Worried about the nascent antipathy towards the male nude and its supposed implications.
Need I be aware of aggressive anti-gay sentiment out there? Should I vigorously stand against it, or capitulate to the mere showing of the decorous and the etiolated - the ephebe in the dappled glade? Or should I stand aloof, claiming that it does not matter - Ars gratia artist forever?
I recently saw an unbearably annoying diatribe against 'banter.' That the thing came with inverted commas already underlined the unreliability of the category. The main grounds on which the nomenclature is inherently unsound revolves around the notion of intent. I also saw a meme in Spanish, possibly on the same day,, showing a medieval marginalium of a surgeon chiselling a head to verify the veracity of the thoughts expressed by the interlocutor.
The young unwittingly use terms that are considered inappropriate by supervising adults, usually because they are unaware of the potency granted the words by the dominant overseeing section of Society. Sometimes the sly use innocuous terminology deliberately, larded with vicious tone, there to cause offense from the outset. But prying apart the suprasegmental signification and the weltanschaung behind the phrases is all but impossible. I am not offended by any words used to denigrate my particular sub-group, but I rail against the ignorant pigeonholing done by the vilely ignorant. It is, thus, a matter of education, but jumping to condemn usage before exegesis is another case of the cart before the horse. Homophobia and xenophobia are to be abhorred, but putting certain things out-of-bounds immediately empowers them and their use.