Hi! I'm a US citizen who is late to this party, and also who has lived in another country (on a very small Caribbean island) for over 10 years now. I have noticed the same thing here with adoption of American phrases, but with the twist that the phrases aren't being used for the same thing that Americans use them to mean.
So for instance, "toxic masculinity" became popular here shortly after it became popular in social media and media generally in the USA. But American "toxic masculinity" refers to, I think, a guy at work interrupting female coworkers and being bad at expressing his feelings or something. Here, "toxic masculinity" means something more like a very violent, physically abusive and unfaithful boyfriend. Very occasionally there will be a conversation between an American and a local where the same words are being used, and in the course of the conversation they uncover that they're talking about very different things. But usually, word usage just runs in parallel, with neither speaker apparently being cognizant of each other's different meanings.
I wonder if the international figures of phrase usage you show might hide distinctions like these, as very few cultures are as, ahem, "woke" as US culture is, even if they're using the same American words. In America, "anti-trans" means using the wrong pronouns; in Jamaica, it means someone getting beaten to death. So an article about anti-trans attitudes published in Jamaica might look like it's about the same thing as an American article, but it definitely is not.
Thanks for your input. I suspect the ambiguity behind terms like "transphobia" (which can mean anything from "acknowledging the reality of sexual dimorphism" to calling for trans people to be beaten up with impunity) is entirely intentional, and it's a motte-and-bailey fallacy from top to bottom.
I think that this kind ambiguity might be intentional in American media, but in other places it’s not ambiguous—it’s that the phrases mean different things, with the more benign version not being recognized as a thing at all.
Using the “toxic masculinity” example above, if I described being interrupted by a guy at work as “toxic masculinity” to a non-Western female friend here, she’d just be confused: did I get beat up? No? So then how is that “toxic masculinity”? Guys interrupt women all the time, that’s not violence.
I think that the less woke/progressive/egalitarian a culture is, the harder it will be to imagine a “microaggression” as anything at all, let alone have a word for it. So while American media can elide misgendering with beating under the same heading in a semi-intentional way, I don’t know that it can go in the other direction. And that’s what I’m wondering about in use of woke American phrases in some of the countries you have in graphs: do these phrases mean anything like what they do in the USA other places?
Oh I'm sorry, I see what you're getting at now. So while (for example) progressive Jamaicans might have started using the phrase "toxic masculinity" en masse at around the same time as progressive Americans did, they're really using one term to describe two very different phenomena?
I can only speak to the Irish example, but I'm very confident that when a progressive Irish person uses a term like "racism" or "transphobia", in almost all cases they're using it in exactly the same context as a progressive American would.
Right. It's also my experience that WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) people use progressive terms in an American way. So if I'm talking with an American (or a Canadian, or a European) here, "toxic masculinity" means "a guy who interrupts women a lot or 'mansplains'"--and potentially also implying that that behavior is the greased rails to beating your girlfriend. But if I'm talking with some islanders (or South Americans, or Africans)* "toxic masculinity" means "a guy who is unfaithful to his wife, who he also beats" and really cannot mean anything as benign as being arrogant, or a bad listener.
With the graphs you use, my curiosity on what people around the world mean when they use "woke" phrases is influenced by stuff I've learned from Alice Evans at The Great Gender Divergence (here: https://www.ggd.world/ ). So, a bunch of middle eastern and central Asian countries show the same exponential growth in the usage of these terms starting around 2010, just like you see in the USA and Europe. But these include places where supermajorities *of women* think that men have a right to beat their wives, and that marital rape definitionally cannot exist. It includes places where homosexuality is punished with severe corporal punishment and prison time. It just strikes me that what it means to be "progressive" in, say, Saudi Arabia is real different than what it means in the USA, or Ireland, and as a result you might see the same use of terms, but without the terms meaning the same things.
*Almost half of the adult population of the island I live on is immigrants, from many different countries. So I have coworkers from around the world, on the underlying Caribbean culture of the island itself.
This is a great point. My girlfriend is from a part of the world in which wife-beating and abducting women to force them into marriage are both very common, and early in our relationship she was a bit taken aback when I said that I wasn't feminist. We eventually realised that we were sort of talking past each other, because the term "feminist" means something radically different in Ireland to what it means in her home country. Fortunately for me, at the time she was doing a postgrad course and had to complete one module in "gender justice", so she got to see a lot of the petty insanity of Western feminism firsthand and quickly came to understand why I find it so silly and off-putting.
