections I had with friends on instagram.
If LGBTQ content was filtered as "political", then when this filter was turned on, we should expect engagement for major LGBTQ creators to fall off of a cliff. This data would make the critiques...
If LGBTQ content was filtered as "political", then when this filter was turned on, we should expect engagement for major LGBTQ creators to fall off of a cliff. This data would make the critiques mentioned in the article all the more forceful. Do we know any examples where this has happened?
Another piece of data I'd like to see is a regular survey of how safe different vulnerable groups feel on various platforms. This would be a nice gauge for platforms seeking to build inclusive spaces.
I don't think this was your intent, but all you did was question the article with this response and it made me initially wonder if you had simply entered the LGBT community to provide a negative...
I don't think this was your intent, but all you did was question the article with this response and it made me initially wonder if you had simply entered the LGBT community to provide a negative opinion. I want to be clear that I'm not attacking you, but as a queer person who has spent a reasonable amount of time in these different spaces, anecdotally I could tell you the author is sharing information on a real problem and anecdotally nearly every queer and minority I know would agree.
This is not an objective measurement, obviously, but to comment only on the lack of objectivity here without providing any additional input or sharing your stance on LGBT folks could be seen as an attack by some, and I think it's important to point out because I believe a lot of what the author is getting at comes from the similar place - that questioning queer folks under the guise of just asking questions or voicing discomfort is generally allowed on many large platforms. Where that line of what's hate speech and what's allowed gets pushed further right generally speaking with bigger platforms (and notably called out here as particularly malicious by meta because they are likely profiting off it), and it's why queer folks have fled many of these larger platforms.
I understand sensitivity to something many call "concern trolling" where one enters a community they don't belong in and pose objections while insincerely feigning concern as a justification for...
I understand sensitivity to something many call "concern trolling" where one enters a community they don't belong in and pose objections while insincerely feigning concern as a justification for why they are making the objections. This feigned concern allows the troll to blend in.
I am a queer man, and issues regarding inclusivity and safety on social media platforms matter greatly to me, and is a substantial portion of the reason I prefer putting my efforts here at Tildes rather than another platform. It also motivated the comment I left.
My comment makes two points and doesn't seek to discredit the article. To start, I think the article works as-is, I don't intend to ramp up the standard of evidence for the main thesis of the article. The fact that political content is turned-off by default and that some people's existence is inherently political is cause for alarm.
For my first point, I think it is a worthwhile endeavor to measure the impacts to LGBTQ creators that Meta's algorithm change caused. My point isn't that the critique doesn't work without this evidence, but that it is more forceful with this evidence.
My second point is less about data the article could use and makes a broader point about the kind of data that could make communities more welcoming and safe. For instance, if we had a good measure of the relative inclusivity of platforms, this would both help in both finding safe communities and, more crucially, measure the impacts of platform actions on inclusivity. Such as whether this politics toggle has an impact on safety or the degree to which Twitter's change in ownership affected inclusivity.
I don't really have much to add here other than to thank you for spending the time expanding upon your thoughts and make clear your intention. I agree that better measurement would be great, but...
I don't really have much to add here other than to thank you for spending the time expanding upon your thoughts and make clear your intention. I agree that better measurement would be great, but it's also really hard to measure on a private platform and especially so when you're a group of queers who likely don't have the kind of resources to do this measurement. I think it would be great to see more researchers focus in on this issue, but unfortunately I think the fact that we see so little of this is a reflection of the incentives in research for them to focus on other issues.
I've played with the politics filter since I started using threads as a fellow queer person. I haven't noticed any issues with queer content being filtered out when the politics filter is turned...
I've played with the politics filter since I started using threads as a fellow queer person. I haven't noticed any issues with queer content being filtered out when the politics filter is turned on. It might just be my curated content, but I have actually felt the safest on threads over mastodon and Bluesky being a queer person on the internet.
I know all experiences vary, and I don't want to discredit the OP or the article, but I do really want to note that not all experiences are the same.
I've come across some really awful things from trolls/bots, and have reported them every time. More often than not, meta has marked them as harassment/bullying/spam/what have you, and removed both the comment/post and the user.
So I was curious about this and noticed that on my Instagram account, I do have "Limit political content from people you don't follow." I don't remember setting this. I'm assuming this came out on...
So I was curious about this and noticed that on my Instagram account, I do have "Limit political content from people you don't follow." I don't remember setting this. I'm assuming this came out on all Meta platforms at the same time, so relatively recently.
Anyway, I haven't noticed any decrease in content from other LGBT, POC, etc users that I don't follow. I also still see ads for Ukrainian and Palestinian causes and charities, along with campaign ads for Biden and other state/local Dem pols. Though being ads, those may not be included in the restriction.
Maybe I should turn the option off for a bit and see what pops up.
I'm somewhat surprised you've had issues on Bluesky. I've personally never faced any queer discrimination on there, but maybe I've just been lucky? Can't say the same about the Mastodon instances...
I'm somewhat surprised you've had issues on Bluesky. I've personally never faced any queer discrimination on there, but maybe I've just been lucky? Can't say the same about the Mastodon instances I've checked out.
It's the internet, so there are still some heated discussions occasionally. You can always plug in your own moderation services too to easily control whatever content you don't want to see.
One of the big labelers just blew up recently so a lot of folks who used it for muting or blocking transphobic, or racist or whatever people rather than having to do it individually while being...
One of the big labelers just blew up recently so a lot of folks who used it for muting or blocking transphobic, or racist or whatever people rather than having to do it individually while being potentially mobbed by notifications. That may impact recent experiences in particular.
Is it just me or has open, blatant queerphobia and misogyny gotten really bad lately? What the hell happened? Did everyone just suddenly decide to become hateful pieces of shit during the pandemic? God damn I hate the future.
The prejudices have always been there, but there was a period of time back in the 00s and even the early 10s where being a jerk to someone else made that person look like a jerk. Being openly hateful, regardless of the reasoning, had a jerk-like quality to it and came with a social cost. This acted as a counterbalance to the underlying prejudice.
In the mid to late 10s though, we saw the Twitterification and Trumpification of American society at large. This had the effect of restructuring the idea of being a jerk and allowed those underlying prejudices to resurface and become emboldened. When everything is a culture war, and your enemies are everywhere, and they're evil inhuman people undeserving of anything, then being a jerk to them doesn't mean you're a jerk -- it actually means you're virtuous!
People who once might have experienced social pressures that mitigated their personal aggression and hostility saw, in the 10s, that pressure reversed. Instead of fighting those bad impulses, they were instead actively encouraged to be aggressive and hostile.
I think a really good example of this effect is Westboro Baptist Church. They were known in the 00s for publicly picketing funerals, shouting and carrying signs with extremely homophobic sentiments.
It feels paradoxical and very weird to say this, but I, as a gay man, actually appreciate the Westboro Baptist Church. From their internal perspective they thought they were doing the right and holy thing, justified in their culture war, but most everyone else, from an outside perspective, could see the social cost of their hatred. They ended up being a very strong example of what not to be -- a cautionary tale, an ugly mirror that showed what you looked like when you broke the social contract.
I lived in a very Christian part of the American south when they were at their height, and even though many of the Christians I knew had some doctrinal overlap with them in regards to their view of homosexuality, they couldn't square that with Westboro's overt hatred. I think it prompted a lot of self-reflection in people I knew, and, surprisingly, also a lot of compassion in them for gay people like me. In a world where hate has a social cost and kindness is a virtue, it's hard to witness someone being the target of such extreme bigotry and not have your empathy kick in. Westboro intended to spread hate, but they had a way of, paradoxically, triggering kindness.
I remember being taken aback when Westboro announced that they were going to picket a local funeral in our area, and some of our local churches and Christian organizations were the ones to lead and organize a counter-protest. I can all but guarantee that these groups still thought homosexuality itself was wrong, but they also couldn't countenance the idea of a group picketing a funeral for the purposes of hate. That was the greater evil. This is how things were back then.
