I Don’t Give a S**t if You Say Fuck

There’s way fucking shittier things to say

The way we police the word “fuck” is f**king stupid.

Every day, people lose their goddamn minds over all the fun words like shit, fuck, and pussy. Meanwhile, people are given a complete green light to espouse coded bigotry, so long as the words they use are “family friendly.”

No homo bro.
In my day it was, “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
He’s one of the good ones.
All lives matter.
What are all these made up pronouns?

All of these phrases are hurtful and work to diminish the plight of marginalized groups. They invalidate people’s experiences and make them feel like outsiders. Speaking from personal experience as a gay person, I have found plenty of groups who made me feel unwelcome with their words.

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The number of times I have heard the term gay used as a pejorative by fully grown adults in the last year is simply astounding. And every time they use the word that way it makes no sense, like when I heard someone say “That job is gay,” or a statement that still confounds me to this day, “The traffic was fucking gay today.” And that sentence honestly could’ve been true had he said it in June, but alas, there was nary a fabulous float that day.

But the fact that the statement itself made no sense was beside the point, because what he made clear was that anything gay was worse than anything not gay. And anytime I find myself in a position like that, there’s a decision that needs to be made.

Do I confront this person or just let it go?

For all you heroes out there who try to help people to see the light, I commend you. I, however, tend to just let it go. I probably shouldn’t, but I do have a couple of reasons for doing this.

First, it is exhausting. Repeatedly explaining the same, very emotional topic to anyone, even supportive people, is fucking draining. And don’t get me wrong, “turning down the gay” anytime I’m in an anti-LGBTQ+ space is still plenty draining, but it sucks a smaller amount of energy from my life than hoping someone, who has a lifetime of deeply entrenched beliefs, will just relent and admit they were making a big deal about nothing after a single 10 minute conversation.

Plus, and this viewpoint admittedly straddles a line between realistic and nihilistic, there’s almost no way I’d be important enough to these people for them to actually internalize my message. How many people take life advice from a random person they don’t know?

So, that effort, in most cases, feels like an incredibly draining and soul deadening waste of time.

But the other reason I let it go is because I still can’t fully answer any question about my sexuality that may come up in a conversation like that. At some point, the only response I’d have is to call this person a fucking asshole, and I know that would undo any good that came out of that conversation. Nobody would have learned anything, and all I would have done was give this guy a reason to continue thinking us gays were a bunch of “snowflakes.”

And regardless of what I do, people like that go on to continue living their best, most hateful lives, while I continue to hear all their negative messaging and constantly doubt the validity of who I am.

And if you want to take it a step further, according to the United Nations, hate speech has been identified as “a precursor to atrocity crimes, including genocide.” So no, it’s not a stretch to say that people reciting these ignorant phrases are potentially laying the groundwork for mass murder and genocide.

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But with all that going on, the things we choose to censor are words like dick-head and fuck-face. These “curse words” have no deeper meaning, yet they’re still the ones that get bleeped-out, and not the dick-heads and fuck-faces saying dangerous hate speech.

Now, if there were a pornstar who went by the name Count Fuckula, then yes, I’d agree that probably isn’t a family friendly use of the word. And by extension, I could understand where that name would get censored. But even in that hypothetical, there’s an underlying meaning connected to the word, and that’s really the point.

Our approach to censorship is guided by overly reductive and trivial guidelines. We take a surface level approach to monitoring dialogue, without lending nearly as much consideration to monitoring the actual contents of people’s words. And when we censor like this, we stifle people who haven’t done anything wrong while simultaneously providing a massive loophole for people to say horrible things.

So maybe it’s time we rethink what makes something rated-R, because why should anyone give a s**t if we say fuck?

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