being adjacent to cancel-heavy (or at least, cancel-anxious) groups for a few years has unfortunately infected me with an ability to write shitty thinkpiece theses, the two today so far have been “male/female designations of cables are transphobic” and “my sharona is pedophilic”
I had the same thought re: cables some years ago but without the assumption that transphobia is bad or that people shouldn’t resist trans activists who try to make them stop referring to cables that way.
In the same vein of thought where wanting to know a stranger’s assigned gender at birth as soon as you meet them is equivalent to wanting to know what’s in their underwear or their private medical history, maybe there’s a hot take to be had that we should call them “penis” and “vagina” cables, which takes no longer to say, and is what we actually mean when we say “male/female” cables.
That would work, except no way in hell am I going to ask “Hey, anyone got any usb-vagina-wall-outlet-penis or micro-usb-penis-wall-outlet-penis cords?” in the office slack
I wouldn’t say that in the office, but on the other hand my girlfriend will absolutely live to regret your post
Huh. @tototavros, you *would* be willing to call them “male” and “female” in the office slack? I wouldn’t be comfortable with that myself: to me “male” and “female” feels like the barest fig leaf over the obvious genitalia references, still very crude overall.
(And indeed, “WTF, why are you referring to them so crudely” was my very first thought the first time I heard someone refer to them that way in my mid to late teens. I was boggled that she was not calling them “prongs” and “outlets” (sometimes “plugs” and “sockets”, though “plug” can be ambiguous as it is also an umbrella term) as I considered to be the norm, and even more boggled when I worked out that *most* subcultures in my meta-cultural neighbourhood consider comparing plugs to genitals to be the *standard* way of referring to them.)
Yes, mostly because I don’t know how to refer to them otherwise
(gf has informed me that male = connector, female = port works but i think that’d be too confusing)
#plug and socket are even more ambiguous imo
(see also)
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TBH, it was pretty unnerving to learn that the prong/outlet dichotomy is not a widespread norm. Like, what *else* do I think is just how things are, until someday somebody who isn’t culturally SJ has no idea what I’m talking about and I fall face-first into an inferential crevasse?
@eightyonekilograms, I’m intellectually aware now that a great many dialects consider this terminology unremarkable (though I’d thought offices might be unusually strict, at least enough to make it uncomfortable on the part of the *speaker* even if none of the listeners actually cared), and while I generally don’t use it myself I try not to let my “this is strange and distasteful” reaction show. (I don’t think I even said anything about it to the *first* person, and she was likely too distracted to see the look on my face.)
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#reply via reblog #language #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #gender #nsfw text #scrupulosity cw?
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