“A fool takes offense where none is intended, and a greater fool takes offense where it is.” -Brigham Young @MaryRobinette @AliRadicali
— Joe Vasicek (@onelowerlight) August 26, 2015
Is it just me, or is there an increasing tendency in today’s world to misconstrue anything and everything as “offensive”? This is especially true of the campus protesters, who take offense in everything from Halloween costumes to the name “Lynch.” But the most disturbing trend is when they find someone “offensive” simply because they had the gall to disagree:
When I saw this exchange between a professor at Yale and one of his students, I was frankly shocked at the intellectual laziness and moral dishonesty of the student. “It is not about creating an intellectual space here!” …seriously? You attend one of the most prestigious universities in the Western world and you don’t think it’s supposed to be “an intellectual space”? What did you expect to do here, weave baskets all day?
But notice that the part where she really flies off the hook is when the professor says “I don’t agree with that.” That’s telling. It shows that the student has no interest in engaging with the professor’s point of view, just in shutting him up. It’s as if she knows that her ideas can’t stand on their own, and need to be enforced by bullying.
Well, it appears that the bullying tactics have worked, because the professor’s wife has stepped down from her teaching position at Yale. The thing that started this whole mess was an email she wrote defending students’ rights to wear Halloween costumes that other students found—you guessed it—”offensive.”
Oh, and that racist Halloween party that launched the Yale student protests? It never happened, natch.
I could go into greater detail, but this is just one example of disagreement being conflated for offensiveness. I’m sure that you could cite others. But it’s not the crybully tactics that shock me, or the ideological blindness: it’s the sheer fragility of the intellectual framework on which the “offended” party’s argument is based.
Seriously, almost anytime anyone gets offended because someone else disagrees with them, their position is so flimsy that a high school dropout could poke holes in it. That’s certainly the case with the Yale student shown above. It’s just like the story of the emperor’s new clothes, where everyone can see that the emperor is naked except for the emperor himself.
In fact, that’s a perfect analogy, because all this talk of “safe spaces” and “right to be offended” is nothing less than an attempt to shelter these students from reality—just like the emperor was sheltered from the reality that his new “clothes” were an absolute farce. And seriously, how is it not farcical for a student to shout “it is NOT about creating an intellectual space!” at one of the world’s most prestigious universities?
This is on my mind right now for a couple of reasons: first, because of an online interaction I had recently with one of these overly-sensitive types, and second, because of an interesting post over on Mad Genius Club. This part of the post was particularly relevant:
I’m a very minor pro, and my tips are probably worth precisely what you pay for them. But here is mine: Pro tip for writers. Learn to put yourself in the shoes, thoughts and headspace of people totally unlike you. Learn to write from their perspective. […] If you can’t do this, you may have one or two good books in you – but essentially you’re writing one character, yourself, and those who are very like you. Unless that’s exceptionally appealing… people get a bit sick of it.
Even if you detest those other people who see the world differently, and wish nothing but ill on them, and plan to destroy them… you’ll write it a lot better understanding what they do and feel and why they think or act as they do.
If you take offense whenever people disagree with you, chances are that you’ll never be able to cut it as a writer. In order to write well, you have to be able to see things from inside the heads of people who aren’t like you and probably don’t agree with you.
This is why I support Sad Puppies: because the SJW types in Science Fiction are usually the first to cry offense over anything that doesn’t fit into their narrow worldviews. This naturally makes them as vehemently opposed to intellectual diversity as they (falsely) claim that the Puppies are to racial, sexual, and cultural diversity. When you look at the books and stories that these people uphold as shining examples of the genre, their rigidly ideological worldview is as plain as the emperor’s new clothes.
Disagreement is not “offensive.” In fact, it’s a sign of respect. If your opponent thought that your opinion or argument wasn’t worth engaging with, then they simply would have ignored you. By saying “I don’t agree,” they are acknowledging your position in an intellectually honest way. When you willfully misrepresent your opponent’s views, or bully them into silence, it is a sign of disrespect that warrants taking offense. And who is most guilty of that? I’ll give you two chances, and the first one doesn’t count.