In hindsight, it's clear that Westboro was actually just ahead of their time. The techniques and tactics that they used are basically the Twitter and Trump playbooks, only Westboro implemented them a decade or so too early. Unlike when they were operating, our environment has now shifted such that hatred is not seen as its own specific type of evil. It's instead transmuted into something positive, just, and so frequent as to be obligatory.
It's hard to overstate just how prevalent in our discourse this has become. It isn't a left/right issue. It isn't a partisan thing. It's now embedded in the unspoken rules of engagement that is our forever culture war. Expressing contempt for other people, acting in ways to explicitly spite them, and seeing all that as justified because they "deserve" it is just sort of fundamental to how we engage with others now. We expect it.
One of the emergent behaviors I've noticed on Tildes, both in myself and in others, is that people will try to route around this expectation. If I write something thorough, and I'm really clear with my points, and also say explicitly what I'm not saying by implication, and I use some weasel words to make my point less black-and-white, then maybe people won't respond with hostility! We're so used to conflict that it's pleasantly surprising when there isn't any. We flinch before any blows are even thrown, because we anticipate them all the same, and all the time.
Now, the problem with all of this (and this is an explicit example of what I said above, because I can already hear the conceptual pitchforks banging at the door of this comment) is that people will go "yeah, but what about those people who do deserve the hate?"
This is a hard question to answer.
I think it's hard because hate is something that has become so embedded that we've lost sight of what it really is.
When you hate someone, it takes a toll on you. You have a visceral emotional and even sometimes physical response. It's not a good thing. It's not empowering. It's not beneficial in the slightest.
Hate is also largely ineffective. Take a moment and consider someone that you hate -- someone specific.
Now, ask yourself: does this person even know I exist?
For some of you, the answer might be yes. It might be an ex-partner or an abusive family member or someone for whom the nature of your relationship warranted an extreme response in yourself: outright hatred. There is admittedly some utility to hate in those relatively rare situations.
But if I had to wager, for most of us, the answer to that question is probably no. Who are probably the common answers -- the most hated go-tos? People like Trump. Musk.
There is no relationship there, but hatred is a way of creating and maintaining one anyway. A bad one. A detrimental one. They don't just live rent free in your head, they fuck up the apartment and shit the bed on the regular, and the worst part is that they continually make things so awful for you while you have no -- literally zero -- effect on them. Hatred is effective only at sapping your energy. It's a cynical, destructive force.
The modern internet has done a good job of making us think that hatred isn't self-inflicted though. It always tries to externalize the locus, feeding us reasons to hate things and examples of hate-worthy people. It gets us hooked on the rush we get when we feel judgment enter our thinking. If we get that little nudge from our conscience that says "hey bud, just noticing that maybe we're not at our best right now and maybe this is a little wrong," the internet instead pats us on the back and says "no but see, this really does deserve to be hated -- don't listen to that other guy."
It doesn't stop there though. It keeps going: "honestly, by not hating this person you're seeing on your screen, you're actually compromising your values and hurting other people. It is your obligation and duty to hate them."
Remember when I said that hating used to have a social cost? It now has social capital. Not hating is what now has the social cost. After all, if it's your duty to hate someone, then not hating them means you're neglecting your responsibilities. You're delinquent at your post. You're allowing harm to come to others. You're part of the problem.
This last part is the turn that scares me. Terrifies me, really.
I think its easy for the bulk of the left-leaning people here on Tildes to look at obvious, prejudice-based hatred like the queerphobia and misogyny that you brought up and see it as wrong. It's obvious to us.
I think it's much harder for us to look at hatred for someone like Trump and see it as wrong. (No, this is not a both-sides argument.)
What I'm trying to get at is that we have a much harder time evaluating hatred towards Trump as wrong because hate has become so mainstreamed that it is effectively praxis. It is seen as virtuous; it is seen as justified; it is seen as necessary.
Which brings us back to the root issue: why do we see such overt hatred from the right now? Why don't they see it for what it is? Because it became part of their praxis.
That's the fucking terrifying thing. Obviously for the political implications, but also on a human level -- you know, that level that we always forget about because we're too busy living in the anti-personal hate-driven culture warzone that is the modern internet and, now, by extension, even much of modern life? It's scary in a dark, twisted, uncomfortable Black Mirror kind of way.
There's another question we can ask ourselves. It's a really simple one. I like it because it cuts through all the bullshit I've said here and gets to the heart of the issue:
Are hate-filled people happy?
The answer is, of course, no. Hate doesn't leave room for happiness. It overrules it. It substitutes vindication for joy and tries to convince us they're the same thing. Enough repetitions and we genuinely start to believe it. We lose sight of what happiness actually is, because the only way we can feel good is through spite.
I don't want people to lose sight of happiness. I don't want people to hate. I don't want them to hate even when they feel that people deserve it. Even (maybe even especially) when things are scary right now and we're staring down a dark, uncertain future. I want everyone -- literally everyone, regardless of your beliefs or leanings -- to be able to find joy that isn't based in spite. A big part of that means evaluating the hatred in your own heart. Is it working? Is it achieving what you want? Is it worth the cost?
And I know that pretty much the entire internet and world out there right now tells you that, yes, it absolutely is.
And I know that I’m only one lonely little creaky voice out there, but I want to ask you: what if it's not?
But I don't hate them because it feels like the right thing to do. I'm under no illusions that it's helping the situation or bothering them at all. I hate them because they've hurt me and they're hurting people that I love. It doesn't feel like a choice to hate them, it's a reaction to seeing the lives of people that I care about (and people that I don't know but care about in the abstract) become measurably worse, or even end.
I suppose someone on the other side could say the same thing, but there's just no logical backing behind it. Of the harmful policies that the Democrats are engaging in (ex. sending weapons to Israel) the people they don't hate have even more harmful policies. It makes sense to hate both groups, or to hate the group engaging in the worse behavior, it doesn't make sense to only hate the group engaging in the less-bad-but-still-terrible behavior.
I'm also a pretty happy person, most of the time. I do credit quite a lot of that time to no longer living in America. But when there is an emotion getting in the way of my happiness tied to Trump and the American right wing, it's not hatred, it's fear. Again, that was especially true when I lived in America.
I'm not making a choice about my emotions based on praxis. I'm making a choice about my actions based on praxis, who I donate to and how I vote and what community organizations I participate with, but I would be doing all of those same things whether I hated Donald Trump or not.
So what you're asking me to do with this comment isn't to return to a natural emotional state stop actively trying to hate some people for no benefit to myself. You're asking me to suppress a natural emotional state that reasonably comes from being harmed, despite the fact that it would be unlikely to improve the outcome on the situation. Further, you're comparing my reasonable, justified, fear and anger, to the fear and anger of people who have at best been lied to, or at worst chosen to hate people despite those people not doing them or anyone else any harm at all. Again, I hate Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis and most of the Supreme Court, because they've actively and demonstrably made life worse for me and people that I love. That's not comparable to someone who hates Joe Biden because they believe that he's a pedophile based on zero evidence. That's not comparable to someone who hates trans people because they believe that they're mutilating children based on zero evidence. That's not comparable to someone who hates Greta Thunberg because they believe that climate change is a hoax, or worse, because doing anything to slow climate change would cut into their profits.
If Trump and DeSantis were just guys saying stuff, I wouldn't hate them, because I wouldn't fear them. I mean, as long as I wasn't trapped in a room with them or anything. But they have power over the people that I love, and unfortunately, over the world. Therefore it would be unreasonable for me not to fear them. And because I fear them, I hate them. Not because I think it makes me cool or virtuous. Because I don't really have a choice.
