Originally a comment by Artymorty on An unusually crass opinion.

I’m of the mind that crass language and blunt, confrontational talk is a great tool for smashing bullshit. Too often, people use politeness and euphemism as a shield to hide behind, as deflection to avoid responsibility. When confronted with blunt reality it’s often a lot harder for people to avoid facing their complicity in bad things. I see it in office culture all the time, and I can’t stand it. Bureaucracies love euphemism and they hate bluntness. Especially bureaucracies that are propping up bad things.

In the 2000s, for example, it was euphemism and politeness that enabled unscrupulous financiers to repackage and sell junk mortgage debt: they danced around the blunt facts with pretty language, and by 2008 the ruse collapsed and nearly brought down the global economy with it. It was the pretty language that those bad mortgages were packaged in that gave everyone all up and down the financial chain of command permission to look the other way for so many years, even as many individuals within the system had surely, privately, caught on that it was a scam. More than a year before the subprime mortgage fiasco began to unravel, Harper’s magazine ran a cover story with blunt language, exposing the whole thing. But of course, finance bros don’t read Harper’s. If only more industry insiders were more plainspoken about the scam earlier on, if only they’d been more crass and called those financial instruments what they were — bullshit for suckers — all that financial destruction and the human suffering it caused might have been prevented.

I come from poor neighbourhoods, and I feel like an outsider in environments that fetishize politeness to the point of ignoring higher principles. If I worked in law, I’d be more like Erin Brockovich than, say, Barack Obama.

With respect to the transgender mess, the legal system could do with a whole lot more blunt talk, Erin Brockovich-style, to shake some sense into those cowardly, complicit phonies. This issue really comes down to men’s genitals and men’s sexual entitlement.

When I see people get outraged over crude language even when it’s being deliberately deployed to call attention to more fundamental, higher-order problems, I immediately suspect it’s because the crude language is hitting them in a sensitive spot, and it’s about to uncover a hypocrisy they don’t want to face. I’ve been the one calling bullshit bluntly to people who don’t want to hear it, more than once.

When judges panic about crude language around penises, maybe it’s because they can’t face the fact that they’ve been complicit in allowing those penises in places they absolutely shouldn’t be.