This Party Sucks
A few months back, some folks decided to invoke The Guiding Spirits of Our Founding Fathers by holding political protests in symbolic invocation of the Boston Tea Party. They showed up carrying signs, had noisy speakers make noisy speeches, waved some tea bags around, and in some cases, threw said tea bags into nearby bodies of water.
So far, so normal. Public life in America. Could have happened in any decade of the last couple of hundred years.
But… it turned out there was a small cultural misunderstanding. There are some divergent strands in U.S. culture these days, and as the culture fragments, communication “cross-strand” becomes difficult due to linguistic drift.
Thus, some of the people with the tea bags began to call themselves “tea baggers”; and they started calling their protest efforts “tea bagging”.
Hilarity ensued, because of the the fact that “tea bag” (as a verb) already had a well-established sexual connotation in popular slang. A fact of which the “new” tea baggers appeared to be blissfully ignorant.
I was reminded of all of this when I saw a certain t-shirt. Wouldn’t this shirt have been the very perfect thing to wear to one of those protests?
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=3944
Ummmm…. No. Lefty pundits (who were well aware of the gay slur connotation of “tea bagging”) stared calling Tea Party attendees “tea-baggers”. The first to do so appears to have been Little Miss Nasty herself, Jeanane Garolofo.
“Tea Party” protesters have generally referred to to themselves as “tea partiers”.
Actually, it was political opponents of the tea party folks who started using the “tea bagger” label, to help deride the protesters. The people who have organized and participated in those protests generally find it offensive and wish that others would stop calling them that. They use the phrase “tea partier.”
First of all, I went to enormous lengths in drafting that post to avoid identifying individuals, organizations, or factions by name or ideology, because this is not that kind of blog. Not Saying, you did an excellent job of matching that effort, and it’s appreciated. Future commenters would do well to emulate you.
That said, the suggestion that the tea partiers (to use the the term they eventually settled on) did not use “tea bag” (as a verb), “tea bagging” and so on in apparent innocence of the sexual meaning is quite perfectly false. It’s true that once the sexual connotations became widely known in their circles, they stopped using these phrasings, and began complaining bitterly about the journalists and bloggers who continued to do so in mockery of them; but they definitely used these phrases in this way themselves.
Of course this is tricky to demonstrate without surfing a ton of Youtube videos, but just a few moments with Google turned up this Fox News segment discussing one of the prominent “tea partier” websites, and reporting a web headline urging supporters to “Teabag the Whitehouse!” (It’s about at the 2-minute mark.) A similar headline (“Tea Bag the Fools in D.C.”) from the same organization is still on the web and it can be found here with a February 27 URL and an April 1 date:
http://www.rete...arty/
Note that the media mockery seems to have begun with MSNBC’s David Schuster about two weeks later, on April 13.
Any broad statements about what large groups like “lefty pundits” or “tea partiers” are aware of a almost certainly wrong. On both sides, some surely knew. With divisive issues it is easy for otherwise rational people to tell themselves that the other side is SO ignorant they are just making fools of themselves. But when you stand out in the cold for a few hours with a sign that, upon reflection, isn’t that clever after all…. well most people start to have a sense of humor about themselves.
But seriously — teabags? Loose tea is cheaper and more appropriate to those trying to recall the famous patriots.
I hope that “Tech Reader” will take the time to write back with some dated documentation crediting Janeane with initiating the use of the entendre term referring to the tea crowd.
Participants VERY early on referred to THEMSELVES as “tea-baggers”. I still have old e-mails from one of them (using the term), urging me to join them in an area gathering. I also got a follow-up phone call shortly thereafter from this person, querying if I was aware of the slang meaning of the term, because this person’s brother had just pointed out the ironic double meaning to them. I believe I may have lost a few “points” with this individual for not warning them.
Dr. Whiplash, I think I’ve already contributed enough documentation tedium to this thread. Demands for documentation are one of the signatures of dreary debate on that other sort of blog that this isn’t.
But I do thank you for the anecdotal support; it matches my own internal narrative, which is one of early enthusiasm for the tea-bagger lexicon by many of the partiers and their supporters, followed by a sudden and sharp repudiation (and even “we never said that” denials) once more culturally-aware folk had explained the mistake.
well, next year it may say . I gave my balls for this ?
but this t-shirt will be a big hit at the Christmas party
at work , If we have one this year . if not I’ll ware it to
the family reunion . lol
The daily show did a bit a while back on this same topic and it was sooo funny! It was very entertaining to hear all the big guys on fox use the phrase tea baging! You should you tube it:)
As a side note (and this is for your amusement Bacchus because I’ll bet no one else reads this comment now that the post has been out-of-date for awhile), I worked in a Congressional office during that time (read: paper monkey), and it took alot of self control to a) not laugh every time some really conservative person called in to brag about “teabagging” the Representative, or being a “teabagger” and b)tell them what it was they were actually saying. We were highly entertained for a good month before everyone stopped calling about it.