I appreciate your response. I know it can be super intimidating to engage with a wall of text like mine, especially on frought and difficult topics, and especially at a time like this, so thank you for taking the time to talk to me about this.
Believe me when I say that I understand where you're coming from. I hate Trump too, though "hated" is probably more reflective of where I'm at currently. Do I have contempt for the man? Yes. Do I have contempt for what he stands for? Yes. Am I worried that we're slow-walking into another administration under him in which he has carte-blanche to do awful things? I'm terrified.
In my comment about hate above, I'm trying to talk about the mechanism of hate itself. I saw your other comment below where you talk about the imbalance of hating someone based on falsehoods versus hating someone for legitimate reasons, and I agree. I promise you my comment is not meant to be a "both sides" thing or a false equivalency. I fully think that the hate that I see and have seen my entire life from right wing sources far outpaces anything I see from the left. I say this as a gay guy who grew up in the shadow of AIDS in the American south and left specifically because of the hate that I faced and witnessed there.
What I'm trying to get at is the idea that hate is an insulating process that attempts to seal itself into people over time. As it does this, it increasingly justifies its own existence until it no longer needs to do any sort of justification because the person is already so accustomed to its distortions that their own values are lost.
I have some (well, many, unfortunately) family members who are very Trumpy. We were at a get-together when the news of the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg broke. One person there reflexively cheered, then, in the lag between her response and some consequent self-reflection, she clapped her hand to her mouth and apologized. She, a pro-life person, was openly cheering someone's death. That's not a normal response to death, especially not for someone who explicitly believes life is sacred. Her completely inverted response was a distortion from hatred.
You shared a lot about your situation, and it sounds like you're someone who feels hate but hasn't given yourself over to it. That's normal and human. I feel it too.
What the entire modern internet tries to do, however, is convince us that we don't have the capability to modulate it, address it, manage it, reflect on it, and even move past it. Hate doesn't have to take up residence in us, even if we feel it sometimes. Hate doesn't have to linger, even though it tries to. Hate doesn't have to become the root of who we are and what we do, but it absolutely will if we let it.
I wrote what I did not from some high horse but because I've spent my entire life interfacing with hate and having to hold back the tide from letting it consume my person. I've also witnessed many people who didn't, and I've watched it consume them. I don't want that for anyone.
Thank you for your response. It clarifies a lot of things.
I do agree that we shouldn't foster hate. We shouldn't celebrate it, and we shouldn't allow ourselves to become mindless in it. We shouldn't allow it to be directed towards people who are associated with, but not instrumental in, the harms that come to us. Hatred is inevitable, but I agree that we must take care in what we do with it.
I actually think that's fairly logically consistent, and I fully understand it. When someone dies, they are disarmed. If they were hurting someone, they have to stop now. She believed that Ruth Bader Ginsburg was hurting people. It would make sense to be glad that she can no longer hurt people. I don't exactly want Ron DeSantis dead. I want him neutralized. If he died, I would be relieved, because he would be neutralized. I'd rather he be neutralized by seeing the error of his ways and choosing not to do any more harm, but the important thing is that the danger ends. Relief and joy can be just as closely linked as fear and hatred.
Where her and I differ is that I find her belief that Ruth Bader Ginsberg was hurting people to be extremely poorly reasoned. For a "pro-life" example, we have pretty strong evidence that banning abortion mostly just moves it around and increases maternal and infant mortality rates, and if you want to reduce abortions the best thing you can do is make contraception free and as easily accessible as possible.
I would say it’s not a matter of suppressing hatred you’re already rightfully feeling; as you say, there are very legitimate reasons for that hatred, and in general you can fight your feelings your entire life and never win.
But modern Twitterified culture encourages us to stoke that hatred in ourselves and others, to throw gasoline on the fire continuously because the fire is righteous and correct. That part is optional. That part used to be frowned upon if not outright shunned, but now it’s celebrated.
It brings to mind a piece of wisdom I’ve picked up over the past decade: don’t trust anyone who wants you to be angry, upset, or scared all the time, even if you agree with them. It’s not that they’re wrong, it’s that continually stoking those flames takes a toll on you and ultimately leaves you with less fuel and motivation to do the boring-but-important work necessary to work on these issues in a healthy way.
Feelings are feelings. We have no choice about which ones we feel. Let them in, let them through, always. Talk about them, journal about them, meditate on them, process them.
We have some control over what we do with them, however.
I have a lot of friends in conservative circles, and these two types of things are said very very frequently. "Ive done nothing to hurt them and they're always hurting me and people I love" is a common refrain. Mostly they want to be left alone, but feel like they cannot.
It can feel like their fears are ridiculous and stupid, and mostly just fear of slippery slope stoked by strawmen arguments. But the fear which leads to hate is very real.
Whatever's been done to stoke their fears and hatred for decades is now being done to us. There's a sense of danger and all-or-nothing everything on the line urgency being pushed on us.
I don't think fear of hypothetical or fallacious things should be considered equal to fear of demonstrable, provable things. Fear of your kids being forcibly "transed" is not equal to fear of your daughter not being able to receive a necessary abortion.
Facts and reality matter.
I understand.
But to them, fear of their kid being told by teachers to get an abortion even if the kid doesn't want an abortion, is real and substantiated. It happened to a friend with a teen parent this very year.
Fear of their elderly parents being talked into killing themselves is also real, that was my dad.
Fear of doctors urging them to abort their long hoped for baby because the scans turned up with Downs is also real: happened to two of my friends.
And to the conservative people, they don't experience hate crimes daily, and they don't even know anyone who experiences hate crimes, and so to them they think people hating on LGBTQ+ people is hypothetical and fallacious. But you and I run in different circles and we see it differently.
I'm not trying to argue both sides are the same. They're not. I'm trying to say that the world has become so polarized and our social circles have so little overlaps now that we can clearly see examples of "our people" being hurt, without seeing examples of "their people" being hurt.
Is it dumb for them to think a kid could be convinced to transition? Yes it's totally dumb and I tell them that all the time. Is it awful to learn nothing about hormonal blockers but fear they're being handed out like Halloween candy to every kid? Yes, it's stupid and please for goodness sake read up on it. Is it totally idiot to protest sex ed for their desperately needing sex ed kids? Yes it's moronic please teach them sex ed and save them from actual predators.
So I guess I'm not saying they're the same level of fear. Okay so your doctor is talking about abortion for the fourth time, that's cool, they can't forcibly sign you up for one.
But it does make you stay up at night crying your eyes out wondering if you're putting this baby through prolonged suffering and if your dreams to hold them is just selfish cruelty.
And the social workers and counsellors probably just wanted to give my dad options. But nowadays my dad is talking about it with me a lot about how maybe it'd be less drain on us kids if he just take the perfectly legal option suggested by professionals.
And my friend's kid can tell the teachers attitudes have shifted, and their friendships have cooled, for choosing the socially less acceptable option. It's a lot for a kid to be told point blank by an authority figure that they've thrown their entire future away.
Reality does matter to these people, and they can feel it and be affected by it as well.
But...who is the person they're justified in fearing and hating here? Because as far as I know, those aren't policies with any sort of widespread support or even a single well-known proponent. Absolutely, hate those individuals that said those things. That's no reason to hate people who just...live differently. People who want your friend to have the option to abort or keep the pregnancy, and want her supported either way. People who want your dad to have the option to leave this world painlessly if and when he so chooses or to stay as long as medically possible and not have to worry about what it's doing to his kids because they're receiving support as well. (Admittedly the establishment of the American "left" is not doing much in terms of that support and I fear and hate that about them, though they are by far the lesser of the evils.)
Even aside from the fact that none of these things are being forced, they're also not even policy. They're individuals explaining someone's options poorly. That's the fault of the explanation, not the options, and where it is the fault of the options (i.e. lack of support for teen parents, parents of children with disabilities, the elderly and families with elderly dependents) the left is far and away the group that is more likely to expand those options.
