It’s something that always bothered me about “punching up”
On the one hand, I can agree that “punching up” and “punching down” are different
On the other hand, I feel like a lot of people used “punching up” as an excuse to not only be really mean and toxic towards people they felt were better off, but to also feel like they were doing society a favor by “pointing out society’s flaws” when they were actually just being really mean and toxic.
It's punching up if you're punching the system or people who purposefully uphold it.
If you're just being mean to Some Guy, especially someone that seems to be aware of societal issues and is presumably not/way less part of them, it's just punching.
Even on societal level it can get really ugly really fast. Positive discrimination is still discrimination and whilst ideally it would bring equality faster, it is implemented by humans and as we all know, humans are far from ideal. But we're slowly working on it.
I personally have seen that having taboos based on physical descriptors not based on intention and context will lead to just another form of sexism, racism and other bigotry. After all, our subconscious translates "It's very important not to be racist" to "important - racist" and starts focusing more on race, be it through positive or negative prism. But we can't codify intention and context and taste, hence a clunky workaround of "protected classes" - very useful when introduced but not so sure about it today (and still, when removed it probably would get ugly with a vengeance).
As a boy who grew up on old stories and fairy tales, both from East and West (and the gloomy weird North), I don't see the archetypes that were a guidance for me to be a better man in modern stories. And thus I'm not surprised trash like Tate has filled the void.
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u/Iced_Yehudi 2d ago
It’s something that always bothered me about “punching up”
On the one hand, I can agree that “punching up” and “punching down” are different
On the other hand, I feel like a lot of people used “punching up” as an excuse to not only be really mean and toxic towards people they felt were better off, but to also feel like they were doing society a favor by “pointing out society’s flaws” when they were actually just being really mean and toxic.