The right is known for using provocative language. But lately there’s been a push to be transgressive, even on the left — from the return of certain slurs to the removal of pronouns from bios. Nadja Spiegelman, a Times Opinion culture editor, is joined by the writer and culture critic Aminatou Sow and the New York magazine writer Brock Colyar to debate whether our culture is abandoning political correctness — and if so, why? Plus, stick around to hear what words Aminatou and Brock would like to ban.
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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Nadja Spiegelman: Did woke go too far? I’ve noticed some people are saying the R-word again, and pronouns and emails no longer feel so obligatory. It feels as if we’re just being a little less careful with what we can say and who we might offend. So, where are we with language policing, and are we simply done with being politically correct?
To find out, I talked to my friends — the writer and culture critic Aminatou Sow, and the New York magazine writer Brock Colyar.
To start, I wanted to play a game where I am going to say a word and you guys are going to tell me if it is alive, dying or dead.
Aminatou Sow: Sounds great.
Brock Colyar: Let’s do it.
Spiegelman: OK: problematic.
Colyar: Dead.
Sow: Hmm. Should die. But it’s around. You know what I’m saying? It’s around, but it should die.
Spiegelman: Triggered.
Sow: That one’s going to come back. It’s going to come back, but it’s dead.
Colyar: I still see quite a bit of that, especially on the internet, which is really disturbing because it’s like, “trigger warning,” and then here’s a video of some horrifically violent thing.
Sow: But it’s why I love it. I’m just like, thank you for triggering me with the trigger. It’s like the reaction came 10 seconds before, so I love it.
Spiegelman: Microaggression.
Sow: Dead.
Colyar: Dead.
Spiegelman: OK. Safe space.
Sow: Dead.
Colyar: Dead.
Spiegelman: Folks with an “x.”
Colyar: Dead.
Sow: Never alive.
Colyar: I mean, talk about ridiculous. That really makes me so mad, because I know people who have dutifully and earnestly used that, and it’s like, oh my gosh.
Spiegelman: What about Latinx?
Colyar: I think that one’s difficult because for a lot of Latin people or Latin queer people, it feels good. And for some of them it actually doesn’t, and it can sometimes feel like a Western intervention onto them. I think that one’s complicated. I think people use it.
Spiegelman: It can live if it wants to. OK.
Sow: This is the one that will get me canceled. I hate “Latinx,” and I talk about this a lot with immigrant friends. It’s very much like a diaspora war thing for me, where I was like, it’s interesting that you need a word to signal where you are from. So I don’t like it. I would say most of the people that I know don’t like it, either. It’s just imprecise to me. I’m just like, what are we talking about here?
Spiegelman: OK, perfect. Since we’re going to talk about language, I want to start by being on the same page about the language we’re using. So, when you hear the term “politically correct,” what comes to mind for you? What does that mean for you? And is it the same thing as woke? Are we talking about the same thing?
Colyar: That’s what I was going to say. When I hear “politically correct” — I kind of hate the word “woke,” but I do think that “woke” has almost supplanted “politically correct” as the thing we’re talking about when we’re talking about this stuff.
Spiegelman: “Woke” obviously has had a lot of different transitions as a word, and who uses it and how, and to mean what. And I would say that it seemed like a positive thing to be woke five years ago. And now it doesn’t feel that way anymore. Have you noticed a shift, and where are you noticing it?
Colyar: Yeah, when I’m trying to describe my politics to people, I often say that I have some “anti-woke” sensibilities. And by saying that, I think what I’m often trying to do is distance myself from the woke of five years ago — this way too earnest, super p.c. kind of cringe, resistance-y culture, whose politics I mostly support, but the way that it’s carried out is cringe to me. Yeah, I think “cringe” is the best word.
Spiegelman: What about you, Amina?
Sow: Yeah, “cringe” is a really good word. Thank you to the young people for that one. I do think that language moves very fast. And I think that sometimes, too, when I hear people use certain words, all it does is carbon-date them for me.
So, if somebody says “p.c.,” I’m like, got it. Like, you’re a 1990 and before person. We love that last century, you know? And if you’re a different kind of person and you say “woke,” I’m like, great. You’re a new century person. But do the words mean the same things to us? And that’s not always apparent.
Spiegelman: And does it go further than time? If a white person says to you, “I’m woke,” what do you think of that?
Sow: I mean, I’m laughing. It has been ridiculous since Day 1 — I just want to be so clear about that for me — because I don’t know what they’re saying. Are you saying that I should trust you, or are you saying that you are considerate about people, which is not what “woke” has meant in the Black community, at least, where it originated from.