I'm very sorry that your loved ones had those experiences, and I agree that they are justified in hating the people that have harmed them, but I think if that's lead them to be conservative then they've identified the wrong people.
Hmmm it does get messy when things are policy vs when one can just feel the atmosphere is not welcome of them.
In the article linked, nobody was booted off Threads. By Policy meta supports LGBTQ+ and by policy they don't allow hate speech etc. But in reality the article reports people feeling shadow banned or feeling not welcomed to begin with.
And I mean, before the whole mess with RvW, before it was policy to ban abortions, there was already a lot of noise and rumours and social pressure. These kinds of things sometimes do accurately predict policy. So, not all slippery slopes lead to an abyss, but it is also not wise to ignore/dismiss all slippery slopes until it's policy, right?
We're here talking about an atmosphere of unwelcomeness. Meta isn't having pop up messages of hate and hostility, but they're contributing to not yet substantiated fears of trans hate, and we can kind of connect the dots....
Sorry for being so clumsy with my words, but I mean that when we can feel atmosphere of unwelcomeness and unease, when we live in a place where people in positions of clear authority (Heath care providers, mental health workers, teachers) are clearly advocating one stance and treat you differently when you choose something different.....one can be justified to fear that policy change will soon follow.
So who should my friends hate?
Nobody, turns out.
Getting back to what kfwyre said in a grandparent comment: let's just not hate.
These people offered advice best they could go alleviate suffering. I think they're wrong. They didn't think they were pushy or being hateful, they think they're being compassionate and offering choices. But that's the thing when we get up to core moral choices: they're so central to us that offering choices even worded gently will hurt and wound us, and contribute to great unhappiness.
We can imagine the reverse being unpleasant and nearly oppressive cant we? If I were a pregnant teen and when I came back to class after my abortion, and I can see my teacher treat me differently than before, and out right tell me I'll regret it for the rest of my life......is the teacher just giving me options and explaining it poorly?
And the job of prenatal tests is to inform, and should people ask questions to provide answers. Imagine if the reverse happened and my friends decided to abort, and the health care providers urged with the same intensity and repetition for them to reconsider. That's not cool either right?
Sometimes offering choices when the person doing the offering clearly has made a moral judgement on you, especially repeatedly offering a particularly highlighted choice, doesn't feel like a free choice.
It's patronizing at the very least: clearly you haven't thought about killing yourself / your child before, since the choice is so clear to me, so here let me just reiterate it one more time.
But let's not hate on these workers, sure.
I think we all want to live in a world where people keep their judgement to themselves and don't treat you differently when they find out you've chosen something different, or when they find out you are something different than what they think is right.
For what it's worth, conservative people don't hate on particular queer people either. They usually hate on some nebulous cloud of forces pushing "the gay agenda". They're sort of right and sort of wrong. Their passions are perpetually fanned by folks hiding behind queer rights activism, and hiding behind abortion rights activism. There has been a concentrated effort for decades to make all of our lives miserable and place the blame on a rotating roster of people: immigrants, other races, other countries, queer people, etc.
The same is happening to us. Our health care sucks, cost of living is crazy, and democracy is crumbling. Really, a surprise pregnancy wouldn't be the end of the world that it currently might be in the states if health care was awesome and there's any number of social support and free childcare and several thousands of dollars a month per child. Right?
If the police would actually turn up and arrest hate crime committing people, it would be a less scary place to live in right? Imagine if we had properly enforced policies online to keep out haters, instead of what the article's GLAAD report found:
We're being squeezed in every direction, and then we're being fed a narrative that it's because of "those people". For profit!!
Hating on "them" is not the solution even though we're told all day and night our hate is the last thing keeping what little we have left from being disappeared as well. It's always been greedy jerkwads stealing our cooking and pointing at us to fight for crumbs.
Right, but the same people who are banning abortions are making healthcare inaccessible and and shredding social support. This just further justifies hating them.
Right, but the same people whose rhetoric spurs hate crimes are the people supporting the police in behaving the way that they currently do. The same people who are doing the hate crimes are often the same people who are being the police, to paraphrase RATM.
This further justifies hating the people bolstering not just capitalism, but this specific version of capitalism that we have where human lives comes second to money.
Your examples seem to bolster my point.
It is because of "those people"! Maybe you mean something different by "those people", but I mean "those people who have the power to hurt me and the people I love and are using it or have used it." I don't mean "some guy that disagrees with me somewhere." For each of the people that I am referring to for whom I feel hatred, I can name a specific act that they have done to cause harm. I'm not talking about a nebulous other. I'm frustrated by the nebulous other, I'm saddened by them, I am scared of what they may do as a collective, but I don't hate them as individuals. I don't know enough about them. I also know that they couldn't hurt me as individuals. Even as a collective, I would still have options for evading them if it wasn't for mechanisms like capitalism and our broken electoral system. I do hate those systems. I do hate the (specific, namable) people who have the power to improve those systems but don't, or even make them worse.
Again, I don't hate them (or not hate them) because it's a solution or because it's a reasoned position that I think benefits anything. I hate them as an emotional response to them hurting me.
They absolutely do. Contrary to what you implied earlier, I do know quite a few conservative people, of varying levels of extremism. Mostly they're family, so I've known them my entire lives. They absolutely hate queer individuals, some of them to the point of claiming to be willing to do violence, though I know of very few specific instances of it. I did know one guy - haven't spoken to him in years for reasons that will become obvious - who we "agreed to disagree" with on homophobia. It was less abnormal at the time. He got out of prison recently after beating one gay man to death, and another to a point where he lost sight in one eye and hearing in one ear. I recognize that he is the most extreme end, I am not claiming that it's common among conservatives, but it does exist, I do have experience with it, and I have had many conversations with conservatives about their viewpoints. During these conversations I try my absolute best to understand them, and they typically are completely disinterested in understanding me or any evidence that may exist. They have different mechanisms for that. One sister is simply uninformed. She doesn't want to know any facts, and once told me that I "know too much" to talk about things with. She didn't mean "know" in scare quotes like, I'm overconfident in things I only think are true. She meant that she prefers to operate on intuition and how she feels about things, and I was making it too complicated by bringing up facts. I'm not assuming that, we discussed it. One aunt, much more extreme, is actively misinformed. She frequently sends me links to things like Natural News and Info Wars and other conspiracy theory peddlers. If I try to explain the logical holes, she tells me I've been brainwashed by the MSM. She's inoculated herself against learning anything. Those are two examples, I've got a big, mostly conservative family, if you'd like more.
Well, no. The noise and rumors and social pressure weren't what caused the problem. They were there, but there were also active legislative and judicial attempts. Those were the things to pay attention to. There's lots of noise and rumors about universal healthcare, but that's not going to happen until there are legislative and judicial attempts. We knew that abortion was going to be banned after Roe v. Wade was overturned because many states had trigger laws, and others had been trying to bring cases before the Supreme Court for the purposes of overturning Roe v. Wade so that they could ban abortion. Not just because the school nurse was judgemental about someone terminating a pregnancy. There are plenty of things that there are rumors and whispers about that will either never happen. Basing your fears on rumors and whispers instead of the active attempts and stated goals of the people in power is not basing your beliefs on reality.
Well sure, if it's an option for them to hate nobody, that's great. It isn't productive and is clearly a negative emotion. In the same vein, they shouldn't feel sad about anything, or ashamed of anything, or angry about anything. They should, if they can hack it, only feel joy, or the determination to improve a situation so that they can then feel joy. Really, even the joy is unnecessary, but at least it isn't negative.
