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.

  • Reva@startrek.website
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    1 year ago

    You never notice how bigoted and hateful some of your classmates are until you graduate and go out into the real world, let alone get politicized.

    I am German, and the amount of Jew jokes, Polish jokes, jokes about Romanian people, women, feminists, trans people, and so on, just casually thrown around by everyone, were baffling. Even the youth slang word for “to steal something” is “polen”, which just means “to poland”, because Polish people are said by racists to earn money only through thievery and crime. These weren’t particularly alt-right youths, they were just “normal” teenage boys.

    • schmensch@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      I’m German myself, and luckily I haven’t heard “polen” so far (Edit: Might be because I live next to France not Poland). But a lot of my classmates make a lot of kinda racist jokes about the AfD (right, potentially extremist political party) and I can’t tell whether they’re actually racist or not.

      • Reva@startrek.website
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        1 year ago

        “Junge der hat mir nen Stift gepolt” was pretty common back when I was still in school, and I am in NRW, so not particularly close to Poland either. Jokes against Polish, Russian, Black or Turkish people were common though and they all justified it because our classmates with those ethnic roots also made those jokes constantly: even though it clearly was self-deprecating and self-hating behavior as a way to be accepted by the xenophobes and avoid bullying.

        Either way, the moment I personally realized how fucked up everything was was when we had a Holocaust survivor in class after watching Schindler’s List, and the back row of class constantly giggled and did Hitler salutes as a “joke”… in front of the Holocaust survivor, disrupting the discussion. Poor chap was crying at the end. No consequences for the classmates in question because “boys will be boys”.

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            1 year ago

            A gymnasium, too. People like to pretend that bullying, racism and violence are exclusively an issue of “lower” school types, but while there it may be more overt and violent, it’s no better at “elite” public schools.