The comments on the articles (especially the R&I ones) are a warzone, ranging from “route names are sacred art” to “anything that’s even a little offensive should go”.  I know where I stand on most route names, but I also know that I am a cis-het-white-male and that’s a group that definitely shouldn’t be entrusted with setting the bar for what’s offensive (historically, we’re bad at it, to say the least).  In a small attempt to get an understanding where the lines might be, I picked 40 39 routes that I’ve done, attempted, or that kept coming up in articles, and made a poll. Not context, just a name, and buttons for keep or replace.  Additionally, I allowed respondents to select what categories names fell into: vulgar/crude, racist, mis-ist/sexist, and x-phobic. Pick as many as you feel it belongs in.  I posted the poll to Reddit 3-4 times in the span of a week, and got 58 responses.  Raw Data

NOTE: Stop back tomorrow for a follow-up article where I collate as much information as I can on the contextorigin of the oft-cited offensive names.  Some things are offensive out of context, some are only offensive in context, and some are just in bad taste either way.  It’s an important conversation, but one that would make this article alone much too long.

Mistakes

I made some mistakes. First, I messed up and included Yellow Fever twice. That was compounded because I was going from memory – the route I wanted to reference was Yellow Peril at the White Imperialist crag.  Yellow Fever is either a disease or a fetishising of Asians, and Mountain Project shows at least a half dozen by the name, so I’ll keep it.  All but one respondent marked it the same way both times.  Aunt Jemima’s Thunderdome should have been referred to as Aunt Jemima’s Bisquick Thunderdome. The problem Lara Croft also has issues as the official guidebook calls it Tombraider, but Lara is mentioned in the description, see below. I have additional thoughts on the ways I should have structured the poll differently, but those are thoughts for later work, and are discussed later.

Basic Results

I tried to pick a span of route names to find a way to see trends and make comparisons. It might surprise some looking at the list, but “democratically speaking” (more on that later), 75% had a simple majority of “Keep” votes (with Uncle Tom checking in at exactly 50-50)

A quick snapshot of the names and a few things pop out.  There’s a small bump around Daily Dick Dose where things get beyond a 20% call to go, then somewhere just beyond the 50-50 mark things ramp up steeply.  I’m not going to break out how each of the 39 names here were categorized by each of the 58 responses, but I will provide a link to those:  Categorization as a function of name and other charts.

Trends in Categorization

Of 39 names, only 10 ended up in the same bucket more than half the time:

Vulgar:

Daily Dick Dose – 60%

The Vagina – 55%

Pumped Full of Semen – 64%

Skull Fuck – 57%

Caustic Cock – 52%

Racist:

Black Dudes on Welfare – 84%

Happiness in Slavery – 53%

N****r Leap – 81%

Black Bitches in Heat – 69%

Phobic:

Limp Wristed F****ts – 53%

One failing of this analysis – every possible reason to want to change something was not included. More important, not everything needs a reason.  I’m not a person that thinks you have to have a logical reason for your opinionsfeelings, provided you aren’t hurting anyone else. I say this because what gets lost above are what I will call “orphaned replace” responses, for example:

“Replace & No Category”: 121 entries (14.7% of all ‘Replace’ responses)

Maybe something is just a terrible name, but you can’t put a finger on why, or it doesn’t fit in any of the buckets.  You’ll notice some overlap with the most egregious see above. On average, things were marked as ‘uncategorized replace’ 5% of the time, the below are those marked that way >10% of the time:

Name – Number of ‘Replace’ votes without a category selected

Happiness in Slavery – 9

22 Bottles of Queer on the Wall – 9

N****r Leap – 9

Limp Wristed F****ts – 7

Black Bitches in Heat – 7

Ferrets and F****ts – 6

Harry Butthole Pussy Potter – 6

General Lee – 6

One last bit of trivia before we move on. Six names share the supreme indignity of having at least one vote for each of the 4 categories:  Gay Abandon, Yellow Fever, Aunt Jemima’s Thunderdome, Happiness in Slavery, Squaw’s Tit, and Black Bitches in Heat.

Are Some Categories Considered Worse than Others?

……. Yes.  Breaking down the responses that included a category, it’s obvious the community is split on some things, and not others.  Here are the rates at which respondents voted to replace when each category was tagged, vs when it wasn’t tagged. 

eg : (Replace AND Vulgar) / ( (Keep AND Vulgar) + (Replace AND Vulgar) )

Vulgar: 51.0%

Sexist:  84.9%

Racist:  94.8%

Phobic: 95.5%

These results seem to match the discussion at large – only 1 out of 20 people looked at something and said, “yea, its racist, but it should stay”. Half were comfortable identifying something as crudevulgar but allowing it to remain. Some people like dirty jokes, some don’t, makes sense to me.  Same rules as above apply however – many were marked as ‘replace’ without citing a reason (121 times), a handful were marked as fitting in a category without passing a judgement call on staygo – there were a total of 36 responses that checked “Racist” but neither of the KeepReplace boxes. 

