Vox

Musings, rants, rambling, general nonsense

Sticks & Stones

Posted on | November 21, 2010 | 4 Comments

Today one of my young nieces put this in her status update on Facebook

To all those patriots haters and dallas cowboys lovers Tom Brady is NOT a lady but Tony Romo IS a homo!!!!

Now, I am quite sure she does not think Tony Romo is a homosexual, I would be surprised if she even knew what that means at her age. I can’t imagine she would consider it something insult-worthy if she did, because I know she was not raised by people who are homophobic. I’m guessing that it is just something she’s heard, probably at school, as a generic term of derision.

Much has been made lately of using words like “homo” and “fag”, most recently when Willow Palin defended her sister & mother against a Facebook attack by a classmate by writing “you’re such a faggot” in a thread on his page*. Is it likely she was actually suggesting he was sexually attracted to his male classmates? No, and it is unlikely anyone who read the comment thought it was some sort of revelation into his sexuality.

Even Perez Hilton, an openly gay blogger who rails against gay bullying, when in an altercation with Will.i.Am’s producer (or manager, or bodyguard…whatever) reached deep in his soul for an insult to hurl – and came back with “faggot”

It seems to just be part of a larger shift away from civility, more than an indication of increased homophobia. Viewing the ‘youngsters’ online or listening to them at the mall, I see they spend a great deal of time cutting each other down. I regularly read or hear comments referring to friends and family members as “stupid”, “retarded”, “fat”, “cow”, “idiot”, “moron”, “doofus”. White kids & black call each other “nigger” or the seemingly more acceptable “nigga”. Kids that I know have homosexual relatives call their friends “fag” and “gay” and “dyke”.

The volume of the trash talk, as well as the targets at which it is aimed, show that these name-callers think it is “all in good fun”. I assume that when the store clerk spat out her insult at me, she had simply forgotten where she was and that she wasn’t just ‘playing’ with her friends.

I can’t imagine calling my friends names like that, let alone my family. Is that an indication that I am just an old fogey? Do I take it too seriously? Parents, do you hear your kids talking this way and, if so, do you attempt to stop them or do you see it as harmless fun and a way to bond with their friends?

And, given that the current atmosphere is so dense with slurs hurled willy-nilly, how does a person know when to be offended and when it is being said with affection? Is an insult now in the ears of the beholder rather than predicated on the intent of the speaker?

UPDATE: Someone else on Facebook just referred to themselves as a “sick son of a bitch” I jokingly remarked that it was not a very nice thing to say about his mother. Proving that kids have no concept of words & their meanings, let alone the impact of them, he had no idea what I meant. When I pointed out that by calling himself a “son of a ..”, it meant that his mother was the “..bitch” part, he called me an idiot.

I know this kid is one of the biggest momma’s boys ever and there is no chance he would say anything disparaging about her (if I thought he might answer me with “Well it’s true”, I wouldn’t have said anything) Yet the phrase had zero meaning to him. The fact that he just called his mother a bitch, and regularly refers to his friends as “fag”, “dork”, “skank”, “homo”, “nigga”, “moron”, and worse, I can hardly consider that his use of the term “idiot” was actually an insult. Right?
(Of note, he actually wrote “your an idiot”. Sort of takes the edge off when someone trying to insult your intelligence does so with a glaring grammatical error)

* I am not excusing it. Indeed, at her age, and given the level of media exposure she has endured for the last few years, she certainly should have known better. However, like other kids who use the word, I imagine she just figured it was a stupid goof and “no big deal”

I thought about censoring the bad words I used in this post but figured you all would know what I meant. When you see “b*tch, you fill in the blank on the fly. If you will “read” the words anyway, and the point I am making is about people who freely use the words, why bother even trying to mask them with random punctuation?



✏

Category: family, General

Comments

4 Responses to “Sticks & Stones”

  1. Tweets that mention Sticks & Stones -- Topsy.com
    November 22nd, 2010 @ 12:25 pm

    […] This post was mentioned on Twitter by VoxAZ, VoxAZ. VoxAZ said: Sticks & Stones http://t.co/hPH2bzT When is the term "fag" not an insult? […]

  2. Linc
    November 24th, 2010 @ 3:17 am

    Amazing freakin blog here. I almost cried while reading it!

  3. Ernestina
    December 5th, 2010 @ 10:35 am

    very post-a-licious 🙂 thanks for the info!

  4. Merle Ludolph
    December 17th, 2010 @ 1:00 pm

    Tony Romo is engaged. Please tell me he got down on one knees during a game and proposed on the Dallas Jumbotron

Leave a Reply





Time limit is exhausted. Please reload CAPTCHA.