What We're Really Saying When We Say “Fuck You”

Friends, something has been sitting wrong with me for a while: the phrase "fuck you" (or "go fuck yourself"), and those political buttons that say "Fuck (whatever party you can't stand)." I want to explain why. If you have teens at home, you probably hear lines like "We're gonna fuck the other team tonight" or "We're gonna screw them tonight" fairly often. (No? Okay, then it's only that rowdy around here 😉. Well, not here, obviously. At friends of friends' houses.)

Phrases like "That's SICK good" can be irritating now and then, too, and so can kids using a word like "retarded" as an intensifier. We could probably write whole dissertations about those. Can teens say "sick" or "retarded" when they mean it as a compliment? Or is it simply about using a word for something it was never meant to describe, so it would be better to use it only in the context it was meant for? See? We could tie our brains in knots over this stuff.  

Fuck you: What's that supposed to mean, literally?

What has bugged me for a long time, though, is how freely the word FUCK gets attached to anything someone doesn't like. Maybe it's one politician, a party, nuclear power, or whatever else the person wearing it on a shirt, a pin, or a mug despises.

Take "Fuck Nzs" (as in Nazis) as an example. Read literally, it wishes sex on those people. And since that obviously isn't meant to be nice, but nasty, doesn't that mean sex is being used here as a stand-in for violence, for "doing something to someone"? And I just hate that. So, so much. Does anyone else think about that when they see these slogans?

Sex should be something positive

For people I don't like, or people whose hateful views really test my patience, I do not wish sex. Sex is supposed to be something wonderful, something consensual, something intimate. That's why it turns my stomach when the word gets used in this aggressive way. Like violence. Like something invasive, one-sided, punishing.

Even "go fuck yourself" is, if you take it literally, just a call to masturbate, so why is it used in such negative contexts? And "We're gonna f*** the other team" is meant as: we're going to take them apart, we're going to finish them, we're going to beat them, we won't give them a chance. So what's lurking underneath that, subconsciously? Rape has been used, and still is used, as a weapon of war. Could that be where this comes from?

No abuse of power, please

I think we should all take a moment to think about this. Not because I'm a total stickler who weighs every single word, but because I honestly find it awful how casually sex gets portrayed as invasive violence, again and again. So much abuse of power is wrapped up in that.

And because I don't wish sex on people I don't like. Not the invasive kind (definitely not, not for anyone!), and not the nice kind either. To me, "Don´t f*ck Nzs" would fit so much better, because we don't want them to enjoy themselves.

What do you think? And do you talk to your teens about this kind of thing? When you hear "We're gonna screw them tonight," do you ask whether they want to sleep with the other players, and just take it literally? Or how do you handle it?