Hot take but I really do think that some of y’all need to consider how/why/when/how often you’re making fun of straight people for being straight
I do it too, I’m not going to pretend I don’t make jokes about the hets, or the down with cis bus, or whatever
But I recently befriended a cis, straight dude and I have watched him be dismissed, degraded, and unambiguously insulted for the perceived “crime” of being straight — all in queer environments where he is allegedly “completely welcome” and surrounded by “friends”
This guy is not a toxic person! But I have seen him be made to feel so small and like his comfort and safety in those spaces are conditional on his silence and acceptance of being treated like a human dunk zone, and I think that some of y’all have had so much shit from straight/cis people that the second you feel like you’ve got an inch, you want to luxuriate in the perceived catharsis of bullying someone who— actually —doesn’t deserve it
And until he very, very carefully mentioned to me in private that it makes him feel bad, I didn’t even clock that I was involved in doing that, that it had become so instinctive for me to make casual jokes like that, and that— well meaning or otherwise —I had been contributing to an environment that made someone I really really like feel like shit
So, I dunno, I think maybe some of y’all should think about that too
Coming back to say that while a lot of the responses to this post have been mainly positive, some folks have an attitude that it should be something that my friend— or any cis, straight man —should just be able to get over, because fuck ‘em, that’s why, because they’re in a queer space and they should shut up and accept it, because you suffer as a queer person and they should have to suffer too— regardless of whether or not this specific person has done anything to wrong you
I’m gonna say this point blank— you’re a tar pit if you think this way
Your suffering does not make you special, you are not granted brand new permissions to be belligerent and cruel because you have been treated poorly, straight people aren’t an oppressed class, no, but they’re people who are entitled to the same amount of basic decency that you, yourself, are entitled to
It feels good when you’ve been treated like shit to then go forward and treat other people like shit. That’s what you’re admitting. Does it make you feel good to do harm? Are you proud of that? Are you comfortable with being that kind of person? Because I dunno about the rest of you— but I realized I wasn’t, and it turns out it’s pretty fucking easy to change
The way I try to think about it is I’m queer, ND, and disabled. I know what it’s like for my identity and existence to be turned into a massive joke I just have to roll over and deal with. Why would I ever want to make another person feel that way?
If you can’t understand basic concepts like “labels are descriptive not prescriptive” and “just because one person uses the label to describe their experience doesn’t mean other people who use that label to describe their experiences aren’t valid” you are not ready for queer discussion i’m afraid
i think all these american media gay guys acting like francois is some provincial philistine who doesn’t understand anything is so crazy he’s from montreal, california is some little backwater, they were gay in montreal 300 years ago
imagine being a 40 year old bisexual guy who was in a xavier dolan movie in 2009 as your feature debut and getting lectured about how to be gay properly by a bunch of little twerps in their 20s, i’d lose my mind
There are gonna be people who won’t like hearing this but if you want to live in a world where mixed marriages, families, and adoptions (particularly POC adopting outside their “race”) aren’t maligned and discriminated against, then you have got to get more chill about seeing someone partaking in something cultural that you don’t think fits the “race” you perceive them as.
It’s a vague memory now, it was a vague memory even at the time I made this post, but I think what sparked this was remembering stupid comments I saw about a Chinese-American cookbook that were complaining about it being written by a white woman and then I looked the white woman up and the briefest research showed she was adopted as a child into a Chinese-American family and just….
*pinches nose*
Fellas, is it cultural appropriation to inherit your family’s culture but you don’t pass the blood quantum test?
All of you are literally just racist. You’ve come full-circle. You’re working under the belief that people are supposed to “keep to their own kind” and that means the socially invented concept of “race”, and “race mixing” of any sort is unnatural.
do y’all ever have a thought you want to post and you can just FEEL it being screenshotted and ridiculed
anyway the John Green copypasta jokes are just really really gross and uncomfortable and I hate! how that meme will not die !
Like…bro…thats a human person…..
I don’t know if I would go as far as to say that it was, idk, sexual harassment, but it’s definitely something …uncomfortably adjacent to it, and it makes it much worse that people joke about having “bullied him off the site”
I just feel that if you’re like “we made sexually explicit jokes about this person until they abandoned their account, because they were annoying” and don’t realize that this is a “telling a story you were absolutely the villain of” kinda situation…yeah idk
Nevermind, I just googled and it…kind of is definitionally sexual harassment actually
A lot of people have replied to this post talking about how the joke was also kinda homophobic and I want to add that when I looked up the origins of it I saw John Green’s actual response to it which was just like, him talking about how there’s nothing shameful about being a man that enjoys sex with other men. and that part seems to have been forgotten unfortunately
It also seems relevant to mention that this wasn’t an isolated incident. This was one incident in an incredibly long period of harassment, which didn’t end there. John Green finally left the site when he was accused repeatedly (and baselessly) of being a pedophile and repeatedly tagged in those accusations.
