Do you get easily offended?

AskMen.com has an article on this topic which has been disCUSSed much here on Bits & Pieces.

Here are some excerpts:

what do people get offended about?
Everything and nothing
You name it, it will offend someone . With my luck, I’ll be at a party complaining about traffic (a topic you’d think most people could agree on), only to find I’m talking to the one guy who works for the department of transportation. Does he say: “Yes, traffic is bad, we’re working on it,” or just laugh along with the others? No. He goes off on me for two hours about how I don’t understand the complexity of the problem.

“Personal reasons”
Let’s face it: I can’t know everything about you. If I had known that your sister lost her eye opening a champagne bottle, I probably wouldn’t have made that joke. But I didn’t know. There’s always some guy out there who becomes outraged for personal reasons (even when your comments couldn’t possibly be construed as malicious) or who gets upset for someone else (even when he isn’t personally offended).

Touchy topics
Sex, relationships, racism, religion, death, and politics are all serious topics, and they’re all guaranteed one-way tickets to offending someone, and that’s too bad. We should be able to talk about these things, but the guys who are easily offended when someone offers a different point of view stifle the conversation. And for the record, teasing someone about losing a relative is mean, but making a joke about death isn’t taboo because, let’s face it, it happens to everyone.

take it easy
Don’t jump the gun
You might have guessed by now that I’ve offended more than my share of people. But I’ll tell you what almost never happens: I seldom get to finish my thought. My advice to those who are busy drafting their angry responses while reading this is to chill. Take a second and ask yourself if perhaps you’re being a little too sensitive, and therefore missing the point.

Find a middle ground to react
Disagreeing with someone is par for the course in life. But telling another guy what he can and cannot say goes too far. If you disagree, wait for him to finish and then react logically and sensibly to his ideas. Don’t just bark out your own notions of what guys should and shouldn’t say.

Read things in context
Remember that not everything that is written or said is directed specifically at you; it’s usually for the public at large. Everything happens within a context, even your reaction. It’s the context that shapes the meaning of a statement. So consider, among other things, who the statement was directed at, what came before it and the speaker’s perspective.

Have a sense of humor about it
Just because you laugh at a joke doesn’t mean you agree with its content. I love the movie Caddyshack, but I don’t find any redeeming aspects to the game of golf.

Ignore it
If all else fails, it sometimes pays to simply ignore the comment. Life is too short to argue with everyone over every little thing. You’ve got better things to do… I hope. My advice is to try to let things slide. If they’re really so bad, don’t lend them credibility by talking about them.

in the end
Despite the topic of this article, I’m going to go out on a limb and wager that the overly sensitive crowd is in the minority. It’s just that they’re a vocal minority. Have I been offended before? On occasion. What did I do? Unless I knew it was specifically directed at me, I didn’t do anything. And I think that’s what most of us would do.

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