In
2006, for the first time in decades, The Doctor toppled a government
on television, bringing Prime Minister Harriet Jones's Golden Age to
an end by whispering six words into the ear of her aide. The six
words “Don't you think she looks tired?” A moment symbolic of any
small act that creates a crack in the foundation of a much larger
idea. Why am I bringing this up? I promise, it has relevance.
Now
before we get too far, I should acknowledge and admit something. I
don't talk personal politics often. I feel I probably should, as I
have friends that range from far Left to far Right, liberal
libertarians to conservative republicans to socialist democrats. I
play my own political hand close to the chest, though, most of the
time. In my younger, more extreme days, I was an old-school pinko
lefty. For years I pretty much identified as communist, and spent a
great deal of time hurling not-well-thought-out insults at the far
Right. I've railed against bigots and religious zealots, and thrown
things at corrupt politicians. I've flirted with charges of
disrupting the peace and inciting riot. And I did most of this in the American Deep South. In retrospect, I consider myself lucky I haven't been disappeared down a dirt road or swampy hollow. I've mellowed in my days,
though, learning the hard lesson that you can indeed have friends
that hold differing political views (something I feel a great many need to learn), but this is the reason I am so
dead-set against Social Justice (capital S, capital J) activists and
their antics these days. Those causes I fought for, and still believe
in, are causes that they're doing more harm than good to. Causes that
I was fighting for before they were co-opted by people with louder,
less rational voices.
Modern Social Justice is the squat-house
built on the shaky foundation of Third-Wave Academic Feminism. And
don't get me wrong, I'm not against the good that Feminism has
done for the world. The first wave, with its women's suffrage (even
if they really were only fighting for white women – one battle at a
time, I suppose), voting rights and property ownership, and the
second-wave with its sexual liberties, workplace equality, and other
noble goals really made some positive change, even if we have to
ignore some of Solanises and Dworkins that these eras might have
spawned. Third-Wave Academic Feminism, though it started strong by
addressing and bringing attention to important subjects like rape
laws, domestic violence, and childcare, has since had no such clear
goal, and therefore has floundered a bit in the modern day, lashing out at whatever it can reach. This lack of focus may have
been what spawned the Social Justice (again, capital S, capital J)
trends of the last decade or so. Identity politics mixed with
cultural Marxism, but completely disregarding class struggle in favor of branding entire groups of people oppressor and oppressed without consulting them first.
So why I'm bringing all of this up right
now is that recently a hashtag and picture campaign called
#WomenAgainstFeminism has sprung up, a sort of reaction to negative
stereotypes (justified or otherwise) of modern Feminism. This has, of
course, also had a knee-jerk reaction of criticism from feminist
sources ranging from the standard “oh you just don't understand
feminism” to the absurd “these women are simply puppets of men.”
The latter I find especially entertaining and appalling, as it's basically
stripping women of their agency to disagree, something that any
first- or second-waver would find detestable, I'm sure. In fact, the
barrage from either side has gotten loud enough that major news
outlets have gotten wind, and in their typically expected modern
sensationalist manner, have started asking the question “Do we even
still need Feminism?” I remember a CNN segment where a female
presenter brought on two other female journalists, and asked the
question. The first agreed with the presenter that absolutely it was,
but the second one's started with “Weeelll....” to the abject horror of the presenter and other journalist.
Whether we do or not, it's six little
words that attacked the foundation that the Social Justice Warriors
have built their flophouse on. If, as a culture, the sacred cow (no
insult intended there) that Feminism is has started to be publicly doubted,
perhaps identity politics as a whole will start to shake apart. While
I hope none of the good works are undone, I can only hope that we can
move into a period where open discussion is once again encouraged
over shutting people's voices out because of the circumstances of
their birth, whatever those circumstances may be, by shouting the
word privilege at them, or blaming all the troubles in the world on
an ethereal, ill-defined conspiratorial organization that may as well
be the Illuminati. There's been entirely too many people of late that feel they can enact positive social change by tweeting obscenities or writing an angry blog-post shaming someone for an accidental slip of the tongue, and not enough attention paid to people pushing for actual change.
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