[Discussion] 'That's offensive!'

[Naunet]

Say for instance that I'm offended by homosexuality. Is it then reasonable for me to expect a gay rights activist to work around my personal prejudice for the sake of sparing my feelings?

They are after all the ones reponsible for offending me.

 

How one responds to that depends entirely on the rules you've established for your particular community. For my FC, well, said person would simply be turned away at the door with a polite suggestion that Unity would not be a good fit for them.

 

Though two things. 1) You passed over where I said "on a case-by-case basis". And 2) The "over-sensitive" and "non-apology" situations I referenced in my post are generally not used for such things as in your example, and more for topics related to oppression, control, deprivation, and generally triggering situations of all types. And yes, this can include curse words (particularly certain ones). I thought it was pretty obvious I wasn't talking about situations where one person's taking of "offense" was just disguised oppression of another.

[synaesthetic]

It depends largely on context--where you are, and who is around you.

 

Unity is a "safe space," which means that members can expect a certain level of decorum being practiced in FC chat. This doesn't mean that people are required to sanitize their speech--there's no rules against dropping cluster F-bombs in FC chat (unless you start doing it so much it'd be considered spam).

 

But the whole "That's Offensive" issue becomes a lot more of an issue when you have certain types of communities. When you have lots and lots of people who have traumatic histories and pasts and may easily be triggered by certain topics, you have to be a little more concerned about what "offensive" really means outside of someone turning their nose up at you.

 

There's a whole world of difference between being mildly annoyed when someone cracks a sexual joke and being flung into a PTSD flashback and panic attack because someone made an extremely ill-advised rape joke.

 

Yeah; I take this topic seriously.