A big part of my point is that you can't choose not to feel emotions, and in some cases the emotion of hate is justified, and it would be unnatural not to feel it. If they do feel that fear, and feel that hatred, I would absolutely understand and find that justified. If they hate the individuals who, against the policies of their organizations, pressured them in a hurtful way, I would understand that. If somehow it is the policy of those organizations to exert that pressure, it would absolutely be justified to hate the people who set that policy and the people who are profiting off of it. It would be completely reasonable to hate the people who have constructed and bolstered the systems under which this sort of pressure may make sense to some people - for example, Ronald Regan for gutting the welfare programs that would support a family with a disabled child. I'm not saying they should hate those people. If they're capable of the stoicism to avoid it, that's great. But there's no problem with them hating those people.
There is a problem with them hating people who do choose to get abortions in those situations. There is a problem with hating people who want them to have choices about those situations, and would always be careful not to present those options with any bundled value judgement over which is the correct one for them. There is a problem with hating the people who are trying to repair the systems that would allow them to make their preferred choice, simply because they aren't trying to make that the only choice for anyone.
You didn't describe these situations as being gently worded, though. Were they? I do think it matters if the people delivering this information were attempting to be kind and non-judgemental and it was just an extremely tender subject for the people receiving the information, or if the people delivering the information were being judgemental and pushy.
I actually don't have a problem with them hating those workers, assuming that they were actually being inconsiderate or indelicate.
...no? Abortions can't be undone, at that point there is no option. You'd also be completely justified in hating that hypothetical teacher. It's extremely valid for your friend's kid to hate her teacher for mistreating her. It's just not reasonable for her to hate the fact that other people can make a different decision, the people that do make it, or the people that keep that option available.
Correct. The problem is the pushiness. I don't think I'm understanding your goal with these hypotheticals.
When my mom was pregnant with my little brother at 40, the provider who told her about the pregnancy suggested that she terminate due to her age, and she was very judgemental when my mom declined. It seems justified to me that my mom would hate her - for the judgement and the ageism, not for being willing to perform an abortion.
Right, they shouldn't do that. It's better to be in that situation than to not have a choice at all, but it's still not good.
I'm sorry if I'm being blunt or repetitive, I'm trying to be clear and precise. I appreciate your engaging with me and taking the time to have this conversation.
I really appreciate chatting with you about this topic as well. And I can see that perhaps I do live in a very different level of threat than you do, and that to continue being stoic ---> passive in a crisis is not only unnatural, but detrimental. If there's smoke let's keep calm, turn off the burners and open some windows. But when there's a huge blazing fire that same approach just plain doesn't work, it's time to either break out the extinguisher or flee for our lives.
And I mean, you clearly have lived through situations of lower threats and reacted similarly to how I operate.......perhaps it really is simply a difference in threat level.
I can also share that I was also previously, and perhaps similarly, wrong on the topic of police violence. Oh let's be reasonable and calm and reach out and Kumbaya and all that. And all that rhetoric was likely stupidity to those on the front lines against police brutality and their illegal, unrestrained use of violence.
I'm putting this in a separate reply because I don't think it's relevant to the larger conversation, but it might be so just in case:
It would be equally problematic for me, personally. I refuse to carry a pregnancy to term. If I became pregnant I would abort regardless of where I live. If I die in the process, that is preferable to me than to suffer through the pregnancy.
You absolutely have not spoken to any queer person who has grown up in a conservative environment if you believe this. I know tons of queer teens and young adults who were sent to conversion therapy or kicked out of the house by their parents. One of my peers was asked not to come back to my school in high school because he was gay. We avoided particular actors and programming because they were out as gay. My parents would have never let me have a sleepover at my friend with gay parents' place. And I grew up thinking that, among the conservatives, we were the nice ones because we were "love the sinner hate the sin" types and not literally beating gay people to death (which, incidentally, did happen some places and probably still does, albeit more rarely).
You're right. I did grow up in I guess a magical bubble where I only have friends of friends who have had bad things happened to them. There are plenty of personal stories where kids are rejected by their parents for not choosing the right career or having some form of mental illness. Ive seen plenty of kids pulled from sex ed or people have left churches for wrong view on baptism or how many spoons....or there were social gossip etc. but yea, folks with queer family just kind of....chugs along. There's also queer friends of friends who stopped responding to Christmas cards and stopped hanging out with my conservative friends because they don't feel adequately loved or accepted. (I know this last one is going to rightfully stem suspicions but for what it's worth I believe my friends. In one case it was because my friends continue to go to a church that isn't fire brimstone, but not affirming either. Maybe it's because my friend was being patronizing in that folks are gay only cuz they choose to be? I could believe that. They wouldnt argue, but the pressure atmosphere I wrote about could be there,nI imagine)
So no, not outright prejudice or hate speech or acts of violence. My apologies for having forgotten that personal bias.
For parents who reject their children, do they hate these children or do they think the rejection is some distorted loving thing they're doing? The love the sinner type nonsense you talked about.
I'm sure they think they love their children. They definitely feel the emotion, and they feel sad about what's happened. But if you hurt your child or abandon them because of a perceived flaw, you clearly don't love them unconditionally. We all told ourselves we were "love the sinner hate the sin" people, but when the "sin" is a fundamental part of their life and your actions repeatedly harm them because of it... there's only so much you can hurt someone and keep saying you love them. In the end, I'm not sure the emotions they feel actually matter -- what really matters are their actions and how they treat queer people in their lives.
When I was growing up in that environment, one of my best friends came out to me. He described how he'd tried everything he could to stop being gay (he was vague but implied that it included doing things we otherwise disapproved of straight people doing, like watching porn). I loved him as much as I could love a friend, and I earnestly believed what I'd been taught about how gay people going to hell. I couldn't brush it off as being a choice when it was my friend confessing how upset he was about it and how he'd be straight if he could. I couldn't disbelieve someone I loved about their own experiences like that. (This, I wager, is a contributing to factor to why queer friends of friends would cut someone off who insists being gay is a choice -- it's essentially accusing them of lying.) As a result, the circumstance he'd been placed into, ostensibly by a God who loved him, struck me as deeply, cosmically unfair. I was distraught. I kept his being gay a secret from teachers and other friends, even when other people he told did not do so (which eventually resulted in his being asked not to return to our private school and attending public school starting the next year). I prayed for him every day and wondered how God could do this to someone, how God could make someone gay. This was the beginning of the end for my being religious, because I could no longer love a God who would make someone gay only to damn them. I remember at the time telling my mother (who remains steadfastly religious and probably still believes being gay is a sin) that even if that was how God is, I didn't want to worship a God like that.
There's a Bible story in which God commands Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac to him. Abraham dutifully complies and it's only because God stops him last minute to praise him for his obedience and tell him he doesn't actually have to kill his son that he doesn't go through with it. In the context of this Bible story, Abraham is said to love his son, and that's why it's such a big deal that he listened to God anyway -- he loved God more, as he was supposed to. Surely this is how Christians who reject gay family and friends see themselves. But I don't agree with framing this as love. I don't think someone who is willing to do things like this to someone can be said to love them, even if they earnestly believe God wants them to do that. Maybe this is just because I don't love God enough. But if so, it's not from lack of trying.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts and insights. I, too, struggle to understand how it is that we're supposed to not just live, but to give thanks and praise for all the challenges that we are given. It is often said that "God doesn't give us more than we can handle" and I am so glad to, as an adult, be finally told by good priests that that's pop culture rubbish. It's clear that many many of us were given far too much to bear and we break under the pain. What happens afterwards we will have to leave it up to the one who judges: either (1) there is no god in which case, we're all good; (2) there is a vengeful and hateful and god who does not redeem our weaknesses and does not care about those of us who have broken from what he gave us, in which case big finger do your worst, none of us can stand anyway; (3) or perhaps the stories of the loving Father, who runs towards us when he sees us from afar and puts his ring and cloak on us before he's heard our apology, who loves us even if we're unrepentant and angry and doesn't believe.
