[quote=“MaiqTheLiar, post:26, topic:86392”]
I’m OUTRAGED that vagina-faced man is banned in Canada!
[/quote]Ahhh. Now I get it. I thought those were his EARS. They’re LIPS!
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Perfect for one of those “Hell Houses” that churches offer.
“Don’t have premarital sex, kids, or your baby will look like this!”
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It’s creepy how it looks exactly like me.
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My first thought too. I figured you could put it in a window in the front door (if there is a window), looking out.
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Inside the back passenger-side window of the car?
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Nope, it’s not. And yet there’s no good reason why Halloween scares shouldn’t be designed thoughtfully. It was easy to decide to ditch the gallows, since its value as a racially-neutral-but creepy prop was relatively modest compared to its potential effect as a bigotry-laden symbol of lynchings. I’m appalled to remember how many little nooses I used to make out of scraps of manila rope years ago, after I’d learned how. In my mind it was just an exercise to pass the time while working on set, like folding origami cranes, and no more fraught with meaning than a child’s game of Hangman. I hope to god nobody ever found one of them lying around and thought somebody was trying to send a message.
You certainly know that none of us are 100% guaranteed safe from offending anybody. The trick, especially when toeing the line between appropriateness and transgression, between comfortable safety and pants-wetting peril, is to know one’s audience and employ some imagination and pick your battles so you neither throw out your best babies with the bathwater, nor play it so safe that your audience is in danger of succumbing to a nap, nor thoroughly offend people just to land a cheap scare.
I tellya, it’s a dance with new choreography every year.
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I keep a continuous differentiable distance.
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“Prancer, I’ve just shot your mother.”
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So, dress in solid black and move extremely weirdly? I’ve heard worse costume ideas.
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That’s actually pretty good. Print off some business cards or copies of your dissertation (Typed in random foot-prints and stick figures) to hand out, job’s a good’un.
ETA: Remaining completely silent and communicating only through dance and you’d be heading into “awesome” territory.
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Instead of limping, the villains in slasher films should do interpretive dance instead.
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I fail to see the humor in pumpkins. What’s so damned funny about a squash? BAN THEM
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Hanging a noose from the rearview mirror of the grip truck was the standard expression of frustration with a badly mismanaged production as recently as the mid-late 90s, IME. There was absolutely no racial note to it, it just meant “kill me now.” Sometime after that nooses apparently got co-opted by racists as threat displays, akin to burning crosses. Or maybe they’d always been used that way, but not in regions with no history of lynchings, so we were unaware of the connotation until the internet disseminated that information.
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Change that to “tasteless and I won’t buy one” and I’m with you.
If our retailers removed everything that HMSGoose thought was tasteless, it might take a while before we noticed the difference.
But if they removed anything that -anyone- thought was tasteless, we might find ourselves having to go to Venezuela where there’s more to buy on the shelves.
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Every year we see the definitions of racism, sexism and “______phobia” enlarged or changed to include what had always been perfectly acceptable behavior.
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Well, yeah. That’s the progression. Used to be slavery was perfectly acceptable. Once that became socially unacceptable you could still get away with lynching. Later on it was cool just to make 'em ride at the back of the bus. And now you can’t even keep 'em out of the White House. Ain’t progress a bitch?
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I’m going to call you out on this, at least as children’s costumes are concerned. I have never seen a blackface getup on a child in the last thirty years, and while there are costumes such as mock-Sioux, etc. there are certainly no more of them than there were in my childhood.
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Yep, slavery was a big problem and we knocked that one down. Jim Crow too, that one took a while. We started with the big problems and knocked them down one by one and now we are left with the struggle against Halloween costumes, microagressions, a lack of gender choices in video games and what football teams decide to name themselves.
The struggle will continue even if new problems have to be invented to struggle against.
My bad. I did mean to say “our attention is drawn to more.” They’ve certainly been around for decades.
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