We All Have the Stink - Let's All Admit We've Done Exclusionary or Bigoted Things in the Past!

The Hangout Archive
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Hi everyone!

After watching the most recent Lindsay Ellis video, I wanted to talk a little about something she mentioned: the stink.

The stink is the idea that you can’t exist in our bigoted world without picking up some of that bigotry in some way, shape or form. As she said, (I’m paraphrasing because I can’t remember her exact words and the video is really long so I don’t want to go back and watch it all again just to find one quote) If you live in a pig sty, you’re gonna be surrounded by sh!t and you’re gonna stink.

I think, looking at her video and the idea of cancel culture, and also thinking about the things I did in my past, it’s true that we all have the stink. As much as we’d all like to deny it, we’ve all made a stupid or insensitive joke at some point. Many of us used the R-slur or the T-slur before we realised what they meant or what they were. We’ve all had some cringe takes at some point.

This is especially true for people who are in Gen Z (I actually am technically the oldest a Gen Z-er can get. I’m not a millennial. Lol). We’ve had the internet in our lives for as long as we can remember and many of us have figured out our ideology along the way at the same time as using the internet. We didn’t start out as woke, progressive and championing diversity. No one is born left or right wing. These are things we learn over our lives as we grow, read new things, think critically about our ideology and talk to new people.

Thanks to having the internet in my life from well before I had a political opinion, there are some really yikes things that I’ve said. like YIKES. The thing is, it’s the internet. While people in other generations could just pretend they didn’t say those things, we have archives to prove we said the things we did. One day, something we said might come up and people might start to hate us for it.

On the Left, we have a really bad habit of cancelling people for things they did or said (or people they were) in the past. We pull up old tweets from 10 years ago and expect people to be “held accountable” for things that they said and did back then – things that they no longer agree with and probably don’t even remember saying. They can get a whole lot of hate for opinions that they no longer hold. I think that’s wrong.

We want a world with no more racists, transphobes, islamophobes, sexists, nazis, etc… right? If that’s the case, where are these people going to go? We can’t just drop them off a cliff. Even if we could, I wouldn’t want to. I would want them to see the error of their ways and change! But that means we’ve gotta let them change. We can’t villainise or demonise them for positions they no longer hold. Otherwise, no one is going to change. They’re just going to dig their feet in. Even if they do change, we’re not going to really embrace them in our group and we could miss out on some great, reformed people because we were too harsh.

As Vaush said while talking to an ex-Nazi, we’re supposed to believe in rehabilitative justice. Defund prisons, right? But if all people are always going to have their crimes of the past brought up every single time they try to engage online, that’s really not rehabilitation at all.

In fact, I think that the Left online acts like an abusive partner to a lot of us. Constantly bringing up our past when we want to do better and change. Denying any of our struggles or concerns if it doesn’t fit their narrative. Isolating us for small transgressions. It’s horrible.

Lindsay Ellis’s video:

The Purpose of This Thread

What’s the point of my rant? Well, I want ShanniiWrites to be a place where you can say “Hey I used to be a vile person and I’ve changed”. Instead of people cancelling you or getting angry at you for being a bad person once upon a time, I want people to be like “hey! That’s awesome that you changed your mind on those things! Welcome!” I want to give them a clean slate here.

The best way to do that, I think, is to admit to ourselves and others that we messed up. If we can all admit to one slip-up at least, I think we can all join together and realise that we’re not all perfect. We all learn and grow and we can do that together.

So, share below some things in your past that you deeply regret now. For example:

  • Things you used to think about other people.
  • A thing you said that you regret saying.
  • Things that you did that you regret doing.
  • Political opinions that you used to have that you didn’t realise hurt others.
  • People you defended for actions that you now realise were bad.

Then, let us know what changed! You can even share a story about how you changed, too.

I’m going to be sharing quite a few myself. I’d really appreciate it if you joined in with me!

Rules

  1. Please do not use this place to share current opinions that you have which are hurtful to another group of people based on their race, sex, sexuality, gender, gender identity, ethnicity, body type, nationality, disabilities, neurodivergence, or anything that they cannot control.

  2. You may laugh at past stories. You can say “yikes, that was pretty bad”. However, anyone who uses these confessions to shame or hurt other members of the community – either on the Forums or on other social media WILL BE SUSPENDED. That means all criticism of past behaviours should be fair and level-headed. It also means that you will not “hold people accountable” for past actions. They’ll admit them here. We’ll discuss them here on this thread. Then, we move forward. If you use these confessions to paint someone as a bad person, harass them, isolate them, clip them out of context or “cancel” them, I will personally suspend you.

