Me personally? I’ve become much less tolerant of sexist humor. Back in the day, cracking a joke at women’s expense was pretty common when I was a teen. As I’ve matured and become aware to the horrific extent of toxicity and bigotry pervading all tiers of our individualistic society, I’ve come to see how exclusionarly and objectifying that sort of ‘humor’ really is, and I regret it deeply.
I practice meditation quite seriously, but I stopped telling people I’m spiritual. I really am not interested in ghost stories, gods and angels at all.
I know it’s controversial, but moving away from “guys” when I address a group and more or less defaulting to “they” when referring to people I don’t know.
They was practical, because I deal with so many students exclusively via email, and the majority of them have foreign names where I’d never be able to place a gender anyways if they didn’t state pronouns.
Switching away from guys was natural, but I’m in a very male dominated field and I’d heard from women students in my undergrad that they did feel just a bit excluded in a class setting (not as much social settings) when the professor addresses a room of 120 men and 5 women with “Guys”, so it just more or less fell to the side in favour of folks/everyone.
I use “guys” even when address a group of women. I feel it’s basically become a gender neutral term.
I never realized how frequently I called things “lame” until I said it in front of a coworker paralyzed from a motorcycle accident. Hopefully he understood, but it just took that one glance telling me he heard it for me to stop. To try to stop.
Used to use the word ‘retarded’ to describe people doing dumb things. Then I realized that not only was it hurtful to people with Down Syndrome - it was inaccurate … as a person with Down Syndrome would not do the things I was attributing to the phrase.
I was totally headed down the alt right pipeline. Throughout highschool I was depressed and lonely. I lost my faith which sent me to the online atheist community which ran out of content, so they started attacking feminists/sjws. I also just distrusted women because I got molested as a child by one and no one took it seriously. This had primed me to just eat up all the content from the MRA/antifeminist crowd. The youtube algorithm, which at the time was absolutely unhinged, pushed me to racist content which I just parroted because I didn’t know any better. I didn’t understand why things were the way things were, but I was taught who to blame.
What saved me was getting friends. These friends shattered my preconceptions, which sent me to the library, which got me talking to more people, which got me reading more. By the time I finished high school I just became utterly incompatible with the person I used to be. I couldn’t take back the things I said to people, but I could join their protests and speak up for them when I heard some heinous shit being said.
I watched a few Jordan Peterson videos out of curiosity, and I will also watch some Joe Rogan clips as well for the same reason. For a while, I was bombarded by alt right YouTube videos. It’s so crazy to think just a few clicks can lead you down that path. I was older when I watched so it, so I could obviously discern their real message, but if I was a younger man it would be harder. The algorithm almost seemed to slowly introduce more and more extreme views.
Watch the Pangburn videos of Jordan Peterson debating Sam Harris. It’s easy to see what a word-salad regurgitating sophist blowhard Peterson is.
Something rather cringe and obnoxious in hindsight was the over use of the word “ocd” It was quite common in media and in my circles for somebody to say “I’m so ocd” when referring to some perfectly normal thing they do like tidying bookcases and organising things.
It’s pretty cringy now and I’d never say it now. I feel bad for saying it… but hey personal growth I guess. I was in school/college at the time too so it was a long time ago. There were a lot of things that were common at school that I used to say that are definitely not pc nowadays and I accept that. I don’t pretend to be a perfect and morally righteous invidual. I have flaws as much as the next person
People still throw OCD around like they’re the world’s quirkiest person “oh that’s just my OCD lol”
Misogyny in books. I was reading a Morse book. He described the woman of a couple from dyed hair to hammer toes but had no physical description of her husband whatsoever.
Nothing. Everything is still funny in the right or wrong context.
I used to use “gay “ or “ retarded “ as negative adjectives, I no longer do because using someone’s being in a negative light is really mean, and I try not to be mean.
smoking. growing up in the 80s, everyone was smoking - in bars, restaurants, airplanes, even hospitals.
everyone I knew, their parents smoked tobacco or chewed tobacco. I started smoking myself, around 16 or so, as did all of my friends & even people I didn’t associate with. it was just part of the culture - and yes, I was aware at the time that it was a dangerous activity, but kids are stupid.
and then around 15 years ago or so everyone stopped or switched to vaping. now I really only see homeless people smoking. it’s quite the culture shift.
In the 90s, anything bad was “retarded” or “gay”. Those don’t really fly anymore.
I’ve done ny best to shake out ableist, racist, and other harmful speech.
We may be able to speak freely but we are all held accountable for the words we say
Racism.
While I was never into it myself thankfully, I let it pass a lot in my family. Being in university changed that though, it just feels too uncomfortable to have my family say racist shit in front of me while I have so many people of color as friends. I still struggle to call out their transphobia though but that is due to my own identity issues.
In my early life I was raised in Kansas fundie hell. I graduated to 4chan. To call me racist would have been an understatement; “proud white supremacist”, more like. (LOL I used the term “race nationalist” then)
Perhaps my proudest personal achievement has been unraveling that disgusting tapestry of who I was.
Good on ya.
Grew up in the 80s and 90s. As progressive and openminded as I thought I was then…holy shit there are a lot of words and phrases I won’t touch any more because they sound archaic, racist, mysoginistic, or hateful today. Back then they were perfectly acceptable everyday things no one would bat an eye at. It does make me happy that at least in this small arena we seem to have made progress as a society.
(Should add that this is from a US perspective)
I don’t have any regrets about making dead baby jokes when I was much younger, but definitely won’t be making them now with an 8 month old daughter.
My 17yo thought I was bullshitting him when we were talking about these jokes. He googled it and was speechless. I was kinda young when they were popular but remember vividly my uncle’s telling them often.
