#f-slur

As bigots continue to rise to power, it is kind of demoralizing to see their vocabulary of contempt become more and more commonplace. I feel like it makes it that much harder to spot people getting radicalized by this garbage.

I know a lot of slang has dark origins, but we don't have the benefit of time dulling the circumstances of all these idioms. I feel like every day online is like wading into a cacophony of dog whistles having gradually been replaced with trumpets, and shit like incel lingo going mainstream contributes to that.

It's hard for me to fully articulate, myself. Some 19 years ago, I personally fell into the clutches of an abuser for 8 years because I mistook our common ground of nerdy chan culture as something to bond over. It was the common nerd fallacy that liking the same stuff means we have compatible values. But in addition to the abuse, my abuser tried to steer me down his road of racism, queerphobia, misogyny, etc. He used our bonding as an opportunity to recruit me to his bigoted mindset.

Wired wrote about this recently, but I feel like they didn't quite capture what it feels like to move around in a community (ie, being very online and very nerdy) so steeped in chan culture (even if some of it is now a few generations removed from inception), to where hateful people are able to operate in plain sight in part because their language is just dismissed as harmless/ironic slang and memes.

(There's a side conversation here with how the alt-right has co-opted "dei" and "woke" to be placeholders for slurs, but have plausible deniability because these terms have so many different connotations based on where you sit on the political spectrum, such that most people would rather dismiss the words as simply "meaningless" instead of dogwhistles for bigots.)

I ran into people like my abuser constantly in nerd spaces. And it was very difficult to convince my friends at the time to take any action to drive these guys out, to show them that these abusers were a little *too* into the nihilistic, mean-spirited memes of the time. Nope, these guys were just dubbed as "socially awkward" and extended the benefit of the doubt every damned time.

I know I am very close to this topic (and it's why the fandoms I am still in are very small and not on the popculture nerd radar), but scrubbing so much chan/incel language from my mouth makes me feel like I'm drawing better boundaries when it comes to how I engage with the dark side of the internet (and human nature).

I appreciate (and engage in) dark humor and know how it can be an empowering tool when wielded by the oppressed. I know that one can de-fang some of these words & memes with mockery, over-use, and reclaiming.

But at the same time, I spent so many years online when "faggot" and "fag" became more than homophobic slurs -- they were and are common chan chat parlance -- and it was almost impossible who to tell who was a homophobe and who was being edgy/ironic for fun. It's that whole bit about if your satire is indistinguishable from bigotry, it functions the same as bigotry. It's a very isolating experience.

I still engage with dark themes and internet/nerd culture that I know has unsavory origins, but it is no longer a constant, reflexive habit to parrot these phrases. I feel so much better about myself, probably because I'm no longer marinating 24/7 in a language born of bitterness.