CW: incest, rape, abuse, classism, lmk if anyone needs something else tagged
Incest these days seems to be the most popular, funniest joke anyone could possibly make about white people. It's not even just people of color either - actually, about half the people I've seen doing this are smug, white hipsters, mostly from the suburbs, who are way too proud of their enlightened neoliberalism and unironically use the word boomer as a replacement for having to actually analyze relations between social classes.
The thing is, I normally don't give a shit about white people jokes and stereotypes. Like, yes, I'm known among my white coworkers, friends, and family members for my love of Indian food and high spice tolerance, but when I was one of the only white people in the room at a Diwali celebration last year I was definitely out of my league in terms of spice level (#worthit). So joke about how white people don't know how to cook, about how we can't handle spice, invaded the whole world for spices and decided we hated all of them, how we hate the taste of curry (which I'm pretty sure is actually a gift from the gods) and how we never fully cook our chicken. Like I really don't care and I don't think anyone else does either. It doesn't matter and it's so true.
The thing is, I normally don't give a shit about white people jokes and stereotypes. Like, yes, I'm known among my white coworkers, friends, and family members for my love of Indian food and high spice tolerance, but when I was one of the only white people in the room at a Diwali celebration last year I was definitely out of my league in terms of spice level (#worthit). So joke about how white people don't know how to cook, about how we can't handle spice, invaded the whole world for spices and decided we hated all of them, how we hate the taste of curry (which I'm pretty sure is actually a gift from the gods) and how we never fully cook our chicken. Like I really don't care and I don't think anyone else does either. It doesn't matter and it's so true.
But incest? First of all, incest (as well as bestiality) jokes mostly seem to target poor whites and to be another way of framing poor people as sexual predators, a classist phenomenon that affects all races. Related to that, poor people, particularly rural poor people in abusive situations such as the stereotypical Deep South white hillbilly whose family tree is so twisted it's basically a wreath, are often less able to access resources, less likely to have a college education, and more likely to experience social isolation. All of these factors make it more difficult to escape sexual abuse and therefore perpetuate intergenerational trauma in families affected by incest.
Second, incest is a risk factor for multiple health issues. There's a reason CSA is listed as an adverse childhood experience, which if you didn't know literally alters the DNA and by extension the brain, body, and behavior over the course of a lifetime.
Third, incest survivors of color do exist, and pretending it's a whites-only phenomenon erases their trauma.
Fourth, the demographics most commonly stereotyped as incestuous, like the rural poor and working class, aren't exclusively white. And, strangely, when I see people stereotyping the ones that actually are white, it's always the working class that are targeted.
Same for jokes about fatness, addiction, gender nonconformity, and disability. You'll never hear a self proclaimed progressive mocking a pretty white woman from Manhattan who wears designer sundresses because she's fat, or an upper-middle class white man for wearing lipstick and crop tops, or a white man at a comfortable corporate office job for being a wheelchair user, but fat people in scooters at Wal-Mart, or working class rural women who are more comfortable in faded wranglers and flannel than they'd ever be in a dress (particularly if these women are fat), or meth addicts in stained, torn clothes at a little house in the woods, or rural poor people who are missing teeth, or working-class people with interests stereotypically considered "low class" like hunting or country music, seem to be the butt of everyone's jokes.
It's cool and trendy nowadays for middle class people from the suburbs to be interested in cottagecore, backyard chickens, sustainable farming, or fantasizing about moving to the countryside and having a little farm with a romantic partner, but the minute they actually meet someone from a rural, working class background, especially someone who is fat or struggling with substance addiction, the contempt and disrespect never seems to end.
They make it all about being white cishet Christians, too, even though someone in the demographic of rural poverty could very well be a person of color or LGBT or a religious minority, as if an upper middle class white liberal from Bloomfield Hills, MI is suddenly so oppressed just because they're an über-enlightened atheist who mocks "organized religion" to get back at their Christian parents, as if they've really got so much to worry about from Jim Bob the small town Kentucky factory worker just because they're a suburban white nonbinary person who passes as cis, just because they have blue hair and are weirdly vocal about their aroflux demisexuality and get offended when nobody understands what the fuck that means or why they keep talking about it, just because they're a 30-year-old neoliberal white vegan who won't shut up about how monogamy is inherently restrictive, practices witchcraft, and wears "This Is What A Feminist Looks Like" crop-tops that were probably made by exploited brown women in sweatshops. And even if a rural low-income person, particularly a fat, substance-addicted, or disabled low-income person, is a white cishet Christian, that doesn't cancel out the oppression they do still experience. But somehow this classist, ableist, fatphobic, anti-survivor bullshit is considered progressive and funny by metropolitan liberals and leftists.
Fourth, the demographics most commonly stereotyped as incestuous, like the rural poor and working class, aren't exclusively white. And, strangely, when I see people stereotyping the ones that actually are white, it's always the working class that are targeted.
Same for jokes about fatness, addiction, gender nonconformity, and disability. You'll never hear a self proclaimed progressive mocking a pretty white woman from Manhattan who wears designer sundresses because she's fat, or an upper-middle class white man for wearing lipstick and crop tops, or a white man at a comfortable corporate office job for being a wheelchair user, but fat people in scooters at Wal-Mart, or working class rural women who are more comfortable in faded wranglers and flannel than they'd ever be in a dress (particularly if these women are fat), or meth addicts in stained, torn clothes at a little house in the woods, or rural poor people who are missing teeth, or working-class people with interests stereotypically considered "low class" like hunting or country music, seem to be the butt of everyone's jokes.
It's cool and trendy nowadays for middle class people from the suburbs to be interested in cottagecore, backyard chickens, sustainable farming, or fantasizing about moving to the countryside and having a little farm with a romantic partner, but the minute they actually meet someone from a rural, working class background, especially someone who is fat or struggling with substance addiction, the contempt and disrespect never seems to end.
They make it all about being white cishet Christians, too, even though someone in the demographic of rural poverty could very well be a person of color or LGBT or a religious minority, as if an upper middle class white liberal from Bloomfield Hills, MI is suddenly so oppressed just because they're an über-enlightened atheist who mocks "organized religion" to get back at their Christian parents, as if they've really got so much to worry about from Jim Bob the small town Kentucky factory worker just because they're a suburban white nonbinary person who passes as cis, just because they have blue hair and are weirdly vocal about their aroflux demisexuality and get offended when nobody understands what the fuck that means or why they keep talking about it, just because they're a 30-year-old neoliberal white vegan who won't shut up about how monogamy is inherently restrictive, practices witchcraft, and wears "This Is What A Feminist Looks Like" crop-tops that were probably made by exploited brown women in sweatshops. And even if a rural low-income person, particularly a fat, substance-addicted, or disabled low-income person, is a white cishet Christian, that doesn't cancel out the oppression they do still experience. But somehow this classist, ableist, fatphobic, anti-survivor bullshit is considered progressive and funny by metropolitan liberals and leftists.
Fifth, many incest victims are children (or were when the incest occurred) and even the majority of adult incest is abusive, with the grooming process started when the victim is too young to understand the ramifications of sex or able to consent, and often perpetrated by an older relative with more power in the family. I don't know, maybe it's just me, maybe I'm just fragile and white and being completely fucking racist by taking issue with this one particular stereotype about white people, but I happen to think jokes about rape and abuse aren't funny. I'm not sure why that's such a controversial stance now.
No comments:
Post a Comment