What kind of things could someone say to you in normal conversation that would make you take severe umbrage? Or what kind of acts could someone commit that would make you take personal offence?
I’m looking for things that you would actually have an emotional reaction to and that offend you not just things that you greatly dislike.
Secondly, why are you so offended? What exactly is it that offends you? What does the feeling of offence make you feel like? Can this be articulated in words?
One obvious example could be if someone called my mother a whore. However, I don’t think I would actually be offended by this because:
She’s not a whore so they would be factually incorrect so no offence
If she was a whore then they would merely be stating the facts so still no offence
Casual antisemitism riles me up. Lately I’ve seen it in “Why is _____ randomly closed? It’s just a random holiday, why do they need to close?”
Many moons ago, I attended a pre-college program and as part of a project, I had to (along with my partner and good friend) go around and ask random people on the street what their first reactions were when we said names of various races, ethnicities, and sexual orientations.
In the span of five minutes with just one person, she made negative and stereotypical responses to our own makeups: Jewish (him), Indian (me), hispanic (me), gay (him). It was so bizarrely tailored to us that we honestly thought she was punking us.
But that didn’t offend us. Large portions of the population, IMO, are nutso and have bizarre theories and stereotypes.
Racism and other various “isms” I can handle to a point; at that point I am willing to get in someones face appropriate or not. But for over-the-top-I-want-to-choke-the-shit-out-of-someone its stuff like this
I’m offended when I mention that one of my daughter’s diagnoses is ADHD, and the person I’m talking to launches into a diatribe about how ADHD is over-diagnosed and over-medicated, or that it isn’t real. Most of the time they do it without thinking, and they’re not trying to tell me my kid doesn’t have a problem, but that’s what it feels like.
For example, I remember when I was around 12 years old and in summer camp. A few weeks in, I was having a conversation with one of the other kids, someone who until that day had been becoming a kind of friend of mine. Somehow the topic of religion came up. He asked me what religion I was.
“I’m Jewish”, I said.
"In our family, we hate Jews, " he said, matter-of-factly.
A similar thing happened to a friend of mine across the in residence while I was in university. She came from a Jewish private school and was raised in a somewhat Jewish but very urban community, she just didn’t have wide-spread exposure to all the different flavours of Christianity. I needed to pick up a King James bible from the bookstore for a course I was taking on cultural history, and she asked why I couldn’t use just the Gideon bible that we all had found in our dorm rooms. A classmate of hers, present for the conversation said:
“Oh, what religion are you?”
My friend answered: “I’m Jewish.”
Her classmate replied: “I guess I can’t hang out with you anymore then.”
I believe it was intended as a humourous quip, but as you can imagine, it fell as flat as soggy toilet paper on a tile floor.
Broad brush statements where the speaker assumes I’ll agree. It offends me that they assume I am of the same mindset.
I got royally pissed off at a party once when some younger people were telling racist jokes. They assumed I’d be cool because I’m white. I was not cool with it, and they ganged up on what a downer I was because I told them as much.
I also got very pissed off when a hairdresser who was cutting my hair started talking about how offended she was by “I Kissed a Girl” on the radio. And how flaunting homosexuality was sickening. I found this to be sort of strange because, even though I’m not, I could definitely pass as a butch lesbian. I was pretty offended by her.
Suranyi, are you over 50? I just ask because even though I was raised in a VERY small, very backwards town (I’m 23) I never heard and never would have heard comments like that. If anything, growing up it was cool to be Jewish (bar/bat mitzvahs, 8 days of presents, extra days off of school). Mostly I think it’s a function of age - the antisemitism my parents describe is literally incomprehensible to what I’ve encountered in my own life.
But I see a LOT of very casual anti-semitism day to day in a big city now - that comment was from a sports trainer showing me around a new gym yesterday, when my gym, the JCC, was closed. It just manifests itself in not knowing customs or traditions or holy days and brushing off the need people have to take the days off/do certain things/etc.
Active ignorance with respect to art is probably the thing that gets on my nerves the most (aside from stuff like racism, people behaving in a blissfully inconsiderate way, etc. which I assume offends anyone sane). I really can’t stand the attitude that “you’re reading too much into that” - I think humans are capable of creating incredibly subtle and multifaceted things, and seeing an interpretation or an idea shot down just because someone’s too stupid or uncreative to accept even that it might be valid is painful to me. It kinda reminds me of the old line about how “Puritanism is the fear of someone, somewhere, having a good time” - except in this case, it’s more “the fear that someone understands or sees more than I do.”
Racism and some other -isms are a huge deal simply because they lead to people being hurt. Racism has led to death, oppression, slavery, discrimination, etc. Sexism, homophobia and the like lead to people not having a full slate of rights. They offend me because they are prevalent enough to cause active harm to me and to people I love and a country I am a part of and a species that should know better.
When my father died, one of my BIL’s turned to me and said, “This is good practice for you.” Why? Because my husband was sick (he died last year). That offended me. It belittled both the pain I was feeling at the loss of my dad and belittled the pain I felt daily struggling with the fate of my husband. It shoved my face in it. Yeah, that offended me.
I’ve often commented on how obnoxious the laws that prevent stores from selling alcohol on Sunday are–laws that are derived from Christian principles. Does that make me an anti-Christian bigot?
Seriously, that comment sounds like it might well have been anti-semitic in the right context, but it might as well have been perfectly innocent.
I am offended by pointless profanity. I think it hits home when I am on a bus and I hear adults spewing it around children.
From my limited experience, there seems to be one particular ethnic group who uses profanity considerably more (from my ears only) and it shocks and saddens me that there seems to be no restraint around young children (oftentimes their OWN children).
Perhaps I am more saddened than offended.
And this very evening, there is a street festival going on beneath my 7th story apartment here in San Francisco involving Hip Hop bands. It is too loud for my taste (considering I can’t hear my television) but the extreme amount of profanity which is blaring into my home is beyond annoying and I am glad I don’t have children. There would be no way to protect them from the drivel I am subjected to this evening.
I get offended when people who have survived a traumatic experience attribute their survival to “God was looking out for me.” The latest example of this was the lady in Vancouver, Washington, who had acid thrown in her face. She attributed the fact that her eyes weren’t damaged, and that she was alive, to God.
So…what about all those people who don’t make it through traumatic or violent experiences? God wasn’t looking out for them? I thought God loved everyone. The implication is that those who die or suffer devastating injuries are consigned to that fate by an ostensibly loving, father-like figure. It just irks me.
The usual: racism, antisemitism, homophobia, sexism, etc. It really bugs me when otherwise nice people casually make remarks when they think there’s nobody around who would be offended.
But what really affects me are child abuse and animal abuse. Kids and animals are not only innocent but helpless; most of the time they have no way to defend themselves. I had an abusive father, and I remember too well that feeling of total helplessness. And a few weeks ago there was that guy who killed his baby boy because the kid wasn’t “manly” enough. I’m crying right now, just thinking about that.
And I will never understand why some people think it’s ok or funny to abuse cats, but not other animals. I hear things like “It’s only a cat,” and it makes me crazy.
Climate change denialists. Reason has no home there. It’s not that I’m particularly active in environmental things, I just hate, hate, hate to see the scientific community denigrated like that. And it makes me sad to see people so lacking in critical thinking skills that they lend www.climateconspiracyohnoes.com and tens of thousands of hours of research equal credibility.
Also, support of the US government’s use of torture. Its supporters are foul human beings, and this is me being nice. It’s hard to make a person grind one’s teeth and drop one’s jaw at the same time, but they managed it.
