While many young people across the country are becoming desensitized to language on the Internet, many BYU students still find slurs offensive.
A recent study by the Associated Press and MTV showed teens and college-age youth are more likely to use offensive slurs in texts and online sites like Facebook . Racial slurs and other pejoratives seem to lose their sting in the ears of teens if they’re typed rather than spoken.
Bronwen Hale, a psychology major from Leesburg, Va., said she doesn’t encounter offensive language often online and tries to avoid it.
“I do see it as very demeaning,” Hale said. “Sometimes I feel like I don’t see everything there because I don’t want to.”
In the study, many said it’s OK to jokingly use such slurs around friends because no harm is meant. However, when asked if they were offended by slurs, a significant minority of the 14-to-24-year-old people interviewed said they were offended by such language, especially if they identified with the group associated with a certain slur.
Ben Dearden, an English major from Belmont, Mass., said he has lived in Utah and Massachusetts and had varied experiences with offensive terms in both states.
“It’s funny because I wouldn’t say either of them is any better or worse about being offensive on the Internet, it’s just that they do it in different ways,” Dearden said. “In Massachusetts, which is a more liberal state, there’s no gay-bashing or anything, that’s not something you do even online, even, like joking. Whereas in Utah I see that more.”
Four out of 10 young people overall surveyed in the AP-MTV study said they encounter the N-word being used against other people, half of those seeing it often.
“The thing about people online is a lot of the time they’re looking for a reaction,” Dearden said.
Tyler Scholes, a political science major from Broomfield, Colo., said he frequently sees all sorts of offensive remarks on the Internet.
“It happens pretty much every day and it’s really annoying,” Scholes said. “Being online gives them some kind of testosterone boost.”
Scholes said he noticed community attitudes often create situations which invite such comments.
“I used to live in Wyoming, and it happened all the time,” Scholes said. “People there were very conservative, anyone who’s different was ostracized from the community.”
Of those surveyed, 75 percent thought slurs against women were meant to be funny.
Hale, who encountered a group of girls addressing each other in a derogatory way as a joke while at school in Beijing, said she never found it funny.
“I had a friend…she and her friends would refer to each other that way, sort of affectionately, and it was kind of a group term,” Hale said. “When we started to become really close friends she talked about how that was a characteristic of the group that she didn’t particularly like and for me it always resonated wrong. And what it’s doing, honestly, is it’s normalizing this prostitution culture, trying to make it sort of OK when it’s absolutely not.”
Scholes said he thought it was wrong for men to refer to women in derogatory ways.
“Don’t do it, it’s not classy at all, it just shows that you’re an idiot,” Scholes said.
Hale and Scholes both suggested the possibility that many who use such slurs are ignorant of the meaning behind the offensive words.
“Basically it comes down to people who don’t understand the severity of what they’re saying,” Scholes said.
