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Casual misogyny/racism: deal or split?
Dedwrekka
MetalHell adjacentRegistered User regular
MetalHell adjacentRegistered User regular
The more I've been exposed to the levels of misogyny and racism out there via the internet, the less comfortable I am around it in my everyday life. Only, I've noticed that people in my only two social circles refuse to stop using it ('black people cause ebola', words like "bitch" and "whore", ect.) even when I've expressed my uncomfortableness around it and asked them to stop. They assume that my uncomfortableness is based around other people overhearing it and "doing something about it", but the reality is that I don't want to be around it.
However, I also don't want to risk losing the friendships I've built over the years. These are the people I regularly game with and talk to, so I'm apprehensive about just walking away.
What can I do?
However, I also don't want to risk losing the friendships I've built over the years. These are the people I regularly game with and talk to, so I'm apprehensive about just walking away.
What can I do?
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You've expressed your feelings, they didn't change their behavior. There is nothing else you can do. You can't make your friends/acquaintances change, you can only accept them as they are or find new people to hang out with. Not sure what you think people are going to be able to tell you besides that.
Do you get offended when people use "guys" and there's girls present? It's likely not meant to be sexist, and changing is going to be annoying because they're aware of the issues you have and there is going to be slip ups and they know it's going to upset you. People aren't perfect. These words are often used when angry, like if you get cut off in traffic. It's almost entirely not meant to be demeaning like some people think it is now-a-days. I agree they shouldn't be used when you mean "asshole" but is that an uphill battle you want to have?
Now the flat out racism, okay, that's pretty fucking terrible and you should cut ties with those kinds of people because that's nothing but toxic.
If the terms become more offensive, that's when I'd split, I've had friends drop "gay" and "queer" in casual conversation and it's annoying now that I'm not 10 and finding out words that upset people.
Challenge everything they say that makes you uncomfortable. And not in a joking/passive aggressive way. The reason people don't change, as Gaslight pointed out, is that they are seldom challenged in their beliefs/behavior. They are either surrounded by like-minded people or by people who don't confront them. The reason this is the path least travelled is that it is rife with conflict and hurt feelings, but it has the most potential for good. At the very least they'll likely tone down their behavior around you when they start to realize that every time they do it they'll have to endure an awkward conversation
Whatever you decide to do, good luck. And good for you, also. The world needs less misogyny and racism. Also, ebola is caused by a virus which is practically the ultimate in equal opportunity organisms. That shit don't care who you are yo...
but they're listening to every word I say
It's more that some of them jokingly use the term "that bitch" as a replacement for "she" or "her" or "That woman/girl" regardless of action or emotion.
example: "That bitch up front who showed us where the new releases were".
Completely different then. I can understand your annoyance.
Just make it clear one more time I think, third strike you're out.
"Hey, do you really need to talk like that? It's not cool bro." is probably how I'd address it.
Sexism. A few different ways to try and deal with it. First is what you've seemingly already tried - a 'not cool, dude'. Second is trying to relate it to them - 'How would you feel if someone said that about your mom / sister?' Third is shame - 'What are you, some stupid 12 year old on XBL?'
If that doesn't work, you are kind of at the 'Deal or Split' point Gaslight mentioned.
The casual racism is more problematic. You can take the How to Tell Someone They Sound Racist approach, which may work. Of course, they may not care if they sound racist or even worse, intentionally are being intentionally racist...so again, you'll be at the 'Deal or Split'.
Part of growing up is pruning toxic relationships. Sometimes it costs us a lot or all of our friends, but it also frees us up to make better friends on our own terms. Friends that we didn't make simply through the neighborhood we grew up in or what sports team we played on in school. Bascially, if you try the above and your friends still don't care enough about how you feel to even try and change / give you lip service, are those really people you want to consider friends?
EDIT - Casual racism isn't more problematic than sexism, but it's problematic in a different way that can be harder to combat. Not trying to downplay the harm of sexism.
There's a huge difference between "blue language" and "regularly saying casually racist/misogynist bullshit." I (and most of the people I've elected to surround myself with) use blue language prolifically, and still manage not to sound like an ignorant asshole.
OP, I'd start going to Meetup groups asap and phasing in new friends, while phasing these ones out. I absolutely second the vote of making it crystal clear that you personally find what they are saying extremely offputting, and start calling them on saying shit that makes you uncomfortable every. single. time. they do it. Don't worry about making things awkward, because they are the ones making it awkward by repeatedly electing to say shit around you that they KNOW makes you uncomfortable. Either that will kill the friendship (which will have demonstrably not been worth holding onto), or it will fix it. Are there friends in the group who DON'T do this/who just kind of uncomfortably chuckle and try to glaze over this bullshit, too? Invite those people to hang out outside of the group, and maybe focus on those friendships. But either way, I'd start working on building up some backup reserves of friends who behave respectfully, though.
Split.
