as a general rule. if what we’re calling ‘cultural appropriation’ sounds like nazi ideology (i.e. ‘white people should only do white people things and black people should only do black people things’) with progressive language, we are performing a very very poor application of what ‘cultural appropriation’ means. this is troublingly popular in the blogosphere right now and i think we all need to be more critical of what it is we may be saying or implying, even unintentionally.
There is nothing wrong with everyone enjoying each other’s cultures so long as those cultures have been shared.
Eating Chinese food, watching Bollywood movies, going to see Cambodian dancers, or learning to speak Korean so you can watch every K drama in existence is totally fine. The invitation to participate in those things came from within those cultures. The Mexican family that owns the place where I get fajitas wants me to eat fajitas. Their whole business model kind of depends on it, actually.
If you see something from another culture you think you might want to participate in, but you don’t know if that would be disrespectful or appropriative, you can just…ask. Like. A Jewish friend explained what a mezuzah was to me, recently. (It’s the little scroll-thing near their front doors that they touch when they come into their house. It basically means “this is a Jewish household.”)
“Oh, cool,” I said. “Can I touch it? Or is it only for Jewish people?”
“You can touch it or you can not touch it,” she said. “I don’t care.”
“Cool, I’m gonna touch it, then.”
“Cool.”
It’s not hard.
You want to twerk, twerk. I’ve never heard a black person say they didn’t think anybody else should be allowed to twerk. Just that they want us to acknowledge that they invented that shit, not Miley fucking Cyrus.
this is a good post.
Thank you, I was trying to sort this out in my head but you explained it very well.
#free exchange of culture is great - taking that culture without invite and pretending yours is an original take#(worse still profiting off it)#is cultural appropriation (by @gnimaerd)
The sun will always rise and dogs always be happy to see you
I hate this notion that universities need to let literally anyone speak or else you’re stifling knowledge. Here’s something that stifles knowledge: having to explain very basic things over and over. If you let someone barge into a medical laboratory and yell “everyone stop what you’re doing and prove to me that germs exist”, that’s stifling knowledge. Shutting everything down so that a neo-nazi can calmly ask whether black people are people does not enrich a learning environment in any way, It drags everything down and exhausts everyone. Free speech absolutism is crude and unsophisticated, we need to acknowledge that sometimes speech has deleterious effects on the free speech of others.
We’re so bad at sex and then we wonder why women aren’t like, really aggressive about sex. We think it’s cause they don’t have as much desire as we do. That’s how stupid men are, that we think ‘they’re just weird, women are like fucked up in the head cause they don’t wanna just fuck all the time. If I was a women, I’d just fuck everybody. Why don’t they wanna fuck all the time? I do.’ Of course you do, cause when you fuck, you get to fuck a woman! When she fucks, she has to fuck a guy! Wildly different experiences. For a man, 100% of the time, it’s the greatest thing that ever happened in his entire life. For a woman, about 40% of the time, when she’s being fucked by a guy, she’s thinking ‘I’ll get over this in a week. It’s not the worst thing. I’m not gonna cry this time.’
“Another thing that proves how bad men are at sex is that after sex, you’re looking at two very different people. The man just wants to lay there, be cool and the woman wants to cuddle … ‘Why is she so NEEDY?’ She’s not needy you idiot, she’s horny, because you did nothing for her. YOU DID ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. HER PUSSY IS ON FIRE BECAUSE IT’S GONE UNFUCKED COMPLETELY. Of course you’re fine, you climbed on and went ‘KFHGSKG’ and rolled off. And she’s on you because she’s like ‘WH-at SOMETHING ELSE HAS TO HAPPEN, THIS IS BULLSHIT!!’ If you fuck a woman well, she will LEAVE YOU ALONE. ‘Thanks a lot buddy, zzzzz.’
