Ranting Feminist

Finally, I have made a tumblr account and I can make long form posts instead of my famous 500 tweet threads. Shoe0nhead gets in a fair bit of trouble from progressives, sometimes I agree with the criticisms, other times I might half agree, when it comes to the anti-pedo content I have a bit of a different take on this. What I see a lot of twitter users saying is that Shoe0nhead is deliberately promoting an idea that LGBT people are weird with kids or pedos, but I don't really think this is some intentional thing on her end. I would agree that a lot of people in her audience are right wing and do hold these bigoted views about the LGBT and there have been times she has signal boosted stories that fed their narratives.

If you personally find this enough to make you dislike Shoe0nhead, wary of her, or just not want to have anything to do with her then I can understand how you feel that way and I personally think there's not much point in me trying to convince you otherwise if you feel so strongly. The motivation behind what Shoe is doing is she will see something weird around drag queens or gay people and children, then will see some of the weird people on twitter defending said thing or won't see anyone calling it out from a left progressive perspective and will feel like it's best for us to stand up and say "No, this is wrong, we don't agree with this" basically to disavow whatever it is.

The problem is that in doing this denunciation, she will bring more eyes onto whatever the weird thing is and this will further spread a narrative in the eyes of some that gay people are weird around kids. We would all like to believe we are rational and hold our views for rational, well thought out reasons, but the truth is sadly that most of us will take on views based on drawing connections that might not even really exist.

How we come to believe what we do and the role of social media

As an example on the left, we will see plenty of videos shared of police brutality incidents and this has shaped how we view police. While I would argue there's far more empirical evidence for beliefs around police violence, the evidence that convinces most people isn't studies or reading full articles, but usually headlines and videos on social media. We may have come to a correct conclusion based on limited evidence, but what got a lot of us here was the same flawed way people end up in the bigoted camp.

What trends on the right tends to be videos of gay people being weird around kids, feel good videos about troops and cops, videos of random violence from POC and other things that will feed their narrative. While outside these bubbles we can transparently see these videos for what they are, propaganda, if you are seeing enough of these videos it is easy for it to shape how you see various groups. If the majority of what you see of black people is random videos of people being violent, it would make sense that your perceptions of black people would become more negative over time.

I'd love to believe that most people become left wing by being educated, looking at the facts, and based on the empirical research, but reality is far stupider than that. In reality most of these people came to the correct conclusion by hearing others vaguely gesture towards research and by seeing a handful of videos. We aren't paragons of logic and reason and it's silly to think any political side is. It's important to be aware of our biases so that we don't spread misinformation that happens to reinforce a world view.

RE: Shoe0nhead promoting a narrative

I realistically can not deny that Shoe0nhead has been at times useful to the right in disseminating things that further their goals and narrative. If this alone is enough to make you dislike her then I am not personally going to try to convince you that you can't or your feelings aren't valid. I can understand why people are upset. I only disagree about her motivations. If you find her motivations irrelevant then that's up to your judgement and I respect your choice to avoid who you want or like/dislike who you want.

My belief is that her social circles and timeline is full of a lot of right wing propaganda and people who will show her some of the worst examples of LGBT people that exist. I personally have had friends who were right leaning who would share me similar stuff about children doing drag shows at gay nightclubs and while that is certainly strange and no nightclub is a child appropriate place (not even mentioning the time being far too late for a child or the conflicts of interest around the parents making money from their child etc), I never posted about this stuff because I feel like the attention it gets is highly selective. When LGBT people are a bit weird around kids it gets disproportionate attention from the right and if you do take part in talking about it, there's a risk of promoting a connection where there isn't one.

We have entire TV shows like dance moms and about child pageants that while criticised don't get the same level of ire as one off out of context 20s clips of drag performers near children. I say near children because even if the performer is avoiding the child or not facing the child, people will still be outraged. Personally, I think a lot of responsibility of parents to bring their children to child appropriate venues gets lost in the conversation and random drag queens are held accountable for some Karen deciding to bring their kids to a drag show advertised or designed for adults.

The dilemma around the silence

The thing a lot of conservatives will say about all of this stuff is that THE LEFT is silent on this because we are fine with pedophiles or we are trying to cover up some kind of gay sex abuse cult. I believe personally that shoe0nhead is trying to counter that narrative, but I don't totally agree with her choice to engage because I don't think these people will ever change their views and instead she will just be in the box of "one of the good ones" while the rest of us progressives will be seen as complicit in some kind of abuse thing.

The problem here is that there is a genuine reticence on the left to call out weird sexualisation around children when it is LGBT people, but this isn't really because of us. It's because the right is so desperate to paint all lefties as permissive of pedophilia or make a connection between gay people and pedophilia that we don't want to ever concede anything. If we concede that some gay people are a bit weird around kids or that some drag shows are age inappropriate, I do think there's absolutely a risk of the right taking that and applying it to everything that offends their delicate sensibilities.

I can sometimes concede too much to the right by being good faith, but the problem with this is that it alienates people on my side and rhetorically looks bad for my side. I think that Shoe0nhead is a good person and not homophobic, but she's making a rhetorical error of conceding too much to the right or unintentionally supporting their narratives at times by basically buying in to the idea of their respectability politics bullshit. There are individual random right wingers who will gain respect for her, as a person for her "telling it like it is", but ultimately it doesn't do much to actually influence their views or push them away from thinking of LGBT people as predators and so I would agree with certain criticisms of Shoe, but I don't believe she is a malicious actor in all of this and treating her as such only pushes her away and makes us look bad.

For me, my criticisms of shoe0nhead aren't about thinking she's a bad faith actor or malicious, but I do think rhetorically this is not effective left wing activism. She doesn't really seem to consider herself an activist and I get that. I think that in order to concede the points about the weird examples of LGBT people being sexual around children, we need to also call out the right for being over reactive to gay people just being around children. The issue with these concessions being in a vacuum is that they hear "This dude in a g-string shouldn't be dancing in front of kids" and take from it "These people as a group shouldn't be around kids". Nothing challenges their inherent biases that gay people don't act like this generally.

Rhetorically concession can be an effective tool, but if you do it too much you are basically taking Ls constantly and doing nothing to actually challenge their views or narratives. What I would suggest is that shoe balances these takes by also pointing out the many times where right wingers spread misinformation about the LGBT, the times LGBT people are doxed merely for existing, being teachers and so on. Calling out the weird stuff from random LGBT people is fine in a vacuum, but it really has to be balanced within the context of the full situation or else you are just going to end up promoting one side of this situation, whether you intend to or not.

This sort of thing is why I'm a bit wary of people who consider themselves "in the middle" on issues like the anti vax movement.