Post #1755082

Don’t worry about it, you’re english is fine and I would never blame a person for that anyway. The reason I made that sentence comparison was not to suggest that you were lying to me, it was to illustrate the game of telephone that gets played every time subjects like this come up. You say something like “Black lives matter,” but what people hear is “White lives don’t matter.” And so, then you spend a bunch of time arguing about whether “Black lives matter” is a good catch phrase instead of police violence. You say something like “straight women get far too handsy with queer people,” but what people hear is “all straight women are evil.” And so, then you spend a bunch of time arguing about whether being straight and a woman is morally acceptable instead of sexual assault. If you’re paying attention, you’ll notice something. This game, where you just add extra words to the things people are saying, is really easy to play. I told the other person I would be upset if their supposedly better framing was just to swap the word ‘man’ for ‘patriarchy’, and the reason why is that the likes of Andrew Tate or Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson or Nick Fuentes or Steven Crowder—all of these broken clocks, as you say, all of them know that ‘patriarchy’ just means men. And even if it didn’t (it kind of doesn’t), they’ll just say it does anyway. That’s their air of legitimacy. All of the work that you put into avoiding this situation where these grifting conservative dipshits get to pretend that what you’re saying is worse than it is is really easy to unravel. You spend all of this energy trying to appease people, and it buys you nothing. And worse, you never actually got to talk about sexual assault. You are losing the battle if you let them drag you into this pithy, pointless debate about the exact verbage of the idea you’re trying to express. It is so much better to just shut them down. I’ll leave you with this question: if the problem is that the phrase “straight women love SAing queer people” is misleading, why does explaining what you actually meant never seem to fix the problem?