How a vulgar joke became normalized—and why it’s worth questioning.
Question: people who call them “beef curtains” why do you call them this and have you ever offended anyone using this term?
There are phrases in our cultural language that start as jokes, spiral into slang, and eventually settle in a place where people repeat them without stopping to ask—“Why do we say this? Who gets hurt by it?” The term “beef curtains” is one of those.
It comes from the same corner of the internet and locker room culture that gave us “fart box,” “clam,” “wizard sleeve,” and countless other metaphors for human anatomy. It’s humor wrapped in absurdity, but also drenched in judgment. People often use it for a laugh, but few realize how deeply it reduces something intimate, tender, and uniquely human into a joke about meat.
And the truth is this: every time language like this is used in a casual way, it subtly reinforces the idea that women’s bodies are up for commentary. It takes something personal and turns it into spectacle. Sure, it might not offend everyone—and some people lean into it with self-deprecating humor or reclaimed boldness—but it does reveal what we’re conditioned to laugh at and what we’re trained not to question.
One man shared how he used the term toward a woman he regularly partied with. She laughed sometimes, but also reacted defensively. That alone is the red flag we should all listen to: if your words get a different response depending on the moment, then maybe they were never truly harmless.
Slang like this often survives not because it’s clever, but because it lets us hide behind humor to avoid the discomfort of vulnerability. We can joke about anatomy instead of appreciating it. We can call someone “beef curtains” rather than acknowledging the layers of identity, desire, history, and pain carried in those parts of the body.
The better question to ask isn’t “have you offended anyone?” but: “Why did we need this term in the first place?”
Maybe it’s time we retire the language that reduces people to punchlines. Or at the very least, get curious about what it says about us when we keep using it.
Leave a Reply