Okay. Thinking out loud over here.

Had a discussion with a friend the other day about principles. We have a common friend who is on some spectrum and kinda...impulsive at times. As in, making shitty/mean jokes or comments that, if this common friend would stop and think about it, would realize are at a minimum rude and at worst sexist.

My friend is very principled in her action, in that she has a strict set of morals that she abides by at all times. She thinks any kind of objectifying behaviour is uncalled for and hurtful. And she does not want to be around people who she considers hurtful or toxic. And if someone acts sexist or misogynistic, this means that they probably are one or at least hold those kinds of ideas. When you combine the three, it means that she therefore does not want to be around anyone who has acted sexist / misogynistic / objectifying.

Which I think is perfectly reasonable. But because she is quite strict in her moral compass, and has difficulty trusting people, she has a very low tolerance for any behaviour that doesn't jive with her principles, and she takes her principles quite far in my opinion (e.g. feeling hurt whenever someone whistles at her or looks at her with prying eyes). So in practice, and exaggerating for dramatic effect, it means she's hurt by every impulsive comment our common friend says, ergo cannot be in the same room together because she doesn't want to be around toxic people.

Which has led to us deciding to break up a group so that she is no longer in the same time/place as our common friend, even though it is impulsive behaviour that in my opinion just needs time to improve. She also mentioned to me that she felt offended by a joke I made, which was basically a "that's what she said" joke about someone else's poor phrasing. And she said that it made her worry whether I might be someone to chuck in the bad-person-avoid-them-forever-bucket. (Despite us having a 2+ hour discussion of gender roles in modern society just a few days earlier.)

And that puts me on edge? Because it sounds to me like such a hard line to draw in the sand, in an "you're either with us or against us" kind of way. I know enough people with far, far less favorable views of women that I don't want to be grouped with. And such a hardline position doesn't jive with my pragmatism, which puts "let's play some fun games with a large group" over "you want to avoid the occasional dick joke". On the one hand I get where she's coming from. But on the other hand I feel like her trust in me not being a bad person is razor-thin and easily bruised. I feel like I am one bad pun away from being tarred, feathered and outcast, despite her knowing me and my views for quite some while now. So I kinda think that that is her problem, not mine.

But maybe I'm wrong, I dunno.