why do people feel so strongly against pumpkin spice like its tasty and people like pumpkin spice flavored things in the fall literally fucking chill nobody is forcibly attaching you to a pumpkin spice IV
This has always baffled me too. This and mocking “white girls” for liking Starbucks. I’ve always been confused about why people care.
I’ve seen backlash against “stop judging/mocking people for the harmless stuff they like” that was something about “I’m not here for celebrating white women’s mediocrity.” Maybe I’m not interpreting this right, but it seems like such a good example of trying to achieve equality by making sure the privileged group is treated worse, because the converse is harder to achieve. Why can’t we celebrate everyone’s mediocrity in the sense of “it’s fine to do things you like, you don’t have to be really special or talented to earn the right not to be made fun of.” And I understand black women really often don’t get that kind of respect for the stuff they like, but that doesn’t mean being a jerk to a different group of women and saying “but you’re not allowed to be mad about this” is a good idea, or helpful.
Ugggh, argh, argh. I think it’s actually really hard to manage this kind of dynamic on a macro scale.
In theory, mocking white women for liking pumpkin-spice-flavored drinks from Starbucks is…about as anodyne as you can be, as friendly as you can get, while still actually poking fun at someone for something.
Which is not to say that, in the wide world of human awfulness, you won’t find someone using that line to gouge at some poor woman’s soul and make her feel like killing herself. You’ll probably find a lot of people doing that, if you dig hard enough. People are the worst.
But still. As a category of mockery, it tilts very far towards the “all in good fun” side of things.
And you can say that’s not good enough. You can say that no one can ever really count on mockery being “all in good fun,” especially from a distance, because it’s so often used as a way to do serious harm. I understand why you’d want to say that, really, I promise.
That logic has a very clear endpoint: don’t mock people, ever, unless you’re absolutely sure that you can justify your mockery as a sincere argumentative/moral position.
Which, at the very least, means that your callow asshole critics will be right when they call you “anti-humor” and say that you’re no fun. Saying “your jokes can’t have any kind of barb on them” is equivalent to saying “we don’t approve of jokes” – sanitized, inoffensive, Officially Non-Problematic humor is always too weak to live.
It gets worse. Teasing and poking-fun are part of the Basic Human Interaction Toolkit. You can’t take them away no matter how hard you try. And if you do try, people will stop listening to anything you say. As a general principle: don’t make rules that people will never follow, that only robs you of legitimacy.
And even worse than that…
…if the only acceptable mockery is seriously justifiable mockery, people won’t stop mocking, they’ll change their serious beliefs as needed.
This fucking terrifies me. I feel like I’ve seen this exact thing playing out as I watch Internet communities degenerating into monster-pits. The people who have reason to feel like Straight White Men are annoying them, hurting them, imposing burdens on them, aren’t going to take it in pure saintly silence; they will find a way to vent their spleen. Same goes for the people who have reason to feel that way about feminists. And the people who have reason to feel that way about rationalists. And so on. This can be fine, it can be healthy, if we acknowledge that at the end of the day the spleen-venting is just needling and pettiness. Needling and pettiness have their place! But when you start cracking down on it, when you start using the needling and the pettiness as an excuse to lay into people yet more, when you start telling them that the mockery is a Big Important Deal that defines who they are – they’ll double down. They have to.
Anyway. Pumpkin spice. I don’t find anything objectionable about it, and I doubt anyone else really does either. But our snarky comics have to have something to talk about, right?
This reminds me that jokes about “bacon” on the internet are really jokes about jouissance (that phantasmic good that you want more of until you are drowning in it), and not about the particular fatty meat. And even if it becomes cliche to like bacon (or you’re vegetarian), people will always need jokes about The Ultimate Consumption.
Yep.
Also in the category of “things about which humans will always find ways to make jokes” –
* That One Local Guy We Hero-Worship, Oh My God He Is So Awesome (also available in female flavor)
* Those People Who Are Just So Dumb and Don’t Get It
* Our Culture, Boy, It Sure Is Lovably Wacky and Distinctive (plus, if at all possible, And We Drink a Whole Hell of a Lot)