  3. Realise that your old opinions may be critiqued. As long as critique stays in this thread, is not used to make you out to be a bad person and isn’t brought up out of context or any of the things mentioned in 2, please accept criticism. You’re dumping your confessions here because they’re not you anymore. So, anyone criticising things from your past aren’t criticising the you of now.

  4. Please don’t post if you’re just going to say “I haven’t done anything wrong”. For one, there is a 99.9999999% chance that you’re either lying or you don’t remember. Two, it just ruins the atmosphere.

  5. YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO POST CRITICISMS OF OTHER PEOPLE’S ACTIONS UNTIL YOU HAVE SHARED AT LEAST ONE CONFESSION OF YOUR OWN!

Thank you.

@Discussions

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@ForumStaff do you think it’s worth either making an anonymous version of this or creating an anonymous form for it? I dunno. I like the idea of us being open and honest about the people we used to be, but maybe people aren’t ready for that?

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We could do an anonymous form but I hope to God this one doesn’t get abused

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Ok this is my first confession: I used to hold islamophobic views. I don’t know if I ever expressed any of them online, but I would say that it was mainly because of the whole Hindu vs Muslim thing that comes from being from my part of India. My family used to say some pretty bad things bout Muslims in a really casual way. Like, just in passing.

I know I used to specify that I didn’t want to date Muslim people, which ended up being a really hilarious joke because I have totally had a thing with a culturally Muslim guy since then. Not practicing, but from a Muslim family. You may know him. The thing was that I was more scared of my family’s reactions if I brought home a Muslim person, but they changed a lot since then. I’ve also stopped caring about what my family think of the people I date.

Plus, I’m not going to lie. I was in a place in my life where the Muslim men I knew kinda scared me. Not because they were Muslim but because they were just scary people. In my idiot 15-year-old brain, I equated “scary man” with “man is muslim” and it became “scary muslim”. Then the media really didn’t help. Plus, I went to a girl’s school at that time, so the men in my life were very few and far between. The men that were in my life at the time were either family members, from drama school or creeps. That was nothing to do with religion, but with the bigotry surrounding me, I equated it to being a religious thing.

What broke me out of that mindset? Well, after I finished school, I went to a summer programme where the Islam was probably the majority religion among my friends. They were great people. I met a guy I liked and we had a thing for a while. He was Muslim. I realised I was stupid. It’s really true that a lot of bigots are afraid because they don’t know the people they’re hating on. Literally, day one rolled around and I realised how idiotic my opinions were.

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Yeah, that’s what I was thinking, that it’s just going to get the same sort of things that pop up on the others.

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I used to say “If you’re fat, you should just eat less and exercise more”. Now I facepalm at that. It’s really not that simple! For so many reasons:

  • Food is one of the hardest addictions to cope with. You don’t need drugs or alcohol or gambling to survive, but you do need food. I can’t even imagine needing to constantly expose yourself to your addiction three times a day in moderation. That’s really hard.

  • I never got really fat, but one of the things that I never even considered about putting on weight that came crashing down on me after uni is that exercise becomes so much harder. Like, you need to exercise to lose weight, but the weight makes it hard to exercise. It’s a hard cycle to break.

  • Thyroid problems and other genetic issues are a real thing. Granted, I’m pretty sure that some of the people claiming that they have genetic problems are in denial, but there are many who have medical reasons why their body stores more fat.

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I think if it’s anonymous it will be abused really quickly. Without a name, people are braver but that can also be a bad thing in some cases.

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Yeah that’s what I think and tbh last time I gave into popular demand when making an anonymous form it got abused so badly

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I think if we want this forum to be open, we should have subjects like this be open as well. Because then you also show that the forum is a safe place where you can speak your mind as long as it’s not hurtful.

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I mean I used to bully someone when I was in 8th grade. I would pull his hair, pull away his chair and stuff. I didn’t mean it as being mean and thought I was just playing, but I wasn’t. it took 4 years before I thought back and realized what it might have been like for him.
I do feel ashamed about it and actually still want to apologize to the person, but I don’t know where he lives now and don’t want to be a stalker. But it made me think twice before doing something and try and see how it may come across for the other person.