So, I’ve never known what that means. It’s very much like the dad from “Get Out,” you know? I’m like, OK, got it. If Barack Obama was running a third term, you’d vote for him. Cool. I don’t know what that means, you know? Also, now you have people on the right using this word “woke” to mean something completely different than what a mainstream Democrat is saying. So it is very confusing.
Spiegelman: There’s totally that, but I also feel like there is something — and it does have to do with age — but I feel like there’s something generationally that is happening, that is interesting in terms of how people think about the superficial signaling of their politics. That is changing, and it’s what I want to talk about. I wonder if you guys agree that something happened during Donald Trump’s first administration where people were like, “This is not us.” Whatever this person, this man’s values are, we need to prove that it’s not the same as the values of white progressives. And so we’re going to knit pussyhats, and white people are going to do crazy things like read books about antiracism, and they’re going to post black squares on Instagram, and it’s all going to be about ——
Sow: You’re triggering so many bad memories right now.
Spiegelman: And it’s all going to be about signaling in a very, I think at the time, well-intentioned, cri de coeur, passionate way that Trump’s values were not the same as many Americans’ values. So, how could we draw those distinctions? And then, I think during the Joe Biden administration, a lot of the things signaling that became part of institutions, like H.R.-ifying pronouns and the ways in which universities were grappling with all of this.
And I would say maybe now, because so much of the signaling has been institutionalized, there’s a rebellion against that from both sides. Do you guys see that?
Colyar: I agree with that, but I do think, like that black square moment, that still happens. We still get stuck in these virtue signaling, woke social media cycles where any issue that comes up, there’s this pressure to post. And then you post these infographics, and then all of a sudden there’s a realization two months into whatever conflict it is that those aren’t doing anything. So then we start to get mad at people who are only posting the infographics, and then it stops. And then the next time a big issue comes up, we do it all again. It just feels monotonous.
Sow: I agree with that. I remember the black square day so well, because I didn’t know what it was.
And then, one day I woke up and I was like, great, now you’ve told me exactly who I need to unfollow on this feed. This is so silly. It’s like you’re posting a picture because you don’t know how to say “I don’t have racist values.” What’s so scary about saying that?
Spiegelman: For anyone who doesn’t remember, can you remind us what black squares were?
Sow: Yeah, the black squares were in protest — was it George Floyd? Yes. It was the summer of the troubles.
Colyar: It was the summer of 2020. Around the time of the “Imagine” video.
Sow: So, to be fair, it was Covid-19, a lot of things were happening, right? You have George Floyd getting killed. You have a lot of other protests that are happening, like around trans issues. But I think that black squares were specifically to signal that you were not a racist person, which, what a ridiculous way to signal that, you know?
Spiegelman: Yeah. Brock, how much do you think this culture comes out of the internet specifically?
Colyar: Like when we were trying to define “woke” earlier, and I’m thinking about what that means. Everything I’m thinking about is happening on the internet. Thinking about that black square moment, it seems silly in retrospect, but it felt very serious at the time to some. I remember getting confronted by a co-worker ——
Sow: Stop.
Colyar: “I haven’t seen you post yet,” and you know ——
Sow: But post in general or post the black square?
Colyar: That square. And then we had to have a conversation, and that was really difficult at the time. It was really intense, you know?
What you were saying about the Biden years, I think the reason it feels like we’re having this kind of backlash to this culture right now is because of the institutionalization of it in our workplaces and on campuses. And I don’t think even good liberal people feel like the antiracist training that they’re doing in their office is helping anyone. Even people who respect people’s pronouns and believe in nonbinary identity or whatever, I don’t think that they think that putting it in their signature is helping anyone, and I think they’re rolling their eyes and laughing about it in private.
Spiegelman: I want to know a little bit more, like the context of where you each come to this from. Brock, for you, I think Trump being elected was your first semester of college, and you had grown up in Tennessee. So how did you think about these things before coming to college, and how did it change?
Colyar: I mean, I grew up in rural Tennessee, and so I was surrounded by Trump voters at the time, who were pretty outwardly bigoted in a fairly rural Tennessee area. And arriving on campus in the heat of the 2016 election was — it was just crazy.
I think for me personally, having finally gotten to a more liberal place — yes, I could start experimenting with the way I looked, and nonbinary identity was really kind of bubbling up. And so I started using they/them pronouns, and then pronouns became the big conversation on campus.
