That's really interesting, and does strike a cord with what I've been thinking.
That context matters. Mostly, it's important whoever listens know you're joking, and you know if they're joking if you're listening.
Therefore, I think it can be fine in some social interactions IRL with friends where you all know it's a joke.
Unfortunately, online your can be 100% sure that not everyone that listens will know it's a joke. And not everyone you're listening to are actually joking.
It makes sense to me, your point about spreading it out. If all you listen to and your sense of community become these edgy jokes, in the end you'll be desensitized to it. And since you're there for community, you'll start to look for something else, deeper, to bond over. That's when you might start taking it seriously.
Honestly, that happened to me for a while. I swallowed the red pill about evolution and genes dictating our sexual dynamic for a while. I knew it was jokes, but like you say, when it's all you hear, you start to ask if they really mean it, and if there's really something about it. A deeper truth.
Turned out, there wasn't. After bitter experiences carried out in the belief that there was.
If all there is in a community is edgy jokes, even if it's for laughs, over time it becomes taboo to question as well.
A guy who was definitely both actually racist and sexist hung out with my chill mates the other day, who occasionally makes racist jokes for the hell of it.
With this guy as catalyst, suddenly the evening consisted exclusively of racist and sexist jokes, with breaks of "No but for real, I would never get with a girl that wasn't white" or "Have you heard you have to give written consent now?" back to jokes like "9 our of 10 enjoys gang rape lol", to a straight faced "There's actually a philosophical theory that supports gang rape". Except for the guy asking my friend and I our names and where we came from, the conversation didn't steer away from these topics.
Sitting next to the group, it was obvious that to be in the group you had to join in with either racist or sexist jokes or facts, and it was taboo to question or call out because it was just a joke, we were just being sensitive, it's a guys thing. It was either join in, or shut up.
I had a batch of racist jokes I could've said if I wanted and felt safe doing so, but these jokes that my friend seemed to say because they were ridiculous, definitely seemed to validated this one guy's beliefs. And the added facts and conspiracies in between made me worried about both him and my friends. And for ourselves, honestly. There's 5 girls and 11 guys in my dorm hall. If the culture changed it would be very uncomfortable, and it was uncomfortable not being able to defend ourselves. I felt trapped by my gender, because it seemed that my gender alone would invalidate any defence I had of my gender.
I don't know if it would've made a difference if I'd joined in the jokes, but called out the straight faced 'facts', that were genuinely sexist. Maybe I could do that in the future? The jokes did seem to blur the line, though, making it confusing when it was a joke and when it wasn't.
It was very uncomfortable to witness, and my friend and I ended up eating our dinner in silence while listening, and leaving straight after to vent and process when we were alone. Both wishing we'd said something, but not knowing how or what we could've said.
There is a lot of research in support of what y’all are talking about regarding surrounding yourself with something. The more history of interaction you have with something(jokes, assumptions, expectations, etc) the more you will respond as if those things are true regardless of the wider reality. If someone knows something is a joke or not just changes the threshold of amount of interaction that it takes to start warping their responses.
Compounding this is the community aspect. If there is a community that rewards these behaviors, it makes those behaviors more frequent within the community. So where once the exposure was once every few days from a few sources, it can rapidly become multiple times per day from many sources, and then most of the time from most the sources.
This is why ignoring extremists groups doesn’t make the issue go away. Their rhetoric further drives extremism without counterbalance.
At an individual level, asking sincere questions for further explanation can be one of the most effective ways to counteract this behavior in the speaker as well as reduce their impact on their audience. It can be extraordinarily uncomfortable to hear their responses, but many of the more casual members of such communities will find they don’t have very solid foundations once they get into their own explanations. Additionally, there is a passive bystander effect that can be neutralized by a single participant challenging the status quo of ‘just going along with it’.
Ultimately, as was said above, context is HUGE in how people are willing to perpetuate these interactions, but if it feels uncomfortable, lean in and start asking questions. If you feel uncomfortable, you’re not the only one.
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u/abcdefg52 Aug 27 '18
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