So we're just calling things gay and r*tarded now?
On morality fatigue, performative cigarettes, and the pendulum swinging the other way.
If in 2020, you used the word “homeless” instead of “unhoused,” you would’ve been canceled. If you stumbled over the pronunciation of a foreign name, you’d be accused of a microaggression. Assume a woman is taking her husband’s last name? Blatant sexism. But in 2026, the kids are saying gay and retarded again. Not behind closed doors, like in public, and on the internet, like it’s 2002. “That’s so gay” and “you’re retarded” and most often used “that’s gay AND retarded.” I’m feeling nostalgic and deeply uncomfortable. So it’s got me thinking about why, after years of millennials working tirelessly to remove these words from our vocabularies, is the pendulum swinging the other way.
I’ve been turning it over in my mind for quite a while and I have my own theories. I think the reason why young people are casually using slurs again is the same reason why cigarettes are back, clean girl aesthetic is out, and skinnytok is on the rise. In the 90s, I remember kids being radicalized to harass our parents to stop smoking. I was so traumatized by learning about how cigarettes kill, with images of black, rotting lungs seared into my brain. I would come home every day crying to my mother to put down the Marlboro Reds because I was terrified she was going to die. And it worked... kinda. She pretended that she quit smoking for five years and just hid it from us instead, but then she did eventually quit. As I got older, social cigs became my vice. They still are. But it became more and more taboo to smoke them in public. I remember going outside of a bar in 2019 to smoke a cigarette and being the only one not puffing on an electronic device. In that moment, I thought give it five years, and it’ll be cool and retro to smoke cigarettes again. Now, I can’t scroll my Instagram Reels without someone on my screen puffing on a cig for likes. Mind you, they don’t even seem to be inhaling, but that’s another story.
Clean girl is out, mob wife is in. Or at least it was for a short while. I knew these midwestern girls couldn’t commit to the bit. My culture is not your costume, honey! And I’m not going to beat a dead horse about how we went from body acceptance and healthy at any size to everyone looking like they’re about to snap in half due to malnourishment. I drone on about that enough on here.
Living through 2020 felt like one giant witch hunt, where everyone was afraid to say, do, think, or post the wrong thing. When I think back, I don’t even remember worrying about the pandemic itself, but rather the social tension and the impacts of not being morally perfect. I laugh now, thinking about how I posted a black square on my Instagram. Not because I thought it was a helpful thing to do, but because I was worried about how people might react if I didn’t.
This is why, in my humble opinion, it pays to just be normal, to be moderate, to not police every word or action you don’t agree with. Because the pendulum is always going to swing the other mothafuckin way. I mean, Catholicism is on the rise, have you heard?
As a society, we must be experiencing some sort of morality fatigue. And when you combine that with the velocity at which our trend cycles are spinning, you get 25-year-olds calling each other retards, I guess? After years of being afraid to misgender people, use a plastic straw, enjoy the wrong celebrity’s music, want to lose 5 pounds, or eat anything that’s not certified organic non-GMO, maybe we’ve all just said fuck it.
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I'm in that weird inbetween space, at least age wise, where I vaguely remember heroin chic and cigarettes but mostly because of how my mom worried about those things affecting me. While I'm glad we've toned PC down a tad, it also scares me a little how we're back to praising EDs. I guess my mom was right to worry about me, because my body image has already taken a huge hit since we started cosplaying the 2000s online...
MY CULTURE IS NOT YOUR COSTUME, HUNNY. (Also, agree with you on all of THIS, what else is new, I always do)