Trends in People

Looking at the overall histogram of how people voted (keep or replace) shows a bimodal distribution – a strong spike for those that voted to keep things 90-100% of the time that they voted, and then a similar mound centered around 50%, with generous handful on either side as well.  This jives with the vocal crowds of “names should be left alone” meeting a more dispersed “some should go” crowd thats still trying to figure out which.

An important caveat, these were calculated as a percentage of replace votes when they responded in the affirmative in either direction. The respondent that marked 100% of routes as “Replace” marked 12 that way, and none as “Keep”.  If we go just by raw number of “Replace” votes, it changes as follows:

Still a group of 6 diehards that say names should never be changed, a few that say they almost all need to go, and majority that’s 50-50 on the names provided.

Curious as to how consistent individuals were, I also broke out histograms for each of the four categories per-person.  Was something being considered sexist always disqualifying, or was there nuance?

 

Them’s some interesting trends there folks. 65% of people, once a name was deemed sexist said it absolutely had to go, full stop.  That climbed to 85 and 86% when names were categorized as racist or phobic, respectively.  I’m not going to editorialize much in this article, but I think this is unfortunate evidence folks don’t take sexism seriously enough.

Vulgar names are a wild bimodal trend.  Clearly, a proportion of people think once something is notably vulgar, its gotta go, a proportion think vulgarity is absolutely fine, and while there are some nuanced stragglers, very few people are in the middle on the names provided.

Poison Words

Some words are just no-go for the majority of people. I try to limit their use in my personal life, but I’d be lying if I said I have never used them – imperfect but largely trying to be better.  If we look at the bottom of the list, the names that most all say need to go, we see a marked shift in the last 6-7, which lean heavily on charged language (Black Bitches, N*****r, F*g, Queer).  There was a solid 10% jump in recommendations to reject between Squaw’s Tit and Happiness in Slavery – a paradigm shift not seen anywhere else in the list. 

One thing to note is the cultural differences in the prevalence of the language, and its offensiveness.  For instance, I won’t claim that works like the “C-bomb” aren’t offensive, but any review of Australian or even British televisionfilm will show them much more liberal with its use than here in the US. Similarly, f*g and f*****t appear just twice in Mountain Project, a predominantly US site, but well over a dozen times on theCrag, another route aggregator.  Closer inspection shows the majority of routes so-named are in either Australia or New Zealand. A similar trend follows for the pejorative use of queer, although that’s used much more liberally on both.  


A Brief Study in Boundaries and Context (Boob Jokes)

I included at least four boulders that made breast references, but I could probably have done a full 40 of “jug” related names.  They ranged from the poetic, Wondrous Cleavage, the tacky, These Feel Like Your Sister’s, and the oblique Lara Croft. The last went a perfect 55-0 on the keepreplace polling.  I feel as if I had given it its proper name, Tombraider, it’d have gotten similar marks. Innocuous as it sounds, the guidebook clearly instructs the climber to move through the “Lara Croft sloper” on the way to the lip.  Its obvious that one can refer to breasts in a whimsical way or a derogatory way, and if anyone wants to feel out where that line is, see below.  Bizarrely, Home of the D Cups was considered crude and sexist by fewer people than Sister’s, but had more folks opting to have it replaced.

	Keep	Replace	Crude	Sexist
Wonderous Cleavage	46	6	29	9
Lara Croft	55	0	2	0
These Feel Like Your Sister’s	40	15	27	16
Home of the D Cups	34	18	19	15

So this is a conundrum in context I will expand on in the follow-up article, but hint at here. Does context matter, knowing that not all climbers will be given the context? If I told you Daily Dick Dose was named for a guy named Richard, does it make you feel better about it? When you find out Clarien was a housemate of the pad where travelling crushers couch surfed before the FA of Clarien’s Cherry, do you feel worse?  

What to Do Different and Closing Thoughts

Since I ran this poll, a bunch of other routes have come to my attention – if I had just waited longer! A rewatch of the film Rewind reminded me of the route Ethnic Cleansing, and a casual Reddit post brought furor over Closet Nazi.

Another has to do with the options offered.  Since I did not require a vote of keep or replace for each (it was my first Google Form!), many responses categorized a name without deciding if it should stay or go. Should the apathy be marked as a vote to keep? Should it be an “I don’t know”? It happened 54 times for routes marked “Crude/Vulgar” alone.

Randomization of the display order of names would have been a better metric as well.  Its not clear whether having seen a bunch of other names first sensitizes or desensitizes the average respondent.

A broader base would have been nice as well – 58 responses is a drop in the bucket compared to the millions of climbers, and that’s 58 people who happened to stumble into the Reddit daily threads that week.  If one of the major players wants to use this as a springboard to reach a larger audience and do similar research, by all means do so.  Just be very weary of echochambers – if theres a debate raging on a subject but you can’t identify anyone in ‘your circle’ that’s on the side opposite you, chances are your circle isn’t big enough.

One last item I am much more torn on. Some suggested it, but in doing this, I took no demographic data on those answering the poll. I did not want to open the door for discounting someone’s opinions if they are or aren’t members of the slighted class – you don’t have to be a woman to recognize misogyny.