I quite honestly hate the internet sometimes.
Mainly for the collective sense of humour of its inhabitants. In days of yore, sure, you might go down the pub and trade insensitive jokes with your friends. You’d share that kind of humour in the privacy of your own lives where no-one who might get offended might hear. And the vast majority of people would candidly admit that they didn’t think that kind of humour was right or respectable even while they would quite happily join in with it with their mates. I am quite comfortable with that as a concept.
But ‘it’s not rape if…’ and Dead Baby jokes and racist humour and so on are utterly rife and exploding on the internet. And again I suppose in theory I don’t mind that so long as I’m not likely to come across it. By and large you just accept that there are some websites you’re just not going to find amusing. That’s fair enough. I’m not some kind of internet vigilante and I don’t want to be.
I don’t think photo groups on facebook are the place for that kind of thing, firstly. But again, accepted, not everything everyone says is ever going to be to my taste. But commenting after something that isn’t in any way witty or clever, but is just grim, and which has been followed by ‘I hope that doesn’t make anyone throw up’, by egging the commenter on and saying something likeΒ ‘Are you new here π ? I don’t think that’s going to make anyone throw up’ – this attitude that just being insensitive, gruesome and entirely intolerant without also being in the least bit witty is something to be defended and actually encouraged… I think that’s new. And I don’t think it’s healthy.
I don’t like that I now feel the need to point out that I’m not a total prude and it’s not like my sense of humour isn’t sometimes a bit rough and ready and that this isn’t just good-little-Christian-choirgirl-me having a bit of a rant. This is me a decent, mature human being who has been quite honestly appalled by what is deemed acceptable.
I guess it’s just that this kind of thing didn’t used to get written down, it wouldn’t reach such a wide audience, and to an extent I suppose that also means perhaps the jokes wouldn’t snowball to this level of hate-filled witless idiocy.