American here. I still assert that "Black Lives Matter Sinn Fein" (sic) is the funniest thing I've ever seen in politics.
Hi! I'm a US citizen who is late to this party, and also who has lived in another country (on a very small Caribbean island) for over 10 years now. I have noticed the same thing here with adoption of American phrases, but with the twist that the phrases aren't being used for the same thing that Americans use them to mean.
So for instance, "toxic masculinity" became popular here shortly after it became popular in social media and media generally in the USA. But American "toxic masculinity" refers to, I think, a guy at work interrupting female coworkers and being bad at expressing his feelings or something. Here, "toxic masculinity" means something more like a very violent, physically abusive and unfaithful boyfriend. Very occasionally there will be a conversation between an American and a local where the same words are being used, and in the course of the conversation they uncover that they're talking about very different things. But usually, word usage just runs in parallel, with neither speaker apparently being cognizant of each other's different meanings.
I wonder if the international figures of phrase usage you show might hide distinctions like these, as very few cultures are as, ahem, "woke" as US culture is, even if they're using the same American words. In America, "anti-trans" means using the wrong pronouns; in Jamaica, it means someone getting beaten to death. So an article about anti-trans attitudes published in Jamaica might look like it's about the same thing as an American article, but it definitely is not.
Thanks for your input. I suspect the ambiguity behind terms like "transphobia" (which can mean anything from "acknowledging the reality of sexual dimorphism" to calling for trans people to be beaten up with impunity) is entirely intentional, and it's a motte-and-bailey fallacy from top to bottom.
I think that this kind ambiguity might be intentional in American media, but in other places it’s not ambiguous—it’s that the phrases mean different things, with the more benign version not being recognized as a thing at all.
Using the “toxic masculinity” example above, if I described being interrupted by a guy at work as “toxic masculinity” to a non-Western female friend here, she’d just be confused: did I get beat up? No? So then how is that “toxic masculinity”? Guys interrupt women all the time, that’s not violence.
I think that the less woke/progressive/egalitarian a culture is, the harder it will be to imagine a “microaggression” as anything at all, let alone have a word for it. So while American media can elide misgendering with beating under the same heading in a semi-intentional way, I don’t know that it can go in the other direction. And that’s what I’m wondering about in use of woke American phrases in some of the countries you have in graphs: do these phrases mean anything like what they do in the USA other places?
Oh I'm sorry, I see what you're getting at now. So while (for example) progressive Jamaicans might have started using the phrase "toxic masculinity" en masse at around the same time as progressive Americans did, they're really using one term to describe two very different phenomena?
I can only speak to the Irish example, but I'm very confident that when a progressive Irish person uses a term like "racism" or "transphobia", in almost all cases they're using it in exactly the same context as a progressive American would.
Right. It's also my experience that WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) people use progressive terms in an American way. So if I'm talking with an American (or a Canadian, or a European) here, "toxic masculinity" means "a guy who interrupts women a lot or 'mansplains'"--and potentially also implying that that behavior is the greased rails to beating your girlfriend. But if I'm talking with some islanders (or South Americans, or Africans)* "toxic masculinity" means "a guy who is unfaithful to his wife, who he also beats" and really cannot mean anything as benign as being arrogant, or a bad listener.
With the graphs you use, my curiosity on what people around the world mean when they use "woke" phrases is influenced by stuff I've learned from Alice Evans at The Great Gender Divergence (here: https://www.ggd.world/ ). So, a bunch of middle eastern and central Asian countries show the same exponential growth in the usage of these terms starting around 2010, just like you see in the USA and Europe. But these include places where supermajorities *of women* think that men have a right to beat their wives, and that marital rape definitionally cannot exist. It includes places where homosexuality is punished with severe corporal punishment and prison time. It just strikes me that what it means to be "progressive" in, say, Saudi Arabia is real different than what it means in the USA, or Ireland, and as a result you might see the same use of terms, but without the terms meaning the same things.
*Almost half of the adult population of the island I live on is immigrants, from many different countries. So I have coworkers from around the world, on the underlying Caribbean culture of the island itself.
This is a great point. My girlfriend is from a part of the world in which wife-beating and abducting women to force them into marriage are both very common, and early in our relationship she was a bit taken aback when I said that I wasn't feminist. We eventually realised that we were sort of talking past each other, because the term "feminist" means something radically different in Ireland to what it means in her home country. Fortunately for me, at the time she was doing a postgrad course and had to complete one module in "gender justice", so she got to see a lot of the petty insanity of Western feminism firsthand and quickly came to understand why I find it so silly and off-putting.