to regret giving my dd a gay packed lunch?

[pointydog]

Dd1 (12) was off on a fun school trip today with a mix of kids from high school.

I suggested a few things for her packed lunch this morning and she went off happily with a peanut butter sandwich, a fruitus bar, a kitkat, some dried apricots, a tub of home-made muesli and a bag of chipsticks.

The tuff kids laughed at her lunch - snorting particularly loudly at the apricots - and called it gay.

I feel like the mum in About A Boy.

In this context and in general, I personally wouldn't infer "gay" meant lame, crap, broken, stupid, naff or rubbish Leningrad.

I would infer that it implied earnest, or right-on (awful description but for want of a better phrase).

Particularly for the apricots and the home made muesli which although v nice, isn't cool. Add some organic locally-produced starfruits and hand-cooked kettle chips with sea salt from Finland.... IYSWIM...

Gay as insult is completely banned for any of my DC, and I would challenge it if I heard any of their friends used it.

It may be "just a new meaning" for the word, but the fact is that the old meaning (homosexual) has not gone away at all. So it is like using "ginger" or "fat" or "tall" as a derogatory term.

With one difference - you can't just look at someone and tell that they are gay. So if you are coming to terms with your sexuality and "gay" is seen as a bad thing, how would that feel!

And DP, somebody said something (that you could have taken offence to) about the way you have chosen to look. Not something about the way you are. If they were saying you looked like a class A drug user because you had a metabolic problem and were struggling - really struggling - to put on weight, would you have been able to Laugh it off so easily?

While we were having tea last night (faggots, mash & Peas...please don't judge it's DH's favourite)DS1 (just gone 6)asked if Faggots was a swear word. I said not if it's tea, but it's not a nice word to use about people.
I was surprised he'd even come across the word in that context.

Well now here's the thing DP. People do as a rule have a quick wee think before they open their mouths. Not because they are politically correct or culturally anxious or because they don't have a sense of humour - but because it's a part of normal social interaction not to open your mouth and say the first thing that occurs to you every single time. This is because, generally speaking, lots of people don't want to look like idiots.

This will be a revelation to you, I know.

No, no, no Lissya. Get thee to a playground. It means lame, sad, dorky, nerdy, not cool etc

I get very angry at this, gay teenagers have a high rate of bullying selfharm and suicide, it's not trivial. and that could be our children in a few years. Do people really want their children to think being gay is laughable?

(sense of humour failure, I'm working with self harming teens at the moment, lots of them are bi or gay or not sure. I don't care who thinks I'm humourless on this).

lol 100x..

what do all comedians talk about? race, religion, sex,......because taking the piss out of each other can be funny.....jo brand made a career out of fat people.

Ha, ahundredtimes. Guess you can tell I'm not the mother of a teen/pre-teen yet

Well in that case I am totally that down with the kids, gay does imply lame, nerdy etc etc. rather than just earnest/right-on (eww phrase again).

Neither is acceptable in any case although earnest is the less offensive, but still offensive nonetheless.

(earnest compared to lame & nerdy etc, not right on, I mean)

oh i see...so it's ok to take the piss out of fat people if you're fat yourself?

Look you can't win! Wholemeal bread is gay. Fruit is gay. Salad is gay. Your DD is just going to have to embrace her hidden wuzziness and eat her dried apricots with pride.

DS#1 has just about forgiven me for putting his sandwiches in a Rainbow snack bag with a dinosaur on it during his first week in Yr7! Oh the shame

"so it's ok to take the piss out of fat people if you're fat yourself"

--That's part of it; but it in't that simple is it? Jo Brand sometimes annoys me by overusing her fatness, and using it too glibly. Shouldn't there always be some irony, or some table-turning, or some self-validation when a member of a discriminated-against group uses her membership of it for humour?

No, I said that wrong. I mean when she makes an apparently derogatory remark about her membership of that group. Obv there is a lot of non-derogatory purely observational humour about any group membership that needn't be ironic or table-turning, or self-validating.

i never found her funny tbh...she would be funnier if she was a sexually repressed fucked up catholic hippie...more material.

Last year 'sick' meant good. This year 'sick' means bad and in the 80's I was called a 'lemon' for wearing 'virgin socks'. What a wonderful language English is......

I know Leningrad, I was a bit surprised (being new to the self-harming issues) that there's still such a strong link between sexuality and self-harming and similar. I'd thought that might have changed.