I do. The woman looks at me funny if I don't. :)

i stay away from the racist jokes. i admit i have heard some that i have laughed out loud, and honestly, i feel bad about that. as for the sexist jokes, my wife is the perfect barometer. if i can tell her a sexist joke and she laughs, then i know i dont have to feel guilty. it usually helps though to start with a guy joke. she takes the follow-ups much better.

But, should you feel bad about telling the jokes? Though I don't make jokes about white men, I make fun of them almost incessantly (myself included). Is it wrong to make fun of other stereotypes if I make fun of myself more?

"Other stereotypes"? Are you a stereotype?

The bland assertion that "Of course I'm not a bigot, but..." is no more than an excuse when the "but" is followed by bigoted behavior.

I consider calling someone, for example, a "faggot" (when it's clearly understood to be a deprecation) to be bigoted behavior, even if the deprecation is in jest, and even if the people involved are "good friends" and everybody is "just kidding", because the shared context of the communications is "We both consider class {x} to be despised, and there's nothing wrong with that."

i suppose more than anything else it depends on the company. maybe im oversensitive, but i would be uncomfortable if someone in my group of friends regularly made racist jokes, and i would be vocal about that. not judgemental, but concerned. its perhaps a double standard, but i get away with more sexist-against-women jokes because im equal opportunity about that. but i dont care how many cracker jokes i make, i wouldnt be comfortable making a black joke. perhaps its my upbringing, or hypersensitivity, or whatever. and i do suppose there are jokes arent really racist, but play on ethnic stereotpyes in a playful manner. i would be comfortable with being told jokes like that, but even then i dont know if i could repeat it. its a blurry line, and i prefer not to risk crossing it. but thats just me. and on that note:

why dont single women fart?

because they dont have assholes yet.

~james

If I call someone a faggot, but I was only joking, and I didn't even know they were gay, my intented communication was a playful jest. Someone else's different interpretation of my words doesn't make me a bigot. Judge people by what they meant to say, not by what they actually said.

A person can joke about a class being despised and not really think that they are. Yes, sometimes jokes hurt people's feelings. But that doesn't mean it was intentional.

Your "joke" is based in a value held in common--that calling someone gay is insulting--absent that value the joke would be pointless. Your joke, even though your express concious intent was innocuous and playful, tacitly accepts, endorses and reinforces that value. Whether the person you were speaking to actually is gay or not is beside the point, as is what you conciously *meant* by the words .

My point is that what people say reveals things about how they think...things that often go quite a bit beyond what they *intended* to say. Dan Quayle never *intended* for his speech to reveal to people how confused his thinking was, and yet it did, and people judged him on it.

Obviously this case is a bit more subtle than "What a terrible thing it is to lose your mind". But you can't expect to not get called on the *implications* of your words as well as what you explicitly *say*...just like dham 's "I never said *homosexual* ass-spelunker" .

heheh. That was pretty funny, and <i>I'm</i> an asshole!

Dark Helmet: How many assholes do we have on this ship anyhow?
Crew: YO!
Dark Helmet: I knew it! I'm surrounded by assholes! (Pulls down facemask.) Keep firing assholes!

I think that you're wrong. It is possible to joke about something and not believe a single word of what you said. I guess we'll just have to disagree. :)

But look at it this way. I bet Dave would say that he doesn't think the least bit badly about Homosexuals. And yet you would turn around and disagree with him about himself. I think he knows a little bit more about himself that you do. It's true that words reveal things about people. But why not go directly to the source instead of investigating vague clues?

Eh, I get really uncomfortable when people use "nigger" or "faggot" seriously. Really really uncomfortable. That kind of intolerance is not something I'm in line with.

But... as far as words go, they're just words. I think "faggot" sounds funny. I personally actually use "fag", and only because it strings together really well with other words - I'll call someone "faggy mcfag fag" or something. I truly have no problem with homosexuals at all - and, as I've said before (but not here), I think everyone is a bit bisexual. Some more than others, but I think it's there in everyone. So yeah. I definitely don't have any problems with people different than I. Some words just make for better times.

Because firstly there's nothing vague about it at all, but more importatly everyone has a vested interest in denying that their behavior reflects and reinforces prejudice...as dham has proceeded to do. His protest that "words are just words" is feeble. All speech made up of words, and words have meanings, explicit and implicit. The sixties classic denial "Some of my best friends are {group}" is still very much alive forty years later.

Have you ever heard the archaic expression "nigger rig", for example? It refers to a design or scheme that is lazy, sloppy or unreliable. It implicitly calls black people lazy and careless every time it is used. If I say "The program is a real nigger-rig", my explicit surface meaning is something like "This program is a kludge.", but I send a secondary implicit message that says "At some level, I believe black people as a group are lazy and unreliable". Again, there's nothing vague here.

Calling people "faggots" as a joking insult (there's no other reason to do it if you're not serious, which dham says he'd never do) is very much along the same lines. If using the word is an insult, even in play, the word is derrogatory. Every time the word is used in this way, the idea underlying it is validated and reinforced. among the speaker and his audience.

<i> edit to fix typos </i>

My brothers and I always called each other "fag" when we were little. I had no earthly clue what it meant at first; I just heard it used once and thought it was a pretty cool-sounding insult. "You fag". And once I knew what it meant, I/we still kept using it because we were used to it. This continued all the way through high school.

Then, when I went away to college, a gay guy became one of my close circle of friends, and it became very difficult to remember not to use that word. I had to make a conscious effort, especially because he was the only other guy in this circle of friends, and I was used to saying it around the guys.

This one time in particular, we were playing racquetball, and he beat me on one considerably hard-fought point. I slipped and uttered "you fag!" It was under my breath, but I think he probably heard me. I still feel really stupid about that.

I'm not sure they're insults. It's really just to say something silly. The other day I exclaimed to my sister "You're a fat!"

What is a fat? I dunno. But it was pretty damn funny. Nothing against fat people. Nothing wrong with being fat. But I said "You're a fat!" anyway.

Also, I think you're trying to analyze something you've obviously never really taken part in or understood. I call my friends "boner" too. Does that mean I am prejudiced against boners?

Get real. People are just having a fun time with some words. Just like there is nothing morally wrong with saying "fuck", there is nothing morally wrong with saying "fag". The words themselves are just combinations of letters, and I submit that how you use them and what you mean are the things that make a difference.

Psychological studies suggest otherwise.It probably wasn't fair of juju to name Dave as an example to make his argument, which has a false hypothesis. The psychological study linked in this post applies to people generally, not to any individual, and I'd emphasize that this post doesn't reference any named person, but takes issue with juju's argument.

Juju's hypothesis that people know a bit more about themselves than can be learned from objective observation of their behavior is fuzzy logic, although he might be less likely to realize this than others. ;)