And don't get me wrong, I understand that it will be crazy difficult. It may burn bridges. It may lead to a few lonely months while you develop new relationships. But it's for the best.
Because what you may not see is the way this group of friends affects you indirectly. People probably know them. Everyone likes to think their 'crazy' antics are confined to their little group - they aren't. There are people who know your friends, and just by virtue of associating with them, you are being judged. You may have already been denied opportunities and you didn't realize it. Maybe these were just social opportunities. But maybe these were professional and academic opportunities as well. You'll never know. You may get a negative reputation because you associate with these people.
It doesn't matter that these consequences aren't deserved - that's what human beings do, they judge, quite unfairly, quite often. So even though you aren't like that, by being around these people, you will suffer as a result.
I'm the personality type where I would directly challenge these people to change their behavior. Then, they have two options - change, or stop hanging out with me. Because you know what - then it's their choice. I would much rather make them stop hanging out with me because they don't like being with someone who doesn't put up with their racism/misogyny, than to simply say I'm not going to hang out with them. Some people don't like that level of confrontation though, and I totally get that. To be sure, some people get violent at that level of confrontation, so it's not always the best approach.
Either way, do yourself a favor and get new friends. You'll thank yourself down the road when you look at the group of people you hang out with then, and compare them to now. You'll realize all the wonderful people you get to meet because you were no longer associated with these dudebros.
And it'll be hard - but the high road is never easy.
some stuff is so far into the casual parlance that even if their usage is kind of unfortunate (ex: bitch) expecting people to be perfect about breaking old usage habits is a bit unrealistic. But if they're regularly using slurs or articulating shit attitudes, just split. If they ask you about it just say 'I got tired of hearing your racist/misogynist bullshit all the time so I'm out.'
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
I...want to challenge him on it. But I also don't. In the end, I just don't hang out with him anymore. It's the easy way out for me and I feel dirty about it but eh I can't fight every battle.
I wouldn't be able to deal with the guy on a daily basis anymore, though, I'll say that much.
Would you leave your girlfriend/boyfriend over something they did without telling them at all? Or over a continual bad behavior you never gave them feedback on?
If you want change, push for it. If they push back really hard, then feel free to set them adrift, but if you just stop hanging out with them without saying anything, don't think you're effecting change or have any sort of high ground.
Only after I went away to college did I realize how totally unacceptable this kind of behavior is. When I went home between my freshman and sophomore years, behavior that before would never have bothered me drove me absolutely crazy. I made it a point let people know that I found it unacceptable. So when some kid said "So and so is N***er Rich" I stopped everything, looked him in the eye and said "You can talk however you like when I'm not around, but don't say that bullshit around me. It is unacceptable and makes you sound like a moron."
He got offended, multiple people got angry at me. They tried the old "but you're different" tact, or the "We're not talking about Indians so why do you care?" bit, like that should make a difference.
My advice to you would be to only make an issue of the overt things people say. It's not possible to be the thought police. You're not going to be able to quickly change the the habits and though processes people have built up over YEARS. I think you'll find that over time the people that you're closest with will come around, and maybe some of the others.
The way it ended for me is that I have a few friends that I still talk to, and there are a lot of people that I just dropped. Honestly, they're low quality people and at 32 I feel like I"m much better off without them.
I don't have any friends who outright use racial slurs, though. I think if you enjoy them its OK for you to have friends with barbaric viewpoints, as long as they don't express them in venues or contexts that would embarrass you or suggest you share their views.
However, in my experience, hardcore tumblr SJWs and stormfront or trailer park tend to have one thing in common: they have pretty lousy lives which is why they spend their time striving for ideological purity on the internet. If your friends similarly are acting this way because they are undereducated and underemployed or whatever, it would be generally good for you to find more successful friends.
what in the hell is this here
What is problematic about telling people not to be friends with losers? I agree with your philosophy that H/A isn't D&D and shouldn't have lengthy crosstalk with advice givers, but OP would better served if you or DC explained why my advice was wrong (I am OK with being "problematic" if I'm correct anyway ;-)).
I suppose you're right though, sometimes it's not worth a person's time arguing with your friends in real life when it's unlikely you'll be able to change their minds. Better just to move on before their thoughts poison your own. Keep yourself in your own little bubble so no outside influences can contaminate your opinions.
In other words, don't give shitty classist advice.
I do think this is true. Unless you are a trained professional, you probably suck at making other people better. I can't pull people up, but they can sure as hell drag me down!
Ah! Thanks for the clarification. Well, yes, one generally does want to be friends with the successful and educated. That seems like the most classist advice I gave though, so not sure why the rest of my observations strike you as more "classist."
Here are my observations on the intersection of class, gaming, and social status. I have found these observations to be generally true, in a statistical sense, in the middle-upper class west coast cities I inhabit and visit, but I don't think they're universally true and I can think of plenty of contrary anecdotes, so obviously there's room for other experiences and perspectives. This is worth going through for OP, because I think it will help him find well-adjusted gamer friends, which is what the thrust of his OP appears to be.