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I used to struggle with transphobia. As many of you know, I don’t really get gender, very much like how some asexual people don’t really get sex. So, when it came to binary trans people, I just didn’t understand how something like the wrong pronoun can hale such a horrible effect on people. To me, gender was made up so you could just act how you wanted to act and dress the way you want to dress and that’s fine.

Then I realised that I’m the anomaly. I’m the one who doesn’t see gender like most people. I also realised that I’d don’t have to see gender the way they do for them to be valid.

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So, I guess, finding out that I was agender helped me to get rid of my transphobia

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I’m pretty sure I’ve used the R-slur before. I was an edgy gamer. Always left-wing, but sometimes kinda edgy.

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This isn’t really “the stink”, but I used to be one of those “I’m not like other girls”, “nice girls finish last” kinda girls.

I wasn’t the type of most of the people in my 6th form and I wasn’t interested in the ones who liked me. In my head, I perceived that as just not really being attractive

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I was kinda a garbage human being, right? xD But I think that’s it. I still stand by the things I said that got me cancelled. We need to stop the outrage at random white writers and focus it on helping them rather than getting angry

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I know I’m not the only one who kinda sucked :eyes: I didn’t read much theory from minorities or leftists until my second year of university so I only really started truly being progressive in 2017

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Even then, my ideology developed over time. I’m sure you can screen cap things I said on the Episode Forums that I don’t agree with now

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Uhh well in the spirit of…revealing things I’ve had my fair share of yikes opinions but I guess I’ll say that I used to be pretty conservative :eyes: and it was literally because I didn’t want my Dad to call me stupid and say all the mean things he does about people who weren’t conservative. But yeah, I used to take alot of his opinions as my own until I turned 14.

I never actually told anybody this, politics was something I never used (online or irl) to talk about mostly because I didn’t understand and also because many people in my life had the opposite views to me like ahh other views.

But I did my own research and talked to people, found out the things my Dad had been saying were things I strongly disagreed with. By the time I turned 14 I started the path of no longer thinking the way I had been and now at the age of 19 I think of how I used to be and I wanna beat myself up :joy:

But, I never forced those views onto other people or vocalize them really, I think this is the first time I’ve talked about it.

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oop
well, here goes nothing - here’s my darker and more icky past

I used to be transphobic, homophobic, fatphobic, racist, sexist, prejudiced based on religion, a bully, a ‘pick me’ kid and ‘not like the other kids’, probably among other things that I just can’t remember rn.

A lot of the homophobia and transphobia is linked with my religious trauma, and more directed at myself than anyone else, not that I realised until a while later. I firstly didn’t understand what being gay or trans was. I thought gay meant happy and I didn’t know it was an option to date anyone other than the opposite sex. When introduced to these people, I was accepting at first, until I read that they weren’t ‘allowed’ in the bible. After that, when my friend came out to me, I went into school the next way planning how to convert them to be ‘normal’ so I could ‘save’ them from hell and damnation. This went on for about two years, until I had my ‘gay awakening of sorts’ and had to go on a long path of leaving Catholicism behind and embracing who I was and all that sappy stuff.

My parents taught me to be racist. I eventually taught myself not to be. I think that covers the most of it, but I’ll expand a little for saying’s sake.
As I was raised, my father would point out eastern european boys, or really anyone of a darker skin colour and rougher appearance, telling me that I was to avoid them always, cus they were ‘dangerous’ apparently. He would point out anyone who looked a bit eccentric and call them the G slur. He never calls a chinese takeaway a chinese takeaway. he calls them the c slur :upside_down_face: Theres a lot more but you get the gist. As I discovered :sparkles: the internet :sparkles: I began unlearning all these things, but it’s safe to say it took a lot of time.

I used to laugh at overweight people and comment on them behind their back. Now that I myself have discovered my severe body dysmorphia, it’s safe to say I’ve changed considerably, becoming more sympathetic if nothing else.

I allowed a friend to manipulate me into bullying the new girl in the class, all because the entire class had decided she was an Irish traveller, and hated her for it. I’m not sure she even was, but I’m pretty annoyed at how I treated the poor kid. i know better now

there’s a bunch of other things too - some that I’m still trying to ease myself out of the mindset of, some that I’ve left far behind and shudder to think about them. I’m not prepared to talk about everything, simply because many of them are closely linked with past trauma and stuff lol
but uh yea I was raised that way, and I’ve changed now. I think I can safely say that if I could do it, there’s no excuse for anyone else not to.

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I used to be a tattletale and tell on other peoples :pensive:
Does that count?

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