I find it very odd that all these parables were told of what God is supposedly like, only for the very self righteous to take up the mantle of the prodigal's hateful Older Brother, or the Pharisee who crosses the street to avoid the wounded, or the labourer who insists on skimming the wages of the last to be "fair", etc. And to insist that that is right and holy living.
I think you're so right on this. Wasn't there the parable of the sheep and the goats, where many will be shouting Lord Lord and He will say depart from me I never knew you? In the end it won't be boasts (here I'm more guilty than most) but whether one really did give water to the thirsty, fed the poor, clothed the naked, visited those in prisons (not add to them!) and provided housing to refugees.
Love isn't going to be evaluated on professed feelings.
Even though I'm no longer religious, I really do like how you engaged with that part of my comment. Thank you for this response.
Preach!
Ive thought what you thought for a long time now, but far less eloquently laid out :)
Maybe a lot of Tildes people grew up left leaning, and they don't often get to see conservative people and how they think. Oh we're TOLD how they think all day every day: they hate us cuz they ain't us. But it's not real. The left has strawmen and we're not so immune to being dog whsitled at either.
I do feel like sometimes being on the left, we have our own virtue signal requirements. Like, it's not good enough that someone doesn't openly hate on LGBTQ+ folks, theyre just as bad if they are missing any rapidly increasing number of qualifications that secure their membership as allies.
Outwardly we'll say something like, we just want tolerance and to survive.
And then in reality we demand 1984 O'Brian level of "we love Big Brother" allegiance to all the latest and greatest progressive thought for any of it to count. Any bit of hesitation and you might as well be Westboro Baptist.
We are that way because we have ingested and been fed a steady diet of "they deserve hate, they're either all the way with us or they're part of the problem to be hated on"
Not hating on queer people is definitively the bare minimum you could do, and I would call it basic empathy rather than outward allyship.
Edit: Also the inclusion of "openly hate" makes me want to clarify that just hiding your queerphobia beneath a thin veneer of civility (what I would call "inwardly hating" something) does not count you as an ally.
Yeah, it's like... I have family who don't "openly hate" on queer people but are absolutely homophobic and transphobic. Social pressure and a desire to maintain personal relationships with queer people in their lives (like me) have changed their behavior, but they still fundamentally believe it's a sin and would prefer that queer people not exist. The current status quo is worlds better than where it was when I was growing up, when acquaintances would get cut off by their parents because they were queer. But that absolutely doesn't make people like my family "allies" even if it's more palatable to interact with them now.
Sure. Prison labor camps are always nicer when you try and forget about the jailors and the world outside and instead concentrate on the little things. /s
Elon gave full permission to nazis on X. Trump brought the haters out of the shadows and they feel empowered to be loud and proud. The Christian right has become increasingly aggressive.
I wrote a huge nuanced comment about what I think is a major cause of this but I deleted it when I realized that the more words I added were making my point less clear and that this message won't really be taken well by a lot of people.
I will simply say that homosexuality won acceptance with the love-is-love campaign, messaging that signaled to mainstream Americans that gay people wanted the same thing they did and arguing against two people simply wanting to love each other was so difficult that even many socially conservative religious people began to accept gay people either outright or in a live-and-let-live compromise of their values. Gay people showed straight people, we're just like you. Well, we've come a long way from those days and the way that gay people are portraying themselves in social media and increasingly in mainstream media are not at all conducive to inclusive messaging.
Do I believe that people should be allowed to practice what they want, consensually, in how they express themselves and practice forms of sex? Absolutely, 100%, and without judgement aside from occasionally finding something cringy. But do I believe that people should be showcasing this to wide audiences who find that content objectionable and socially abnormal? No, and I believe that the latter puts serious risk to the hard won acceptance of homosexuality. I think the fight for acceptance still struggles on but we are just not at a point in American society where it's okay to be that different and not expect people to start to form bad associations or even push back against acceptance in general.
I'm not arguing at all for people do go back into the closet, I think seeing two men walk romantically hand in hand down the street should be normalized and accepted without reservation but some of the things I've been seeing from fellow members of the community, both in public and online, are a far cry from that. I think others are correct that Trump normalized right-wing incivility and that social media encourages widespread incivility in general but I think we as a community need to take a hard look at how we portray ourselves to outsiders and understand how they are going to react to that, even when that reaction is not justifiable it's still the reality of the situation.
So what counts as "showcasing" here? Kissing my wife in public? Saying "my wife" in a casual workplace conversation? Existing in public as a trans person who doesn't pass? Getting a double mastectomy for gender-affirming reasons? Going topless at the beach? Breastfeeding a child in public? Wearing a short skirt? Wearing trousers at all instead of a skirt? How far do we have to go to appease people who "find that content objectionable and socially abnormal"?
I'm going to be charitable and assume that you're not just purposefully choosing innocuous examples. I'm also not talking about transgender people which is a subject I don't intend to reach with this narrative. If we're going to be intellectually honest here we're going to have to admit that things exist on a spectrum and what is socially acceptable and abnormal can at some point cross over into finding wide disgust or condemnation, any inability for commenters to envision something more egregious than saying "my wife," routine PDA, or wearing trousers is a gross failure of imagination and doubly any failure for someone to be able to put themselves into someone else's frame of mind (in this case a normal American socially centrist or conservative individual) is a huge part of the political problem we face in the US.
What you call appeasing is at a certain point conforming to social norms or what I call, living in a society. Gay culture has always existed outside of social norms and, quite frankly, can be at times pretty extreme compared with what average people find acceptable in life or at least what average people feel is acceptable to disclose in real life. There are a lot of social norms that I violate as a gay man but I keep those private outside my very closest of friends, for whatever reason a lot of gay people no longer feel the need to keep those things private. And to be very clear, we're not talking about me talking about my boyfriend, holding his hand, or giving each other a kiss in public. If you imagine a line that wider society generally deems as acceptable and cannot imagine what things may constitute crossing that line by a margin large enough to turn public opinion against gay people, then I don't think me giving any examples would help this conversation at all.
My point is that this line moves. That list of things are all things that people absolutely can and do object to still. Many of them absolutely crossed that line by a large margin in the past and in some places in the present. There are US states where I could not do some of these things safely. My mother still says "ew" whenever there's a gay kiss on TV. If queer people are required to stay behind a line of what society deems publicly acceptable, our only option is not to exist at all.
Without examples of what you mean and how it's specific to queer people in a way that's responsible for turning public opinion against us, I can't think of any behavior that is egregious enough that society rightfully disapproves of even straight people doing it while also being sufficiently unique and common to queer people that it would remotely be justified to turn public opinion against them. My only recourse is to assume you're referring to the same things that other people who make similar complaints are -- and that's overwhelmingly people who criticize queer people for doing things straight cis people do all the time, or people who want queer people not to exist at all.
I can't read u/TreeFiddyFiddy's mind, but I think this Key and Peele bit encapsulates how...loud some queer people are:
https://youtu.be/e3h6es6zh1c?si=O5tijzRnFKzx6icV
I get that it's a comedy bit, but I have known many queer people that turned their sexuality into their entire identity. I know people often explode out of the closet and calm down with time. Still, it's sometimes worth discussing what's acceptable to flaunt in public.
But when people are as loudly and aggressively straight, they might be equally held accountable by HR, but no one talks about banning straight marriage. So this is not a queer people problem. It's that same issue where the acts of any one minority are projected on the whole and "allyship" is conditional, which are majority issues. Or in this case, heterosexual issues.
This whole thread is "let's talk about what's acceptable" by mostly saying queer people can sometimes do "too much". But mostly with zero actual examples except a key and Peele sketch and a lot of suggestive eyebrow gestures. It's very "behave according to majority culture or lose your civil rights" purity culture junk. And it's right up there with " I mean if they would just act right, the police wouldn't harass them." Note how this can be about any minority population, including queer people?
