Listen up fuckos, we’re almost a decade in to the 21st century and it’s time to start focussing on real problems. We need to listen to Sir Hicks and sort out this food/air deal before debating the finer points of butthurt.

I’m talking about this bit of nonsense. KFC have sponsored Australian cricket since 2003. Unsurprisingly, their ads during the cricket have involved Australian players, bad jokes about cricket (really bad jokes) and obnoxious voice-overs of real footage. That’s corporate advertising for you.

Australians can instantly see that the ad is in no way racist. Americans see black people and fried chicken together and their hackles immediately rise. “They have a tendency to think that their history is more important than that of other countries,” says Brendon O’Connor, an associate professor at the University of Sydney.

This isn’t just an American problem however, butthurt remains a pressing concern in other hotspots of mental dissonance. Take the response of some Muslims to the cartoons of Muhammad as an example.

People died over this image.

Or what about this flaming butthurt. In the 2010 census US citizens will have the racial choice of “Black, African Am., or Negro,” because “there are still people who prefer to use it to identify themselves.” Sounds fair enough to me, but no!

“I don’t think my ancestors would appreciate it in 2010,” says Pamela Reese Smith, a 56-year-old. I struggle to draw meaning from this sentence. Is she saying that the mouldy corpses of her ancestors, if dug up and asked their opinion, would not appreciate the use of the word? Or is she saying that, back when her ancestors were alive, if you’d told them we’d still be using the word negro in 2010, they wouldn’t appreciate it? I really don’t know and frankly I couldn’t care less. Why should we care about what some long-dead people think about a current situation? This is butthurt on behalf of the buried!

Even France is getting in on the collective insanity, with a proposed bill that would fine Muslim women 750 Euros for wearing the full veil in public. This is plain wrong-thinking. Fully-veiled women are instigators of butthurt for both the right (ostensibly for ‘security reasons’) and the left (as a symbol of Islamic oppression of women.) But legislation against a facet of a culture that desperately requires integration is obviously not the way to go.

“Not to mention that all it’s likely to do is imprison the women in their own homes. In the ‘husband/father/family makes them wear the burka’ scenario, it’s highly unlikely that they will turn around and say ‘oh fair enough! Off you go, then, just take it off and pop on a nice pair of jeans and a sweater.’ ” Kat Milazzo speaking truth.

This bullshit has to stop. There are more important things to worry about than working out who is the biggest butthurt victim. Everyone has their reasons for butthurt, all of them to do with past incidents – horrible genocides or mundane insults as they may be, allowing yourself to be offended is like pandering to self-pity and a sick sense of entitlement to self-pity.

Laugh it off. Isn’t your own belief structure strong enough to withstand a cartoon, a word, a piece of clothing, bare skin, an emotion in someone else’s head? It should be. African-Americans turned the word nigger around, mostly.

What if black people started wearing swastikas? Would that simply be offensive to Jews? Or would Hitler perhaps not appreciate it in 2010?