1) I find that, at least until you get into people who are independently wealthy, in American urban cultural centers, people tend to be more middle-of-the-road the more successful they are, because part of being successful as a non-entrepreneur is not being too offensive or objectionable to anybody. Meanwhile, the more people are positioned away from the college-educated middle class - e.g. the very wealthy, the poor, the uneducated middle class, and the educated poor like humanities grad students stuck toiling as adjunct faculty or baristas or both- are more often on the fringe of the political left or right.
The way causation runs is different for different people - some people opt out because they are radicals, some people are radicals because they are excluded, but either way, people who are outside of, and not well served by, existing power structures tend to have the strongest, most ideological critiques of those power structures.
2) My anecdotal experience from being a gamer is that outside of IT and STEM fields, the more educated and successful somebody is, the less likely they are engage in hobbyist non-video gaming like tabletop RPGs or miniature wargaming. Out of my law school class, about 5 of 350 were into gaming and outed themselves such that I knew about it. Meanwhile, the larger university had a thriving gaming club, but 90% of its members were in STEM fields.
3) So the intersection of these two trends is in the fact that, gamers, again from my anecdotal but broad based experience, tend to be more often people on the economic and social margins of society than say, golf enthusiasts or competitive road cyclists. That correlation between gaming, class, and social status is one of the reasons hobbyist gaming is considered "expensive" when you have to drop $700 on a Warhammer army or $2,000 on an enthusiast gaming PC, but an "expensive" hobbyist road bike is in the $5k-$15k range. Another one of course, is age - golfers tend to be older, and therefore have more income than your average age Warhammer player. But that raises the second-order question of why people drop Warhammer, but stick with or take up golf, as they age.
I won't attempt to tackle all those questions here, but the impact of these demographics on the hobby is that you see a greater number of people with non-mainstream political ideas (like the libertarian/Heinleinian ideology that threds through science fiction fandom) or crass racism or misogyny that would not pass muster in polite society but somehow persists in conventions, "esports", and other offline and online gaming spaces.
4) This means that gamers are likelier to have (or at least think it's OK to express) the paleoconservative views OP's friends have, as compared to other enthusiast groups. If OP wants to find well-adjusted gamer friends, from an odds-playing perspective his best bet is to find a university-affiliated group that welcomes a broader community. Doing so effectively selects for higher-SES gamers who are likelier to be well-adjusted and, even if they think sexist or racist things, are less likely to think it's OK to blurt them out in polite conversation. In those circles, some of the humanities majors get so wrapped in social critique and genre deconstruction that they spend their time policing the problematic behavior of other gamers. It's a question of picking your poison, but in my experience, it is far preferable to interact with the occasional well-intentioned SJW-left gamer who wants to "educate" you on why playing a kuei-jin character while being white is problematic, compared to dealing with people who regularly use racial slurs or ogle women's bodies and who might think it's funny to voice a Kuei-jin with the same accent kim jong-il had in TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE.
5) From a practical perspective, OP's best bet is to look for gamers at universities or other places with better-educated people, and taper off contact with his existing gaming group when he can do so. It will probably be easier to take the obnoxious comments if they come in smaller doses and he doesn't feel stuck with those people. It's also easier to tell them off if you need to if you're not as dependent on them socially.
I too encourage heterodoxy, but at some point certain views or behavior are beyond the pale. Some people are only comfortable gaming in a "safe space" free of heterodoxy, too, and this probably isn't the thread to push back on preferences. If you want to make a D&D thread about the broader points, happy to follow you there.
This is literally a five-point essay on what I told you not to do.
You should feel comfortable and agreeable with your friends. That is important. But it is also important that you see your friends as persons in their own right who have good and bad traits. It is a relationship.
Of course, plenty relationships don't work. And it's perfectly acceptable to think a persons good traits don't outweigh the bad. Your friends sound like dicks, OP, and you have no obligation to hang out with them. Personally I would just find new friends but I'm good at making friends so I don't know if you should do that. I think the best idea is just try and find more friends while still hanging out with them and try to which of your friends you can actually get along with. I've found that groups of friends divide over time simply because they like one person more than the other.
My advice is to address that you don't appreciate it. If that doesn't sway them find new people to hang out with. No reason to blow up on them because you told them what was unacceptable. I know not everyone can just drop relationships but racist and misogynistic thinking is unhealthy.
1) Don't be a dick.
2) Don't be with people who are dicks.
3) If people who are rad start being dicks tell them to knock it off.
4) If they don't, go be rad somewhere without those jerks.
Repeat until completely awesome and satisfied with life (which is usually pretty quick if you stick with it).
They didn't seem to really think about those terms, and after asking them to stop, they didn't seem to think about not using those terms.
But it does seem that you already talked to them about this, and they pushed back. That's not a promising sign.
I'd suggest trying a few more times to let them know it's not cool and see how they react.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
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