The Impact of Jokes

Our life has become extremely desensitized to a lot of things through the constant bombardment in everything pop culture. Every day, there seems to be more video games about war and more songs about drugs. These topics just don’t seem to have much weight anymore. The same thing happens in the conversations we hold with each other online and in life. We speak with sentences riddled with jokes that seem to insult either someone or something. I’m not trying to be that grandma whose every other sentence seems to start with “kids these days…” but we need to be honest with ourselves and today's social norms and understand how they’ve become more common for people to talk bad about others.

Almost every subgroup of people has some name that is used as an insult: we throw around the word "gay" as if it reflects badly on a person. And just like with video games and music, the constant exposure causes a sort of desensitization where people only know the word as an insult instead of where it comes from. This causes a misunderstanding of its actual impact. It’s like how people throw around the word girl, such as "you throw like a girl" or "don’t cry like a girl." As a society, we’ve taken that word in and it’s become a common saying. If you think about it, it should be weird to hear this come from a girl directed to another girl, yet it’s almost second nature for little girls to say it to each other.

Once a phrase is heard over and over again, it means a different thing; being called a girl does not mean you are a girl: it means you are weak. I’m not gullible enough to believe that this is ever going to disappear- it’s too ingrained into our culture. However, I think as people we need to step back and really think about what we’re saying. I believe it’s time we stop acting like sheep mindlessly going along with everyone else and start deciding for ourselves how we’re going to act as people.

#november #jokes #insults #music #videogames #culture #society