That’s horrific in the best possible circumstances, but the people doing it didn’t know that it was the best possible circumstances. Like??? Imagine how horrific it would be to have that happen if you were a survivor of such abuse yourself???
All of it was just beyond inappropriate
ALL RIGHT, Y'ALL, I GUESS IT’S TIME I FINALLY SHARED THIS. First of all, @headspace-hotel, Excellent post, 10/10. Thank you for putting it so perfectly.
Story time: Back when John Green was still on tumblr, and the bullying was really picking up steam, I sent him an ask and basically said, “Hey, buddy, are you okay?” I wasn’t expecting a response; I didn’t even think he’d see it, but he answered privately and honestly. I kept it to myself out of respect–if he’d wanted it seen, he would have published it–but considering it’s been about 6 years now and people are still clowning on him, y'all need to see this:
That man was on his last straw–you can hear it in the exhaustion dripping from every word–but he still took the time to 1) respond, 2) list a reason why tumblr is good, despite EVERYTHING, and 3) thank me for empathizing with him??? How badly do you have to be mistreated to thank an Internet stranger for being kind to you for two seconds?
What happened to him was unacceptable, and some of y'all owe this man an apology.
Damn…
ID: An answered ask from shipvicturi to fishingboatproceeds (John Green’s tumblr). The ask reads:
Do you ever get tired of being on tumblr because so many fake tweets / misattributions of your quotes / general hate about you gets spread on here, and you have to constantly explain what really happened or what you really meant? Sometimes I get exhausted Just reading all of it, so l Imagine It must be quite daunting for you
The reply reads:
I am really tired of the misattributions and fake tweets and tumblr posts, yes.
To be honest, yes. I am tired of it. Tumblr is an awesome place full of good work, but I am so so tired.
Thanks for your empathetic message :)
10/10 post and those jokes have legit ALWAYS mode me so fucking unbelievably uncomfortable and they really do read like sexual harassment so I’m glad you pointed that out, but like lord it was also so weird to see this site turn on him?
Not only cuz some of it was based on wilful misinformation about his books(I keep seeing people say Paper Towns is about how its right to objectify women when the whole entire fucking point of that book that is repeatedly spelled out at like a kindergarten level is that no, actually putting people you don’t know up on a pedestal and expecting them to like you based on your perception of them is Wrong and Creepy. The book makes it super clear that the protagonist is wrong.)
But even then, like the Green Brothers were like the McElroys of the pre-2010 internet. They were funny and popular and made videos that everyone loved and watched. They did sold out panels and con appearances and had all sorts of fun inside jokes that their fans used(if you have ever heard a YouTuber refer to leaving something in the description as “leaving it in the doobly-do” the Green Brothers popularized that). His url was even an inside joke. Ngl before all this people adored that John Green was on tumblr. Seeing people turn on him(cuz as far as I know Hank was never on tumblr and seemed to escape this shit unscathed) was so confusing. I think it really was the first real instance on this site of people just attacking someone who was popular because they just decided he was cringe for no reason, which is a cycle that continues to this day.
On top of that they were super wholesome? They ran(and still run) an huge charity event every year in honor of their dead friend that dozens of youtubers participate in. They started Crash Course just because they loved making learning more accessible and fun for people who were struggling or even just liked learning. They leveled with young people and respected them and their thoughts and agency(which I assume is another reason teens liked them). Like genuinely they were the most unproblematic people on the goddamn internet in the age of shit like the nostalgia critic and johntron.
But then John Green wrote one book that everyone deemed as “pretentious” (which it does NOT escape my notice that it was his first book with a female protagonist) despite the book kinda acknowledging that teens are struggling to find an identity and tend to experiment with cringy stuff, especially teens who are suffering and that’s OKAY(like you weren’t supposed to take August’s cigarette thing at face value ffs but this site has 0 reading comprehension so). The book got popular and people just decided it was dumb and cringe and as always they came up with moral reasons to label it problematic(namely that a book about teens contains, oh my god, a barely T rated scene where they have sex dear lord won’t someone think of the children) and hell I even saw people claiming he was bad for exploiting the memory of his dead friend which god imagine saying that and thinking you have the moral high ground. And that was enough for everyone to bully the shit out of John Green accusing him of being a pedo for writing teens doing things teenagers do tastefully and then added what’s basically sexual harassment to it until he bailed and now its still some big fucking meme everyone is SO proud of for some reason. (He also has a right to be upset as a YA author that’s carrer could be ruined by people putting words in his mouth that people were making him out to be a creep.)
So yeah, I will never find those fucking cock and balls taste jokes funny and tbh it’s really gross that people still think of them as something funny and good when if you look into the situation even a little it’s clear it was an unwarranted hate mob against a decent guy who just wanted to be cool and engage with his fans all because I dunno people hate popular stuff I guess.
