i've only seen it in the tags just once, but because it happens every time i mention strabismus jokes, i want to preemptively say:
this joke when it appears in media is not usually just "hey this person has a weird eye" it's "hey this person is disabled", specifically, 99% of the time, "this person is intellectually disabled and either has or potentially has brain damage". (alternatively, rarely, "this person is mentally ill", such as fiddleford mcgucket and his glass eye, and a handful of cartoon villains i saw growing up for some reason)
strabismus jokes are not harmful because they "wrongly associate strabismus with stupidity", they are harmful because they are making fun of disabled people, especially intellectually disabled people and people with brain damage, who often do have strabismus, because many congenital and neurological conditions cause strabismus, intellectual disability, developmental disability, and cognitive disability. so while they think our eyes "look funny", that is only part of it
the strabismus jokes i see are generally about exotropia or esotropia. i see them on tv in comedy skits, i see them in cartoons both new and old, i see them in just random peoples's fucking art, i see them in reaction images often, i see them in memes often, i see them in emojis in discord servers, i see them in new media like fionna and cake (candy queen) and dungeon meshi (most notably marcille's "if i'm not useful to anyone" scene, laios, and an orc are all portrayed with exotropia as a joke at least once.)
there is a tv tropes term for this: fish eyes. and another! comically cross-eyed. the second even mentions this:
"In Real Life strabismus is a serious condition and poking fun of it is likely to offend some people, as it's a relatively common disorder. Despite this it's still an Acceptable Target in most circles, and mockery of strabismus is surprisingly common even in modern media."
but why are we considered an acceptable target? is it so normalized to make fun of people with visible differences, especially facial differences, that you need someone on a condemned social media platform to tell you it's not ok?
how do you "not know" that people with strabismus exist? stop putting that on my post. how could you not read between the lines when you see characters take a blow to the head and suddenly become cross eyed, speaking and walking like they're drunk? when things fall out of their hands and they drool? i always remember patrick going "wall eyed" and drooling and spongebob snapping his fingers. how could you not see what was being made fun of? did you not have disabled kids in your schools? have you never seen people with strabismus outside, even though there's at least 13 million of us? i just can't wrap my head around it- how could you "not know"?
someone i know recently said that people with visible disabilities are so hyper-visible that we've become "invisibilized". inconsequential. i'm hidden in my house and a shadow at my mother's heels, a flea bitten bad dog who does not speak unless i'm spoken to, does not try to take or want more than i have been graciously offered, and does not challenge the way things are
i refer back to the ugly laws- that unless we were there for the purpose of entertainment (jokes, inspiration porn, "feel good" stories that dehumanize us and shower praise upon able bodied people for being so kind as to take care of us or to take us to prom or to dance with us or to fucking... take us to a strip club, because we are also desexualized, and degendered, rendered entirely fucking inhuman and only existing for able bodied consumption, even in our day to day irl interactions) or reminding people to be repulsed by us (horror, villains, "undesirable" characters like loser nerds or stalkers), we were not to be seen in public.
this is also a call to like, think about what you're seeing and what's being depicted and what's being implied by what you're seeing depicted. think about what's being implied by marcille with her wide apart eyes and her childish voice and limited vocabulary. who might sound like that? who might look like that?
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