Me personally? I’ve become much less tolerant of sexist humor. Back in the day, cracking a joke at women’s expense was pretty common when I was a teen. As I’ve matured and become aware to the horrific extent of toxicity and bigotry pervading all tiers of our individualistic society, I’ve come to see how exclusionarly and objectifying that sort of ‘humor’ really is, and I regret it deeply.
Gay is one of the most useful words. There isn’t and never was a replacement for that word. It just fits a certain description of a certain something that no other word quite fits.
Gay used to mean happy, then it meant homosexual, then it meant some annoying, uncomfortable, awkward thing. We have words for the first two definitions but we don’t have an alternative to the third. It just made sense in some many different contexts nothing could replace it.
Gay (the three letter word) for the third definition was a thing of beauty and I wish it would come back. Let’s just go back to calls gays homosexuals and we can use gay for a better untapped market.
Cringe?
Cringe seem to have become popular to describe all kinds of annoying, uncomfortable, or awkward things lately. Maybe use that instead since the other two uses of gay were pretty well established when people started using it as the third definition.