AI: Bitch, Please?
By This week, an Australian tea company launched a line of gay-themed teas to benefit LGBT health charities. But with names like Fag Hag and Bitch Please, some of us are wondering whether this hurts the cause more than it helps. It’s great to help charities, and especially health charities. But do they really need to reinforce stereotypes about gay men to do it?
What do you think? Are stereotypically-named teas a good way to raise money for LGBT charities? Did you notice the lack of diversity in the DiversiTea? Where are the lesbian, trans, and bi stereotypes? And what is the best tea out there?
The Afternoon Inqueery (or AI) is a question posed to you, the Queereka community. Look for it to appear Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays at 3pm ET.
I feel particularly bothered by the fag hag thing. It’s just such an alien concept to my life. It brings up negative feelings having to do with women who expected me to fulfill a gay friend stereotype.
On the other hand, I could see having a box of this tea and laughing over the cutesy names, the same way I laughed over the “skin detox” tea I had. The “Disco Ball” tea has mini dissolving disco balls!
Ugh.
Not because I’m necessarily bothered by the language (I believe firmly in reclaiming), but because it’s so trite and lazy. Not to mention further alienating to those who often feel alienated by normative or blanket portrayals of their identities that don’t reflect their experience.
Sounds like pretty standard Mardi Gras stuff. Not my thing, but people will vote with their wallet.
This sort of crap drives me up the wall. I was at a comedy event last night where one of the comedians was a gay man and after coming up with a whole bunch of synonyms for gay men he asked if there were any gays in the audience. Neither my girlfriend or I said anything because we didn’t feel like we fit into what he was talking about beforehand. It was really awkward.
The default queer is always a gay man and that’s all anyone ever thinks about and it needs to fucking stop.
“The default queer is always a gay man and that’s all anyone ever thinks about and it needs to fucking stop.”
Amen!
Ugh. No, I don’t think that stereotypes like this are good ideas, even for charities… maybe especially for charity. It hurts in a special “Even our ALLIES are pulling this shit?” kinda way.
You can have funny names without going for the most obnoxious and least creative names. Fag Hag annoys me the most I think- the concept of a “Fag Hag” in itself is insulting and it doesn’t need to be reinforced. Besides that, everything else is just more gay stereotypes and a few that seem to be sex jokes, so.. not really happy about this.
And really, there are way better names than the ones they came up with. Earl Gay maybe? Faggotea?
Also, I agree with Cynik about it being annoying as hell when only gay men seem to be acknowledged. That said, this tea company forgetting lesbians (and others) existed probably only served to spare us from 5 different tongue jokes.
I have to admit, my best friend and I refer to her as a fag hag sometimes. We find it funny to refer to her that way (and I do mean we, it’s not just something I say). However, it’s not something that I say about other people, and I would never presume that other people are okay with being called that.
I do find this line of tea to be tasteless (pun intended) and slightly offensive. There are certainly better ways to make a line of teas to raise money for queer causes.
I just kind of wonder whether if a blend of tea marketed at the African-American demographic and named ‘Darkie Blend’, or perhaps ‘Nigger Nightcap’ (a more soothing nighttime mix), or perhaps ‘Oy, Oolong’ for the Jewish community, would be considered a reasonable marketing strategy.
Why do I get the feeling that some people think it’s okay to use obnoxious and offensive terms for certain groups of people but not others?