I know hate speech isnt allowed, and I dont intend to break the spirit of that rule here. But I do have a serious academic inquiry. If Ive gone too far, please excuse me and remove the thead.
When does an insult about bestiality or incest, based solely on someone’s area of birth, qualify as hate speech?
This came up in an online forum, very similar to The Pit, where almost anything is allowed except racism / hate speech. There was one user who repeatedly was called a goat fucker. Some users complained it violated the rule about racism. For further context, the insultee was known to be born in Iran.
However, it’s worth noting that very few people would consider it racist to call a welshman a sheep shagger (which is a common insult), or to call someone from Alabama or West Virginia a cousin fucker. And those are more or less examples of the same exact insult. In all these cases, the insult centers on a claim of sexual deviance based on the target’s nationality / place of origin.
Funny enough, when looking for scholarly opinions on the matter, I found an article about a welshman who was arrested for calling a policeman a sheep shagger, specifically because they considered it hate speech, regardless of the fact that the guy hurling the insult was from the same town as the cop. Im not eager to go try to find that article again though to link it.
On the one hand, accusing people of fucking livestock is probably a practice older than written language itself. And its more a dig at a lack of affluence, as in, the target is a from a poor backwards place where everyone fucks animals. On the face of it, I wouldnt necessarily call that racism. But on the other hand, calling someone from a middle eastern country a goat fucker seems somehow more racist than calling a welshman a sheep fucker. Maybe because welshmen don’t tend to face overt discrimination based on their country of origin, and neither do most people from Alabama aside from being assumed (probably accurately) to have fucked at least one of their cousins.
If it’s an insult based on the target’s nationality or place of origin, how is that not racist? I don’t see the fact that it imputes sexual deviance to detract from this in any way. It would be racist to accuse a Jew of avarice based on their Jewishness, or an Irish person of drunkenness based on their Irishness. How does the racism magically disappear if the misbehaviour imputed on ethnic grounds is sexual in nature?
Neither is Jewish, but we have long used “racism” to refer to prejudice or discrimination on the basis of ethnically or culturally characterized origin, regardless of whether that origin is arbitrarily classified as a “race” or not. The thread title refers to “sheep shagger” as applied to Welsh people, the OP refers to Iranians, and my own examples deal with Jews and Irish people. If you wan to argue that none of these are races, go ahead; I won’t contradict you. I don’t think it matters, to be honest.
If you’re having to resort to insults based solely on someone’s area of birth or nationality, you seriously need to up your insult game. For that reason alone it should be considered hate speech and disallowed. Look within yourself and really consider the real reason why someone is detestable, then craft your insult accordingly.
What might save the Welsh example is that both people were Welsh. Within a group you can, to some extent, use language and invoke stereotypes that, if used or invoked by someone outside the group, would be considered highly offensive.
I think it’s telling that after a nice scholarly discussion of whether terms that insult a person’s place of origin are racist you end with a gratuitous slur about people from Alabama.
The term isn’t inherently racist in the way that some terms are. But it is racist to apply it to someone because of his racial, national, ethnic, cultural, etc origin. Applying it to someone who actually shags sheep is an entirely different matter.
Many moons ago at my first professional job one of my senior coworkers was a Kiwi, which I at least knew meant he was from New Zealand. He would frequently make jokes about sheep fucking; I didn’t get why at first, but he explained that it was a common riff made by Australians about New Zealanders. He clearly didn’t regard it as hate speech since he was the one making the jokes about his own nationality without an Australian in sight. This was many moons ago; attitudes could well have changed.
I don’t think you have much experience with how pervasive “shagger” is and that it is not commonly associated with a single specific country. Your example uses Wales.
All the folks from the UK I have ever know, use “shagger” pretty regularly and not to denote someone from Wales.
Australians use “shagger” all the time. as in, “hey, Shagger, how are you?” as a pretty common greeting. It doesn’t denote or even imply that someone is from New Zealand. Although if you wanted to make a pointed reference, the default in Australia would be to the “Kiwi’s” and not the Welsh.
So, yes, it prolly came from specific use towards a specific region or country, but it entered the mainstream vernacular at least decades ago. YMMV
When it morphs into “All those sheep shaggers must die” or “let’s beat up these sheep shaggers” or when you move the sheep shaggers into segregated neighbourhoods, or when sheep shaggers have historically been oppressed and fearful of their lives merely for being from that region.
Hate speech =/= mere name calling.
Iranians face race- and religious-based discrimination in the West that the modern Welsh and Alabamans do not.
The Iranian has a layer of discrimination over and beyond the UK or American examples. This is a false equivalence. But you already knew this:
I moved to the UK nearly a year ago and I’ve not heard anyone say that. Maybe it’s a regional thing. I’m in the south. Maybe it’s more common in the north?
Considering the same claim has been made about Australians as well, and none of it is corroborated by anyone (on the contrary, it is contested), I am guessing it’s just common in one person’s head.
I come from a rural area in the north east of England and it was a friendly insult directed at me fairly often by people who lived further down the valley. I in turn directed it at people who lived further up the valley.
In my experience it was nothing to do with race and everything to do with living in a place that was slightly more rural with slightly more sheep than you. (there were equivalent insults aimed at people who lived in a slightly larger town than you)