I'm fairly certain if we were talking about race, and someone was complaining about Black people's "behavior" in such vague terms, someone else wouldn't come in and help explain their behavior using a Key and Peele sketch. But maybe I'm wrong and should expect to be disappointed. Black queer folks get double amounts of respectability culture expectation garbage in the first place
And yeah this is coming from inside the house, I get it. But it's still respectability bull.
It's quite frankly a very unwelcoming Thread for LGBTQ folks, and I don't really think that's what the title intended.
Honestly I wouldn't even be shocked if that circumstance happened. The bar for white people is on the floor when it comes to stuff like that lol. The only reason I'd be surprised is that Tildes is so white that I don't see the original conversation about race even starting.
But yeah, I absolutely agree, it's all unwelcoming respectability bullshit. When I first saw this topic on the front page, I misread the title as saying "LGBT and marginalized voiced are not welcome on Tildes" at first. Generally that's not true, especially in ~lgbt, but threads like this are enough that if I were a new user, I'd be put off.
Look as soon as I said it.... I know.
And I hate doing an oppression comparison but sometimes it can make people realize the language being used is a problem.
And this is why, though I feel same sex marriage was crucial its prioritization was criticized by many in the queer community. We didn't break down restrictive systems we just slid into them. And that's important and also it isn't the ideal end.
I think focusing on marriage was crucial due to the legal protections it provides -- marriage has been a legal and financial union for much longer than it's been an expression of romantic love. But my current residence permit is based on me being married to my spouse, so that part is much more salient to me. As a result, I side-eye queers (especially young ones) who call marriage equality assimilationist. I absolutely think it was also a huge force behind the wider positive cultural change that has happened in the US when it comes to attitudes toward gay people. But I agree that we are far far away from the ideal end, and we need to keep fighting for queer acceptance.
Agreed, ultimately it was necessary and crucial given our societal status quo but I do understand the criticism of it from a queer theory/liberation standpoint. I'm less satisfied with modifying existing structures instead of reconstructing them and continually find myself obligated to both support and act in that manner in life so it's an internal dissonance I'm feeling and expressing here too.
Discussing how public behaviour affects how queer people are viewed seems like a reasonable topic for ~lgbt.
It's funny you mention race since the underpinnings of respectability politics are the writings oh W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respectability_politics
My lived experience and discussions with homophobes that I turned into allies clearly aren't valued though, so I doubt any further discussion will make a difference. I've felt more than enough judgement in my life from other queer people for being happy and chill with my identity. We all have to fight discrimination in our way. I hope someday there's no more need to discuss discrimination against queers.
It's not funny, I mentioned what I intended. To quote from that link
And I firmly believe that pride premised on how well we bow to dominant culture is not pride, nor is it acceptance. In fact, I'm arguing we're not that different, we're just judged differently for it. The LGB movement is engaging in respectability politics too.
No where have I said your experiences aren't valued. But I do not feel that arguing to revoke or restrict rights is ever a reasonable response to "bad behavior" (and let's presume it is) from a minority. That isn't allyship and it's not supporting other queer folks. I don't love drag shows, which has a lot to do with me being a non-binary introvert who isn't comfortable with big displays of femininity in particular or really gregarious crowd work in particular. But thats my issue, and not an ethical reason for me to want to revoke the rights of drag queens.
We aren't even really having a discussion about the behavior because it's all been suggestion and hinting and "you know the type of queer person I mean." If we're talking about how to help convince individuals to be more accepting, that's certainly a conversation. If we're talking about how queer people should behave, I have been accused of "shoving it in people's face" for having a shaved head and rainbow glasses.
If we're going to discuss specific behavior and not comedic skits or eyebrow waggles I'd be happy to do that. But there is no response to the fact that the same behavior in "straight" culture never seems to lead to a demand to keep straight people away from children and I cannot get on board with condoning that ideology even by my silence.
I'm happy you're happy, so am I. I am asking us not to participate in shaming of others that are equally happy, rather than acknowledging there are some people that cross boundaries or live far more gregariously in all populations, and whether we like it or not, we don't think it's reasonable to harm that entire population for it.
There are similarly straight people who flaunt their sexuality to an annoying degree in public. No one says that the young cishet couple slobbering all over each other in the corner of the bar are making people reconsider straight rights. Whether I find something annoying or tasteless should not be the measure by which we just something as unacceptable in public, certainly not to the extent that we consider it something that's justifiably turning public opinion against us.
The portions of the population most likely to shift their opinion against queer people are people like my mother, people whose acceptance of queer people around them is already on shaky ground. People like that think that me referring to "my wife" in a casual workplace conversation is the equivalent of that sketch. No amount of policing how annoying or cringe or embarrassing other queer people are is going to win us acceptance from people like that, and it's certainly not going to win over the people who still don't accept us. The most straight-laced chaste normal-seeming gay person is still a faggot to them.
People absolutely discuss backlash to excessive teenage PDA, so I don't think we'll see eye-to-eye on this.
Wasn't talking about teenage PDA at all and you don't seem to want to engage with what I'm actually saying, so I'm inclined to agree we won't see eye-to-eye here.
How do those people feel about Mardi Gras? What about Spring Break parties that happen down in Florida?
Even if they find it distasteful, they don't think straight people should lose civil rights for it. Which is why respectability culture is still part of the problem.
There's a time and a place to cut loose, and those are the right ones per most of American society.
So, once again, it's a problem with cultural bias, not one with queer folks "cutting loose."
Queer folks should be just as welcome to cut loose at the right time and place.
But Pride Parades aren't that time and place? When and where is?
Could you give some examples of what you're talking about? I don't want to make any assumptions.
You could be talking about men kissing each other in a context where it would be totally acceptable for a man and a woman to kiss, or you could be talking about smearing each other in goat's blood and riding naked and crusty on public transportation.
I'm sorry, I just don't see how anyone can engage with this opinion without examples. You could mean anything.
I think so much of what you're talking about exists in straight culture and media and relationships and no one is out here banning or hating straight folks for it.
Strip clubs (bonus, a socially acceptable work outing)
The Playboy mansion
Porn magazines and reading them "for the articles"
Page 3 girls in the UK
"Booth babes" and whatever the term is for "hot girls scantily clad with shots wooing you into clubs"
Boobs everywhere in Game of Thrones and other prestige television. (Straight people cannot keep the male gaze off women, it's obsessive and weird.)
Swinger and kink scenes that are in general dominated (in both senses) by straight couples and straight men.
Nudist beaches and nudist enclaves.
Legal marriage with underage girls
Fundamentalist LDS (which would be illegal marriages with underage girls)
Counting down the days til a female celebrity is "legal"
Oh and the crossdressing by cis women, wearing pants and such? I mean when it's gay women you expect it, right?
Some of this is just skeezy, some is just people living their life, some a crime but none of it makes people want to actually ban "straight marriage" or stop accepting straight relationships. And that's why I don't buy the "queer people demanded too much acceptance by being too out there" line.
I feel like you only need to check any comments on any post on Instagram to see that this is the case. The blocking of Mastodon servers is new for sure, but it really doesn't seem like Meta themselves are willing to do any moderation at all on their platforms even before all the fediverse stuff.
Any comment involving any girl you can bet to see comments asking about OnlyFans, or complaining about what they're wearing, or any other classic 18th century sexism you can think of. Anything with any sort of rainbow in any frame of a Reel and you'll get classic casual homophobia. Most commenters on Instagram are probably the dumbest people in the world, and it's disheartening to read anything on the platform.
I've personally had to limit my own exposure to Instagram, trying to keep it under 1 hour a day if possible. It's just too disheartening to see that there still exists people that are like that in 2024. I've tried reporting many of the accounts to no avail, always denied by whatever "moderator" they have set up.