You couldn’t walk into a classroom without the first day starting with a pronoun go-round, as they say. You know, going around the circle and saying, “Hi, I am Brock and I’m from Tennessee, and I use they/them pronouns.” It really exploded at that moment.
I was, for the first time — also as someone who dreamed of going to a liberal place — confronting other problems within the left, suddenly finding myself among like-minded people, but also discovering that we don’t think the same way about all these topics, and there’s going to be pushback on voting for Hillary Clinton or, you know, any number of ——
Spiegelman: What were examples of that?
Colyar: Yeah, I think who you voted for in the primaries was such a litmus test at the time. The big debate at Northwestern University at the time was a professor had invited someone who worked for ICE to come speak to a classroom. There was a huge protest over that because we were trying to figure out how open we wanted our dialogues. Was it OK to be in dialogue with someone like that?
Spiegelman: And Amina, you grew up — I think you speak five languages, is that right? You grew up in a lot of different places and then you came to America for college. What was that experience like?
Sow: I went to an American high school in Nigeria that was very conservative and run by missionaries, but with an American curriculum. And then my first experience of being in America — I went to college at University of Texas at Austin, and also, as I would say, a very liberal, woke 1.0, woke 2.0 kind of place, but you’re still in Texas, you know? I graduated high school at the beginning of the Iraq war. So my campus time was very much like: war, war, war, war, war. I was a Middle Eastern studies major. So that conversation’s still going on.
But watching George W. Bush just sweep through the office and be this celebrated buffoon was a big system shock to me. And I think that’s my defining political heartbreak.
But to the point about language and stuff, I think that being shaped in that late -90s, p.c. madness, I was very woke to that, because I was like, this is not working. If you’re just like a regular, not addicted to social media person who is just trying to get through the workday, of course you’re upset that they’re making you do all this signaling that you’re not interested in doing at the place that you come to conduct capitalism to pay your bills. Like, who cares about this stuff? And so, it’s a very intense feeling.
Spiegelman: That’s actually where I wanted to go next. The comedian Marc Maron made this joke — I’m going to paraphrase it, but basically it’s like: Did progressives annoy people into fascism?
Sow: I mean, it’s possible. It’s very possible.
Spiegelman: Brock, you’ve done so much reporting on the MAGA right youth movement. I’m curious what you’re seeing there.
Colyar: I wrote a cover story for New York magazine last year where I went to the inauguration and hung out with the new right: young, upwardly mobile, kind of good-looking, influencer conservatives. And language policing was the thing that they brought up over and over and over again. They wanted the freedom to say the R-word or the F-word. This was their main concern.
Sow: Did you find that to be sincere?
Colyar: I did. It’s funny, I think I wrote in the piece that some of them seemed very earnest about it and for some of them it was performative. They were doing it for the bit. But I think largely they really felt that — and something that came up over and over and over again, when I was asking them to explain why they thought they won, they said: “We talk like normal people.” They just kept calling themselves “normal.”
I mean, the truth is that they were not always talking like normal people. They were making really messed-up and cruel jokes. But I do think that they were onto something. I think that’s also the problem with so much of this woke language stuff. I think that to the average American, it’s read as elite and academic. It’s the stuff of campuses and intellectuals. And that’s a turnoff.
Spiegelman: Yeah, I think there’s also feeling like you’re being transgressive, is gleeful. Like it’s a place of joy. And I think that some of these people on the right are like, “We can rebel against this in a way that is powerful.” Do you think that’s part of what’s going on, or is it pure just ——
Sow: Oh, that’s why I asked you whether you thought it was sincere or not, because I have such a hard time with somebody hanging all of their politics on, like: I want to be able to say the R-word. Not even taxes? This is the pinnacle of what you care about? It feels particularly lazy to me. And I do think that it’s about being transgressive, and I think that it’s also about being cruel. It’s something that I think about a lot.
There’s language that I am asked to use that I find goofy sometimes, and I always ask myself: Does it cost me anything to do something nice for someone else? And if it doesn’t cost me anything, who cares?
Colyar: I think people just don’t enjoy being told what to do.
Sow: I don’t think that we’re always being told what to do; some of this is just basic politeness to me. Before we started this interview, your producer asked me how I would like to be referred to. I was like, that’s great. That’s a professional courtesy. People mispronounce my name all the time. It’s fine to do that. So, if somebody is like, please call me by these pronouns, and they’re asking you earnestly, it doesn’t cost me anything to do that for someone.
