I’m a 41 year old mostly conservative white male (for reference) and the term teabagging is not obscure to me. Not at all. It’s been around for years. If I asked any of my peers at either job I’m sure I would get 100% recognition (and some weird looks). Never heard of the 2M thing.
Of course I wouldn’t expect them to necessarily know what it already means. It’s that it’s funny when it rolls out that way. Like when those guys at the Republican convention were selling buttons marked GOP: God’s Own Party. (What’s Arabic for God’s Own Party? Hizbullah.)
Also, possibly they might have Googled.
I just asked my friend if he knew what it meant; he got it straight away. And he’s Greek. If he knows, it’s a safe bet most english-speakers with a social circle bigger than three people also know. Hell, I’m pretty sure even my Christian friends would at least know it’s something unspeakable, if not precisely what. As deviant sexual practices go, it’s hardly space-docking or the spider-man (don’t ask).
2M4M is certainly more tenuous, but it’s still funny, given the context.
How was it juvenile and peevish? Your post, on the other hand…
For the record, my mother (getting close to 70) told me to “go to digg and get the clip of Rachel Maddow talking about teabagging.”
So yeah, my mother knows what teabagging means. I know what teabagging is. I didn’t necessarily want to know that my mother knew what teabagging was.
I don’t play Halo 3, I knew immediately what teabagging meant. 2M4M took a “what if you saw it on Craigslist?” for me to start giggling…
I’m 42, female, live in the 'burbs, have two elementary school kids, work for a Fortune 500 company. But I hang on the internet.
Everyone replying to this thread will know what it means because they hang on the Internet.
The vast majority of people DON’T, that’s my point.
It was part of the vocabulary of pretty much everyone I knew in college nine years ago. Plus it was in Pecker.
Sorry your request is denied.
What’s space-docking or spider-maning?
So the vast majority of people don’t hang on the internet? I think we are past the point where the internet is something reserved for the few. Everyone I know “hangs on the internet” for at least some news or recreation - from my 70 year old mother in law (who spends more time on Facebook than anyone I know) to my nine year old daughter (who probably doesn’t know what teabagging means - her internet use is censored - but it wouldn’t surprise me if her ten year old brother did - his friends are much more worldly.)
I don’t think inclusion in a John Waters movie constitutes proof that knowledge of teabagging has gone mainstream. It’s not like we’re saying, “Don’t you remember the teabagging scene from Forrest Gump*?”
*Feel free to substitute your own blockbuster unlikely to include a teabag reference
nvm googled. Eh I’ve read/seen worse.
If that bothers you stay way from blumpkins.
I would agree, but a huge component of the protest is to use the internet to call people to and to setup the events, I would then say that this is an example of conservatives taking the support of younger people for granted or an example that they sure can learn to use modern tools, but they still assume that all viewer groups are the same.
The “vast majority of people” are changing, but the extreme right is ignoring that.
No, that was just a throw-in. I take the fact that everyone I knew (other than my mother, whose English is patchy) knew what it was as evidence that it’s “mainstream”.
Anyway, any major organization these days checks out names before they use them to make sure they aren’t trademarked or offensive to certain groups and the like. I would have assumed that a giant coalition of grumpy right-wingers counts as a “major organization”.
In addition to the folks who spend all their time on the internet, there are the ones who watch TV
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGNWCwCrUKk
It’s been a fairly main stream term for quite a while.
No, the vast majority don’t. A lot of people use the Internet, but the vast majority (including your average Republican anti-gay marriage doucebag) don’t hang on it the way we do.
Not to mention the fact that 25% of the country don’t really use the Internet at all.
I looked those up.
I hate you.
This is the first time I’ve ever had to use “brain bleach”. 
Wow, politics ruins everything! We can’t even tease some poor schlubs who inadvertently used a sex term to mean something else? The people calling their protest teabagging, rather than a tea party as others did, clearly didn’t know the sexual connotations of the word. That’s sort of funny. Does it matter if they should have known or not? Or if other people like them know, or if X percent of people know?
BTW, he’s Greek, huh? Does he take many trips to Greece? 
Not that I’d know what that means.
damnit I keep googling out of morbid curiosity expecting the worst. It never is.
I have to say if this what passes as controversial it’s good thing the Democrats never referred to an aggressive initiative as a Donkey Punch.
From what I understand it isn’t called a tea party because part of the protest or movement or whatever called for sending teabags to their representatives.