I’m well aware of those stereotypes. But that exchange sounded to me like good-natured ball busting.
Heh! Yeah, we as a society didn’t get into a societal framework of systemic pervasive racial bias quickly, and we’re not going to get out of it quickly, either. Awakening is hard.
Yes, didn’t you notice that I explicitly said it sounded that way to me too?
No, you didn’t. Your hope was that the insult was unintentional and not too traumatic.
My point, which has not toppled you from your white horse, was that it was not necessarily an insult at all, unintentional or otherwise. Unless I misunderstood you, you didn’t allow for that possibility.
I… indeed did not allow for the possibility that one boy calling another boy ugly and consequently unappealing to girls was “not an insult at all”. Because such a claim is absurd on its face.
I certainly did allow for the possibility—in fact, I took it for granted, as I said—that the insult of telling a friend that girls “won’t talk to you because you’re ugly” was not intended or believed to represent the speaker’s sincere opinion, but was in fact just some good-natured teasing.
But I really don’t see how such a remark could meaningfully be described as “not an insult at all”. On the contrary, it’s the fact that it’s explicitly and directly insulting that makes it work as an instrument of teasing.
Yeah, you seem unfamiliar with good-natured ball busting, whose purpose is not to insult. Hell, his buddy might be good looking and the ribbing still works.
But just to make this clearer for you: That exchange needn’t be an insult based on racial stereotypes. Your lecturing, soap box reaction didn’t seem to allow for such a possibility.
I generally sit next to the person who would feel the least threatened by me. I definitely won’t sit next to the pretty girl unless I have to - I’m a big, bearded, middle-aged white guy, and the last thing I’d want is to make her uncomfortable.
But then, I think about my own actions a bit too much.
This is a silly side argument but hey what the hell.
Good natured ball busting is insulting, as good natured play, taken no more serious than “your mother …” jokes, but of course the absurd insult is the form of the joke.
And of course sometimes the intended joke insult hits a nerve.
It reminds me of of an old Peanuts cartoon where Lucy, as always, is calling Charlie Brown a blockhead, and Linus says that maybe she shouldn’t. “Why not?” “Well what if he really is a blockhead and gets insulted?”
Anyway. Yeah ball busting insults have been known to go too far … And I know of adults whose parents abusive insults were always couched in " just a joke"
I think we’re in agreement. Obviously ball busting takes the form of an insult, without the intention of actually offending or insulting. Yo mama jokes was a good analogy.
And yes, sometimes ball busting goes too far (often intentionally)…
Just to make it clearer for you: You’re trying to use “not insulting” to mean “not sincerely insulting” or “only pretending to insult”. I think that’s unnecessarily clouding the issue.
I get, and I got from the beginning, and I made clear that I got, that the young @msmith537 was not intending any insulting disparagement when he jokingly called his Black cabinmate “ugly”, because he didn’t mean it. But that doesn’t make the phrase “you’re ugly” not an insult.
Indeed, as I said (and as @DSeid also said), it’s the fact that the phrase “you’re ugly” is intrinsically insulting that makes it work as good-natured teasing or “ball busting”.
Yay! All on the same page at last.
Yeah, this is a great day in SDMB history…
To bring round back to subject … can the ball busting sometimes have specifics that are racial or other group stereotype influenced without our conscious awareness? Probably. Can they be heard that way even when they actually are the same insult that would be said to anyone else? Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Definitely.
It doesn’t hurt to be aware of the tropes but there are limits where trying too hard to not accidentally offend becomes offensive itself? I hope that a friend would cut me slack for unintentional offense even if it is of implicit bias origin. And a good friend maybe even gently educate me about why what I said was minimally dumb.
Oh, of course. Like, if some camp counselor had butted in and scolded @msmith537 for jokingly calling his Black friend “ugly”, because “that’s invoking racist stereotypes against Black people’s looks!” or something, that would have been way out of line and not helpful in any way. If two individuals are mutually comfortable with what they’re saying to each other in private, then it’s nobody else’s business to declare that they’re being harmful just because they include some mutually rude or insulting (or even downright derogatory-slur) remarks intended as good-natured jokes.
I just thought it was kind of eyebrow-raisingly comical how @msmith537 obliviously offered up in this discussion the instance of “that one time I jokingly called my Black friend ugly” as an example of a situation that has no possible connection to racial bias. Mmm, well.
He’s the one who was worried about racial bias.
Did people on this board not occasionally bust each other’s balls when they were kids?
I imagine we were all good kids who ate our vegetables, never swore, and always listened to and respected our elders.
Not so much. Those of us at the bottom of the social totem pole - the nerds, the geeks, the outcasts - tended to hang out with the few people who didn’t give us a hard time.
I’ve never heard any variation of “ball busting” used to refer to anything other than actual physical assault before.
And, my childhood consisted of almost relentless bullying outside my own home. I’d have responded to anything even vaguely like that with nothing but rage.
IME / IMO “ball busting” is very much NY / NJ speak. And not an activity practiced in much of the rest of the country.
Do schoolkids tease one another? Of course. Does any of that persist past high school? Only on TV and in NY / NJ.
The whole country of Australia would like a word. Three words actually. Taking the piss.
I dunno. Yeah High School probably most of all but working at my dad’s shop as a kid I heard the joking insults between the in their twenties movers on the deliveries working class Chicago pretty commonly too. And “Little John” (who you know with that name was huge) loved busting the boss’s kids balls all the time.
Getting my full nerd on, I wonder if there are cross cultural studies about it? Is it exclusively a male bonding behavior, a play fighting, a status display?