And so, when I find this wanton cruelty being the driving force — because, again, everything exists in a context — I think that what I find particularly grating about the “I want to be able to use the R-word, I want to call women [expletive], and I want to call people the N-word,” you know, whatever it is, I’m like, why do you want to do that? Why is it so important to you? What is so important about being able to say that to someone who is telling you they don’t want to hear that?
Colyar: At the same time, though, I do think there’s a — I’m 28 and I live in Brooklyn, and I’m surrounded by, like, card-carrying D.S.A. members.
Sow: Including one right here.
Colyar: But I will say, I do think that most people are willing to be polite, but so much of this has gotten so fraught, on the example of pronouns, because people do not allow people to learn. People do not give them the grace to try and figure out how to get these things right. I mean, people are militant about this stuff and will bite your head off, bite their professor’s head off over a misgendering situation, and that makes it really hard to move forward.
Sow: I hear you and I agree with you. I’ve been in those meetings, I’m a member of the coop; I go to the meetings where the people are militant, but at the same time, I’m just like, no one’s killing anybody.
There is a fragility built in on both sides of this conversation, where somebody says, “Call me this.” You do. We don’t have to have a 10-hour-long fight over this stuff. Or you can just smile and move on. I think we can agree that that’s very silly. It’s like somebody yelled at you onetime in college that doesn’t have any power over you, and now I have to live with the consequences of — you know, fascism is knocking at the door because of that. That’s a big leap.
Colyar: It is a big leap, but, again, I think people just don’t like being told what to do, and that’s like a very ——
Sow: Yeah, but welcome to society. The government tells you what to do, and also, it’s sometimes — I want to backtrack. To me, it’s not about being told what to do. It’s like, we have basic rules of decorum.
Colyar: I guess my problem is, while the left is wrapped up in these debates about decorum and politeness, the right’s reaction to this is to actually dismantle things, right? The things that we were doing in college, you could not do on a campus. Women’s and gender studies have been destroyed, queer studies, Middle Eastern programs, protesting. We’re having these silly little debates about that, and they’re taking these big actions.
That’s sometimes my problem with the pronoun discourse, too. Like the left, the young queer people spent so much time enforcing all of this pronoun stuff. And what energy was wasted? Why weren’t we talking about health care or bathrooms?
Sow: I don’t disagree with that.
Spiegelman: And you were just speaking at a university a few weeks ago on these subjects. Do you feel like it’s changed on campuses now?
Colyar: This was at a very liberal university in the South, an artsy school on a mountain, which is actually in a town that actually votes blue. And yes, the change was huge. These students were telling me that previously they felt like the school was 90 percent liberal kids and maybe 10 percent conservatives, and now they were estimating it was more 60-40.
They said that Trump was elected, and all of a sudden these frat houses were hotbeds of the R-word and all these things that we’re talking about. They said that dress changed on campus; all of a sudden, all these girls and boys are in salmon-colored button-ups.
Spiegelman: Oh, wow.
Colyar: The culture at this very liberal school had gotten so much more conservative. They said they had about nine kids who participated — it’s a fairly small school, but only nine kids participated in the pro-Palestine protests.
Spiegelman: Wow. And do you think that’s because youth movements are shifting? Are just the signifiers shifting? Or is the youth shifting to the right?
Colyar: The media talks a lot about the youth shifting to the right. I don’t think that’s what’s happening. I think that the youth are just shifting away from both parties, and don’t really want to be aligned with either institutionally. And that makes their politics really funny and hard to map onto MAGA or woke.
Spiegelman: Steven Pinker came up with this concept called the euphemism treadmill, the idea that we are always going to replace a word that has stigma attached to it with another word, because the word is just going to get too loaded. Like the R-word, for example, was the polite replacement for the word “idiot.” And we are just never going to be able to outrun the stigma, because the word’s always going to catch it. Do you guys think that there is a way off that treadmill, or is this just a thing that happens with language?
Colyar: I just think that’s what happens every generation. I think queer stuff is really interesting about this. Like, obviously, “queer” is the word that we’re using right now to kind of stand in for all L.G.B.T.Q.+ people. But it was not always that way, though it was very popular in the ’90s. And a lot of older gays and lesbians today are very uncomfortable with the word. And I just think it changes, it will continue to change, and that’s also why you can’t quite police this stuff, because it’s so fluid and flexible.