The comments section will kill your faith in humanity every time. That's true on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, pretty much any mass audience platform.
Among the top ten rules of internet mental health hygiene: Don't read the comments!
Surprisingly I feel like YouTube has been a bit better with their comments recently, not too sure if it's because I'm on the better side of YouTube or something. But yeah, everywhere else really just makes me depressed. I always have this morbid curiosity of how dumb people can get, but it's probably better to just cut it all out nowadays.
I think YouTube really upped their comment moderation tools, both automated and non, so we no longer see the worst comments like we used to. My YouTube comment experience has become downright pleasant.
It's funny, I used to have an extension that changed the YouTube comments to the reddit threads about the videos, but nowadays sometimes I'd rather have the opposite.
YouTube allows video uploaders to moderate their own comments, so if you don't follow terrible people, you probably won't see terrible comments. It is sort of outsourcing the issue, but it seems to work out.
YouTube comments really haven't been that bad recently......?
I think it's because edgelords aged out of YouTube comments, not better algorithms or moderation.
And I say this because I remember trying to report bad comments on YT many many years ago to absolutely no avail. The entire system was set up to ignore reports, it felt like.
On the other hand it might also be the kinds of videos I watch :/
Meanwhile, on my home feed I was just recommended a community post from MSNBC about a football player who's died and the overwhelming majority of comments there were claiming it's the result of COVID vaccines. Avoid the news channels, I guess.
I just choose not to look at most comments. I've had an Instagram for a long time, but other than posting my own photos and looking at photos from friends and family, I never really endlessly scrolled. But since I don't have reddit accessible on my phone anymore, I've switched to endlessly scrolling Reels.
I didn't look at comments at first, but then I started getting curious...and hoo boy. People fucking suck. Whatever happened to, "if you have nothing nice to say, don't say anything at all?" I mean, I know it's the Internet; I'm not that naive.
The video or photo can be something cute and wholesome, like someone's cat lovingly licking their owner's face, and invariably one of the top comments (though not the most liked), will be some asinine, misinformed, rude, and/or mean comment. "OMG, you're a terrible cat owner! Your cat is going to die because you're letting it lick the germs and sweat chemicals from your face! Give up your cat and KYS."
Huh? WTF? So yeah, I just mainly skip over comments.
More importantly, there's a trans home DIYer that I came across who's got some pretty good tips for around the house. She does an annual charity stream to support trans youth. This year, I think she got kicked off/banned from almost all the platforms where she was trying to raise money, including Instagram. She's trying to do a good thing here, but these trolls and garbage people have to ruin it, by submitting false reports, death threats, and more. And the platforms just let it happen.
I really don't get it either. For me it's really about the morbid curiosity about how stupid people can get more than anything.
I wish people would learn how to stop talking if they don't have anything nice to say, and I kinda wish there were more consequences irl with what you say online. But most of these abusive comments are probably bots anyways so -shrug-
I didn't know that the trans DIYer was banned on platforms :( I saw some of her videos every once in a while and really appreciated her presentation. That just makes me even sadder, that for some reason these moderation systems can be abused so easily but they can't seem to ban actual trolls or bots.
I used threads for about a week during the Kendrick/Drake beef. And just being on it did a number on my mental health. Deleted it and noticed Instagram having the same impact. Deleted that off my phone shortly after. My social media is now Tildes and some discord servers. I feel much better but I do miss the connections I had with friends on instagram.
If LGBTQ content was filtered as "political", then when this filter was turned on, we should expect engagement for major LGBTQ creators to fall off of a cliff. This data would make the critiques mentioned in the article all the more forceful. Do we know any examples where this has happened?
Another piece of data I'd like to see is a regular survey of how safe different vulnerable groups feel on various platforms. This would be a nice gauge for platforms seeking to build inclusive spaces.
I don't think this was your intent, but all you did was question the article with this response and it made me initially wonder if you had simply entered the LGBT community to provide a negative opinion. I want to be clear that I'm not attacking you, but as a queer person who has spent a reasonable amount of time in these different spaces, anecdotally I could tell you the author is sharing information on a real problem and anecdotally nearly every queer and minority I know would agree.
This is not an objective measurement, obviously, but to comment only on the lack of objectivity here without providing any additional input or sharing your stance on LGBT folks could be seen as an attack by some, and I think it's important to point out because I believe a lot of what the author is getting at comes from the similar place - that questioning queer folks under the guise of just asking questions or voicing discomfort is generally allowed on many large platforms. Where that line of what's hate speech and what's allowed gets pushed further right generally speaking with bigger platforms (and notably called out here as particularly malicious by meta because they are likely profiting off it), and it's why queer folks have fled many of these larger platforms.
I understand sensitivity to something many call "concern trolling" where one enters a community they don't belong in and pose objections while insincerely feigning concern as a justification for why they are making the objections. This feigned concern allows the troll to blend in.
I am a queer man, and issues regarding inclusivity and safety on social media platforms matter greatly to me, and is a substantial portion of the reason I prefer putting my efforts here at Tildes rather than another platform. It also motivated the comment I left.
My comment makes two points and doesn't seek to discredit the article. To start, I think the article works as-is, I don't intend to ramp up the standard of evidence for the main thesis of the article. The fact that political content is turned-off by default and that some people's existence is inherently political is cause for alarm.
For my first point, I think it is a worthwhile endeavor to measure the impacts to LGBTQ creators that Meta's algorithm change caused. My point isn't that the critique doesn't work without this evidence, but that it is more forceful with this evidence.
My second point is less about data the article could use and makes a broader point about the kind of data that could make communities more welcoming and safe. For instance, if we had a good measure of the relative inclusivity of platforms, this would both help in both finding safe communities and, more crucially, measure the impacts of platform actions on inclusivity. Such as whether this politics toggle has an impact on safety or the degree to which Twitter's change in ownership affected inclusivity.
I don't really have much to add here other than to thank you for spending the time expanding upon your thoughts and make clear your intention. I agree that better measurement would be great, but it's also really hard to measure on a private platform and especially so when you're a group of queers who likely don't have the kind of resources to do this measurement. I think it would be great to see more researchers focus in on this issue, but unfortunately I think the fact that we see so little of this is a reflection of the incentives in research for them to focus on other issues.
I've played with the politics filter since I started using threads as a fellow queer person. I haven't noticed any issues with queer content being filtered out when the politics filter is turned on. It might just be my curated content, but I have actually felt the safest on threads over mastodon and Bluesky being a queer person on the internet.
I know all experiences vary, and I don't want to discredit the OP or the article, but I do really want to note that not all experiences are the same.
I've come across some really awful things from trolls/bots, and have reported them every time. More often than not, meta has marked them as harassment/bullying/spam/what have you, and removed both the comment/post and the user.
So I was curious about this and noticed that on my Instagram account, I do have "Limit political content from people you don't follow." I don't remember setting this. I'm assuming this came out on all Meta platforms at the same time, so relatively recently.
Anyway, I haven't noticed any decrease in content from other LGBT, POC, etc users that I don't follow. I also still see ads for Ukrainian and Palestinian causes and charities, along with campaign ads for Biden and other state/local Dem pols. Though being ads, those may not be included in the restriction.
Maybe I should turn the option off for a bit and see what pops up.
I'm somewhat surprised you've had issues on Bluesky. I've personally never faced any queer discrimination on there, but maybe I've just been lucky? Can't say the same about the Mastodon instances I've checked out.
It's the internet, so there are still some heated discussions occasionally. You can always plug in your own moderation services too to easily control whatever content you don't want to see.
I feel like a lot of it is just the luck of the draw with who finds you and your content.
One of the big labelers just blew up recently so a lot of folks who used it for muting or blocking transphobic, or racist or whatever people rather than having to do it individually while being potentially mobbed by notifications. That may impact recent experiences in particular.