I don't see how someone who's mature cannot see the distinction between trash-talk and harassment.
This was clearly harassment.
But the line gets blurry.
When a guy hits on another guy or talks about grabbing rears, it's ok apparently. When he does so to a woman, it's an instant problem. In an age where orientations and sexes are supposed to be treated in the same way there is certainly a double standard rooted in sensitivity here. Yes hate exists. Yes discrimination exists. Dirty people exist. We get it. But so does context.
What happened there was horrendous. Pure garbage. I would watch him get beaten up. exiled to Angola for that behavior, and then laugh about it later. There was a boundary there and he crossed it.
However, lets say the situation wasn't dialed up to 11 and it was at a level where she was actually ok with it. Nobody sane would care.
That's why I believe it is obvious that issues like this should be judged on:
A) A case by case basis and
B) Only based on the interactions between parties A and B, not your own offend-ability or lack thereof.
So what I mean is that if person X doesn't want person Y demeaning them or objectifying them about some intrinsic quality of person X's (their orientation, their sex, their race, their mother's profession, etc) then it is an issue. This was clearly such a case.
What we cannot do is police every instance of the mentioning of breasts or race related words because between individuals the target may not legitimately care. Perhaps they disagree with all this wanton sensitivity. If someone says that I'm acting N****ish I won't be offended, ever. Even though some outside authority thinks that I should. That's our interaction, nobody was even remotely hurt, and it's all good. Imposing morals on people concerning their speech that each involved party finds acceptable is just the wrong way to do things.
The hard part is determining where you are allowed to go... a random person could be offended by any number of things. Maybe I think that since you will use the N word around your friends but not around me that you are treating me differently, and discrimination of any kind is wrong. Maybe I find that offensive. I'm sure many people dont. This is why the lines are blurry, and I go into said blurriness below.
Getting upset when someone uses the term **** in regards to smash offends some people because **** as an actual action is horrifically bad. It sure is.
But nobody gets upset when someone says "he murdered him"? "Massacred"? "Beat your face in"? "Ran you over"? "Got jumped"? "Tortured"? All terms that are objectively bad. All acts that are very traumatizing, immoral, wrong things that we all just don't give a damn about. Somehow **** is worse to some people but if I were to be completely honest I cannot agree.
It's all bad, and playing favorites with words is inherently arbitrary.
We don't even have to get into immoral words for my point to still exist; I could replace the word "*****" with "divorced" and this thread would read exactly the same, with one person thinking it's ok and someone else lamenting about how it is a hurtful, life altering thing that you never get over. There is an arbitrary line drawn in the sand for some words and not others, and this is simply based too much on emotion.
/sarcasm
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