Sow: Yeah, I agree with that. I think we’re not going to make new words, so we are going to recycle all the same words. I was talking to somebody in their 80s recently, and I used the word “horny” and he got so offended, and he was like, “Your generation loves to use that word.” And I have never had a reaction to this word before. And it was very instructive and very funny.
Spiegelman: But do you think that there’s a way off the treadmill?
Sow: No, I think that language is always going to do this, because the political mood shifts. People reclaim words, I think, a lot. We are in an era of people taking words that meant bad things and were a replacement for something that was bad, and really bringing those back to the core. And we’re seeing real generational anxieties about that. And I don’t know, as a words person, I love all of it. I just love to see how language is formed. And so I think you could be scared by it, or you could be really intrigued and see what we do with the language.
Spiegelman: Right. And then sometimes I get confused. I mean, as a white woman — let me make this about me for a second ——
Sow: Is this your coming out? I love it.
Spiegelman: But I, as an editor, also, I’m like, we’re constantly making lists of people to do things and I have to be like: We’ve only put white people on this list. We need some people who are — and then I don’t know what to say, because I’ve heard from a lot of people that “person of color” feels so corporate, and everyone’s a color.
But I’m like, so add some people who are not white, but then that centers whiteness, and like it actually comes out of a genuine desire to be like, what is the word that means what I want it to mean and is the most respectful?
Sow: Right. But at the end of the day, also, it’s like, just do the thing. Like in the summer of 2020 — I will never forget the summer of the troubles — I was on a call and somebody used the word “BIPOC,” which I had seen written, but I had never encountered before. And I’m a fairly online person, and I had seen it, but I guess my brain had registered that it meant something else.
And I was like, wait, who’s the BIPOC on the call? And this woman was like, “Oh, you.” And I said, “Oh, I’m not bisexual, but thank you so much for thinking that about me.” I really thought it meant bisexual person of color. And I was like, that is so niche, you know?
And she said, “No, no, no. It means Black, Indigenous, person of color.” And I was like, “I’m just Black. I don’t need this thing.” But I remember it made me laugh so hard. And then, when I was really thinking about that call; this is somebody that I’ve worked with for so many years, who’s always like, “How do I get more Black people to be involved?” And then never does. At this point, you were talking so much about, how can you do it? What’s the list called? What’s the thing? And I was like, where’s the results? If you’re still not doing it, this thing doesn’t matter.
Spiegelman: Totally. Intent matters so much more than language, but language is how we communicate. Language is also important. We are all three writers who care about it.
Sow: But I think that showing curiosity and asking questions about it is better than being definitive. So, even if somebody says to me, “What do you identify as?” That is automatically easier. I think so much about trans friends who have corrected my identification of their pronouns. And it was never done in an aggressive way. It was always like, “Thanks, actually, this is the pronoun I like,” and then you move on. And I think about that a lot in this debate, where sometimes I’m like, yeah, you said someone’s pronouns wrong and they have now told you how to say it. You don’t have to wallow in shame. You say, “Thank you for telling me that.” And then we both keep it kind of pushing.
Colyar: If the conversation goes that way.
Sow: If the conversation goes that way, but I think a lot of times the conversation’s not going that way because it’s not an invitation. On both sides. There’s so much shame and self-loathing, and it’s like, well, no, let’s be correct and let’s move on. Let’s have a dynamic conversation about it.
Spiegelman: Yeah.
Colyar: Thinking about all this, I don’t support the loose and free, say-whatever-you-want cruelty of the young Trumpers. But I do think that once you start parsing what people can and how we say all these things, it has a chilling effect. And I don’t know if the young people I know are also a good sample size to talk about this, but it feels more fraught and policed than ever in my social circles. There’s like a slight fascistic thing about what we are doing. Like, can you say you didn’t like this movie? Can you say that you like Lana Del Rey? Oh, but wait, she dated a cop a couple of years ago. Like, can you like her? And she has tradwife aesthetics. Like, sharing on Instagram who exactly you should rank in the New York elections. And if you don’t rank it exactly that way, then get out of this circle.
When I wrote about the cruel kids for New York mag, at the end of the piece, I kind of copped to some of this, because I felt that I was becoming vaguely more “anti-woke,” and I admitted to making bad jokes and stuff. And the way I felt socially ostracized among my friends for just admitting that. I thought it would be relatable to people.
You know, sometimes we do say these bad things in private, but I don’t know, among my social circles there was just a huge backlash to that. In some corners of the world, I think woke is more alive than ever, and it’s getting more intense, and that’s how they’re transgressing.
Sow: It’s definitely coming back.
