When a conversation becomes WHO IS GARBAGE: THE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP TO FINALLY DECIDE WHO IS FUCKING GARBAGE (IT’S YOU) (NO, IT’S YOU) (NO, SHUT UP, YOU ARE THE GARBAGE) then no-one ever gets to just be wrong. Not “wrong because you are a piece of shit” (which no-one ever agrees to). Not “wrong because you are stupid and/or crazy” (which no-one will ever agree to). Not “wrong and therefore you should disappear because you can never change your mind or contribute anything of value or be defined by anything other than the fact that you were wrong” (which no-one should ever agree to; that shit is abusive). Just plain, simple, everyday wrong. “Sorry I told you Denise’s party was on Saturday — it is actually on Friday” levels of wrong. Human wrong. In possession of bad or incomplete information. Forming inaccurate judgments, and re-forming them in response to new circumstances and events. That kind of wrong, the kind everyone is, many times.

So let’s say that you’re a great person, and a talented comedian, and you’re wrong about a joke. You work hard to be funny. You don’t intentionally hurt people. You have empathy. I know you do, because even if you completely closed off when I mentioned sexual assault, even if you instantly put yourself on guard against my SJW preaching, when you read the phrase “microwaved a cat,” it made you tear up, or it made you nauseous, or you had to take a few breaths to settle down. You felt pain there, because in the absence of politics and pre-rehearsed arguments and everything you think you think, your brain kicked in and forced you to feel the pain of another living thing. That pain, believe it or not, is wonderful; it’s tangible proof, if you ever need it, that you are not a fundamentally bad person. The primal instinct at the heart of all kindness and justice exists in you. Yet you told that joke, and it was fucked up. It really, really was. You were wrong about that one.

Because I can’t really soft-pedal this part: If you tell a joke to the effect of “I raped her and it is hilarious,” you’re wrong. If you tell a joke that goes “all Latina women are crazy” or “all black men are criminals,” you are wrong. If your joke is “here is how all gay men speak and behave, which is weird” or if it is “transgender women are men,” you are just not correct, buddy. You don’t know what you don’t know. It’s making you wrong today. Again: For the purposes of this argument, you are not bad. You are simply not right about this. Like you were wrong about where you put your car keys this morning, you were wrong about this joke.

There are a few reasons why this is an easier way to process bad joke decisions. For one thing, admitting to this kind of wrong is (unless you are ridiculously egotistical) harmless. It’s not your human value on the line. It’s not even your intelligence. You thought you had to turn left on Broad Street to get to the restaurant; actually, you needed to turn right. It’s a pain in the ass to turn back around, but your family won’t disown you for it. If you hurt anyone, deal with it — your friend has been waiting for 30 minutes in that damn restaurant; text her to say you’re sorry and that you got turned around — but otherwise, just fix it by being right.

Also: once we’ve established that everyone in this conversation has value, it’s a lot easier to talk about why you’re wrong. You’re not wrong just because you hurt other people, although you may have. (Again, simple solution here: “Got turned around, headed in right direction now, sorry for inconvenience.”) Being wrong hurts the people in the wrong. It hurts them in ways they don’t expect, and in ways they can’t fix. It can be devastating.

Because sooner or later, a guy who believes that all black men are criminals is going to shoot an unarmed black man. It happens. All. The. Time. The white guy who believes they’re “just words” and that people are being “too sensitive” about them is going to throw an N-bomb at a black person in anger. A white woman who thinks all Latina women are crazy is going to hurt her Latina girlfriend’s feelings and then tell everyone she’s being crazy; a dude who thinks all gay guys are the same, and therefore weird, is going to refuse to hire a guy who “seems gay” in the interview; the feminist who thinks trans women are men is going to accuse one of planning to rape her when she’s just trying to use the bathroom.

The guy who laughs and chants rape jokes before every party is going to rape somebody. Maybe in the precise way his favorite rape joke envisioned. Maybe there’s something wrong with him — hell, there’s clearly something wrong with him — but this isn’t Charles Manson deciding that a song about a fucking park slide is predicting the End Times. This is a kid hearing grown men laugh about rape, and deciding rape is funny. One is a bizarre delusion. One is a logical outcome.

You didn’t make them do it. You didn’t tell them what to do. There are a million other prejudicial messages and ideas floating through the air, and there are a million structures giving those prejudices credibility and power — any one of those moments has a thousand causes, and also only one cause, which is that someone decided to do it. Maybe you didn’t even mean for your joke to relay those messages — maybe you were trying for something more subtle, or you didn’t know that one word had an ugly history, or whatever, and you just screwed up in communicating your point, like the best of us do from time to time. And maybe everyone else who heard your joke is a wonderful and completely bias-free person who’s never done anything oppressive, though I doubt it. The world is pretty tangled up in old, bad ideas.

And maybe — here’s where I really stick my neck out; you’re welcome — you’re tangled up, too. Maybe you did think they talked like that, or that you should be able to say that word, or that rape is just a gross thing that happens pretty rarely outside of crime procedurals. I mean, I’m white and straight, and I can’t even forgive you on behalf of all the other white straight ladies, but speaking purely for myself: That could be okay. If you weren’t a woman yourself, you could easily be a good person and just not know certain things. Adam Horovitz didn’t. People don’t know things, until they do. Education was invented for the sole purpose of addressing this well-known human problem. So yeah, you turned the wrong corner, took the wrong train, thought rape was rare: You turned back around once you realized the mistake, right? As long as you get to the right place, we can hang out. If you take the wrong turn and stick to it out of pride until you eventually walk into the ocean, then I worry.

But even if all you do is make them laugh, even if all you do is entertain them, there is that one, lingering problem. There is the power of art to inspire. You don’t want to be the victim of Christopher Archer or someone like him. But even if you were physically safe, could you ever entirely forgive yourself if you knew that you were the voice running through his head? And running, and running, before every party, until the party where the spark hit the gasoline and Christopher Archer got his wonderful, funny idea? Even if you are a good person who happens to be wrong — in fact, because you are a good person who happened to be wrong — I don’t believe you would ever want to be his funniest thing.