Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Many years ago, when I was still active on IRC, a stranger messaged me to criticize my use of the word "straight" to mean "heterosexual". He wanted me to explain my choice, then he listed the reasons it bothered him.

Y'know, it seemed like such a small thing. Such a petty thing. Why would he bother getting on my case about that, risk picking a fight? And why on Earth should I bother to change such a tiny thing? I immediately felt defensive and bristled, ready to defend my right to use the accepted slang. But I did something that, if I must be honest (and I suppose here I must), I'm not sure I'd have had the wisdom to do on any other day: instead of mounting a vigorous defense or writing him off as a petty annoyance and setting an ignore-flag, I wrote back that I was in fact feeling defensive and that most of the answers I could give then would be tainted by that -- that my instinct was to reply in "debate where I must prove myself right" mode -- but that I would ponder his points overnight and get back to him later.


And away from keyboard and screen, I did ponder this "timy thing". Reflecting on the other meanings of "straight" -- not-adulterated, regular, morally upright, ordinary (years before, when I hadn't yet adopted the term 'vanilla' for such things, I once found myself referring to "straight gay sex (as opposed to kinky gay sex)" in a conversation) ... pure. And I realized that by saying "straight" when I meant "not gay", I was reinforcing every heteronormative memeset, the background ideas that heterosexuality was the pure, unadulterated, moral pole and any deviation from it was inferior at best.

But it still seemed like such a small thing! It would have been so easy to say, "yeah, okay, he's right in abstract philosophical terms, but who the fuck cares? It's too small." Instead, I said, "It's small, but it's there, and since it's small, there's no really significant sacrifice involved in my doing the right thing despite the amount of effort required to break a language-habit.

I found that person online a day or three later, and said, more or less, "hey, you pissed me off but you were right. I'm gonna try to change my language," and I edited various things that said "straight" to read "het" instead (the complainer's suggestion when I explained that I'd written "straight" only because it was shorter than "heterosexual" and fit into a limited-size buffer), and began trying to train myself to say "het", not "straight", when "heterosexual" seems too long or too formal. It's a whole lot later and I still catch myself slipping up now and then, more often in speech than in writing -- "straight" is still the dominant phrasing in my culture after all, so the long habit I'd had before the events recounted here still gets buttressed by linguistic-noise all around me even as I try to replace it -- but it only took a couple weeks in "focus on retraining myself" mode to get "het" to pop out of my mouth (or my keyboard) much more often than "straight". Golly, I'd changed a 'little thing' by making a little effort.

The point here is not to make me a saint, especially since I'm sure I've failed this test at least as often as I've passed it (and I'm sure stoneself and others will call me on my failings every so often (and I'll get annoyed and feel defensive), and this whole tale still comes down to, yes, a darned little thing.. The point is to give one example of changing "one little thing". One little thing that it would have been easy to brush off for being so little, But which matters to some people.

Most of us, most of the time, have no idea that we're doing small things that annoy others. So I do hope you won't be shy in dropping clues if I seem to be doing something that annoys. I can't necessarily promise to fix it, but I can promise to either try my best or give a real explanation (which would never involve the phrase "small thing").