Spiegelman: So it’s sort of like these two completely different spheres, then, that you navigate between both, when you’re reporting on the MAGA right youth movements and when you’re moving through Brooklyn. It’s two completely different worlds. Is that right?
Colyar: Yes, and I would say, pretty comfortably, that having open debate among the young conservative influencers I know is much easier than doing it in Brooklyn.
Spiegelman: That’s so interesting. OK, so, is woke over? Are we done being politically correct?
Sow: It’s coming back. Woke is always coming back. It just comes back in new clothing.
Colyar: New iteration for a new generation.
Sow: Yeah. And also new leaders of the woke.
Something’s definitely brewing. So I’m curious to see what it’s going to look like, what it’s going to feel like. But I’m really ingesting this thing that you’ve said, too — about the opinions that you’re allowed to have online and how much it’s shaping all of us.
I know that for me, it shapes my writing a lot and it drives me nuts when I’m like, oh, this is not from a place of honesty. This is from a place of not wanting to get yelled at or whatever. So, that feels genuinely palpable. But yeah, woke is on its way back. We have a democratic socialist mayor.
Colyar: I do think it’s on its way back. I also find that there’s a certain corner of the internet that is always insisting that it was never dead and that it’s alive. And I find that a bit disingenuous.
Look what’s happening to this country right now. These policies have lost, and maybe it shouldn’t come back in the same way.
Spiegelman: And it’s interesting because I think any person that we could ask these questions to would have their own very specific answers that might be completely different. And that’s a really interesting thing about this kind of conversation, because you’re like, this is what’s happening in Brooklyn, but you’re also describing this formerly liberal college campus where things look a lot different than they did a few years ago.
And so we live in such atomized little bubbles, and when we’re talking about social movements, so many different contradictory things can be happening at the same time.
Sow: I know, but also, there’s been such a big switch. When I think about the fact that football is now a left thing, and family — all the gays are married, we’re watching the Super Bowl, whatever.
And on the right they’re doing no vaccines, the weird milks, the weird kinks with the Republican husbands. This is very weird to observe.
Colyar: I mean, look at who people are listening to. I wrote a profile of Candace Owens in December, and sometimes I think that politics are heading in her or Joe Rogan’s direction. She’s such a, you know, pro-Palestine, but super anti-trans, but against the war.
Sow: But started as a Vogue intern. It’s all very weird.
Colyar: And her audience is young, and it’s a lot of women who, I think, are heading in those directions.
Spiegelman: OK. So, just to end, I want to play a game. And for this game, the three of us are going to be the language police, and we are going to get to ban a word.
I’ll go first. For me, I was at the supermarket and I heard a woman say to her boyfriend: “Honey, should we get some cados?” And she meant avocados. And that is banned. No one can say “cados” for avocados.
Sow: The food girls, generally, should be banned. The white women that make up the backbone of the food writing industry, I think they all need to go.
Colyar: The baby talk.
Sow: The baby talk. The “ayos” and the ——
Spiegelman: What does “ayos” mean?
Sow: Mayo — I was like, banned. Banned, banned, banned. What happens when bad writers have too many words to give people? No, thank you.
Colyar: It’s just started happening, but I’m already done with the “maxxing”; you know, looksmaxxing or whatever. You can add any word onto “maxxing,” and that’s already completely annoying.
Spiegelman: It was too easy and it went too fast.
Sow: I want to ban straight people using “partner” when they mean husband or wife. I’m just like, I don’t like this signaling of your politics. I really hate it, because it’s very sinister, actually.
Colyar: They’re hiding. It’s like they’re doing some queer for clout ——
Sow: I’m like, you’re literally participating in the most heteronormative institution a person could participate in. And you don’t get to rebrand it.
Spiegelman: This always bugged me as a queer person. Because anytime someone would say partner, I’d be like, oh, cool, they’re gay. And then I’d be like, no, they’re just an ally. Now it actually is useful, because I’m like, oh, you’re straight, cool. You’re a straight person who says “partner.” No gay people say that anymore.
Thank you both so much for being here with me today.
Colyar: It was such a delight.
Sow: Thank you for having us.
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This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Vishakha Darbha. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin and Jasmine Romero. Mixing by Isaac Jones. Video editing by Jan Kobal and Arpita Aneja. The postproduction manager is Mike Puretz. Original music by Pat McCusker, Isaac Jones and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Video is Jonah M. Kessel. The deputy director of Opinion Shows is Alison Bruzek. The director of Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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