What's your take on, for lack of a better term, "anti-SJW" reactions? I mean, what do you think drives it, what do you think is broader political or social character of the people that express that sentiment? And what do you think the response to the people that express that sentiment should be?
Here’s what I think…these ideas about how words have deep and sometimes hidden impacts on people…they developed in isolation at academic institutions. They sat around in the collective consciousness of liberal-arts educated folks like myself for a long time before finally leaking out as the internet brought over-educated people together with people who had never been exposed to these ideas.
When that started happening, it mostly resulted in harmless frustration as people who were 10 steps deep into these issues expressed frustration at people who were busy living lives that did not include feminist critique (and vice versa).
But the internet doesn’t amplify harmless frustration, it amplifies the voices of the most outraged. And the outrage pulls useless, angry, poorly-reasoned arguments out of both sides. Then one side shares the worst of the responses from the other side. And the other side responds in kind.
The anti-SJW side never actually got exposed to the original arguments, they were either exposed to the worst reactions of angry feminists or to the imagined, inflamed, and even impersonated versions that have popped up over the last few years.
After having been been exposed to those judgements (or the imagined versions of them) people feel as if they’ve been told that they are evil or bad or whatever and MUST BEAHVE DIFFERENTLY. And the response of young people, especially young men, when they think someone is trying to control them with what sounds like adversarial and made-up bullshit tends to be frustration and anger. This isn’t just young people and it’s not just men, but it tends to be young men because there’s a tendency among both young people and men to chafe at people attempting to control them.
And, yes, it tends to be young white men, because white people are, on average, less used to people attempting to control them. And, yes, it gets worse if the person attempting to do the controlling is a woman because, well…maybe let’s not go there right now. And there’s nothing like a person who is unused to feeling persecuted, and is maybe also feeling insecure and searching for a way to identify with strength and masculinity (and, in the most severe cases, might even be feeling very lost and lonely and rejected for other reasons), for spending a lot of time getting really angry really publicly.
So that’s what I think it’s about. And I think both sides participated handily in fucking it up. Because this was all supposed to be about empathy, and yet so many people’s first exposure to these theories was being shouted at for being in the world incorrectly. And as much as young white men do not sound like the group of people that needs the most empathy in the world, I think there has been a lot of damage done to the world by belittling their frustrations and calling them unimportant. Even if those frustrations are comparatively unimportant, shouting “ YOUR FRUSTRATIONS ARE COMPARATIVELY UNIMPORTANT” at them is not how to make a better world.
I don’t know man. I get that empathy with the other side is important. I get that. I try to have it even when it’s hard. But there’s just something about this post, which I think attempts to build empathy for the “anti-SJW” crowd but isn’t willing to go there on why they might respond poorly to “angry feminists” that doesn’t quite sit well with me.
I understand that everyone has very real frustrations, and that it isn’t fair to tell people their pain isn’t real because someone else has it worse. Or yell at them for not knowing a thing that, well, how would they have known.
Still, I’ve had to delete thousands of death threats, rape threats, and racial slurs from my comments. I get scary messages from people who say they intend to hurt me. My stomach drops every time I get a call from an unknown number and I try not to ever be too specific of where I live or work because I fear someone who has made or watched one of these videos about me will show up and try to harass me or worse, cause me physical harm.
And even while I type this, I feel the compulsion to hedge. To soften my argument, to say, “well maybe I’m reading this wrong and maybe you’re right and maybe this response is simply proof of your argument” but it feels a bit of a false equivalency of the extent to which we’ve both fucked this “conversation” up.
You’re right. This post created equivalency where it doesn’t deserve to be. There is a wrong side of this argument to be on, and that’s clear. It’s the side that has the most people patting each other on the back for really well-worded and clever threats of sexual violence. I did not intend for this to seem like a pass for the anti-SJW crowd.
To say that both groups had a hand in creating the situation is not to say that one group is not consistently more incorrect (and disgusting) than the other.
We under-estimated people’s ability to feel judged and controlled and weak and threatened. We thought they would understand their power. But they do not, they feel powerless despite their power.
And a great many of the evils in the world are created by powerful people who have convinced themselves that they are weak.
Deciding you are weak is extremely seductive. It gives you an excuse to have failed, and a reason to believe it’s not even worth trying to succeed. It is freedom from the pressure that has been placed on you by society. It is an excuse for apathy that isn’t your own brain chemistry or bad decisions. So when you’re told that you are strong and powerful (and that your skin color and gender give you every advantage) after you have decided you are weak, that is a threat to an identity without which you have to confront some unpleasant things.
This is not an excuse, it is only a useful thing to understand.
I did not mean this to sound like a strategy for, like, healing the horrible people in your comments, I meant to outline how this happened. I stand by that. I think that, at this point, the lines have been drawn and the culture war begun. I do not know how to stop it, but I do think that compassion and understanding are two of the many tools in our toolkit that we must use.