Apparently kids go to college to be ‘comforted,’ not to learn. How far the Ivy Leagues have fallen…. And she proves her anti-intellectual stance with her poor vocabulary choices and her F-bomb. If this is our next generation of “elites” then America is done, we can’t win or succeed with those toxic mindsets.
Social justice crusaders are still in deep denial about how the Puppies got started. Pretty much everyone in SFF was hanging out minding their own business when voices like Mary Ann Mohanraj, K. Tempest Bradford, and N. K. Jemisin started showing up along with their familiars Jim Hines, John Scalzi and Mary R. Kowal. They started selling the same stupid con game of group defamation anti-Semites and white supremacists have been selling for years. The blatant Orwellian idiocy was they claimed to be an informal anti-defamation league.
Social justice Twitter feeds read like a reversed out Stormfront. Any transgender or gay person beaten up anywhere in America or even just not showing up in a story was laid at the feet of all heterosexuals as proof of what scum “cis scum” are. Same for black people. Anything bad at all which happened to a black person anywhere was laid at the feet of all whites in America. Same for women; any rape or demographic shortage of women in any cultural interest was blamed on all men and their “misogyny.” Laying aside what any of that had to do with SFF, these people came in and started laying waste to the genre. Thus was created the idiotic concept of the “marginalized” and “exclusion” rather than the actual truth of demographics which simply weren’t there.
People well-placed in fandom with actual names and in actual quotes started racial incitement and incitement to hate men. They implemented both formal and informal affirmative action and segregation policies aimed at reducing the footprint of straight white males in core SFF, and they continue to do that to this very day. On top of that they have the bald-faced gall to deny all of that because our social justice comrades are dim-witted serial liars. Not only that, they have reversed out that scenario and accused everyone who are not them of doing what social justice cretins do. Of course, that brings us straight back to what created this cycle of defamation in the first place.
A bunch of people with no names identified only as an amorphous Lovecraftian blob of millions of straight white males have been accused by this Third Wave Feminist cult of everything from global slavery to every rape committed by a man, even including the bizarre claim men “invented” heterosexuality to oppress women because men hate them and in order to keep the percentage of lesbians in the world to a minimal number.
The solution to all this is very simple: group defamation is always wrong. But gerrymander that idea like a congressional district to include out straight white males with transparently childish power/privilege excuses which murder equal protection and there’s going to be a self-reinforcing cycle of the very racism, sexism and genderphobia social justice crusaders supposedly wish to end, a cycle which never existed in the first place. In 100 years of American SFF there has never remotely been anything like a an institutionalized white, male, anti-gay supremacist ideology. However a real one – social justice crusaders – are working day and night to bring their prophecy about by creating enemies where before there were none. Keep telling a person they’re a dog and don’t be surprised when they start barking.
I’m not surprised the woman in that video went nuts. She has taught herself everyone who doesn’t look like her is a racist, misogynist, homophobe. Are we then surprised two of the worst anti-white racists in SFF and who use terms for whites like “cracka ass cracka” and “sour dough-faced” created a racially segregated “safer-space” at the “feminist” WisCon? Funny how – in principle – this brand of “feminism” is indistinguishable from the KKK.
That’s a fascinating history. I’m not saying it’s wrong, but I think the roots of social justice platforming in SF&F go a lot deeper than the current batch of SJWs and their toadies.
At the first WorldCon back in the days of the Bolshevik Revolution and the rise of global communism, a sizable faction within Fandom demanded that the convention formally declare Communism to be the one true form of government. A massive fight broke out between those who thought they were right, and those who thought they were ridiculous and that this sort of nonsense had no place in the Fandom community. This was the start of the schism within Fandom, and it only deepened in subsequent decades.
The thing about SJWs is that they are fundamentally Marxist collectivists. They reject individualism even when it appears to align with their social justice goals: for example, they reject choice feminism in favor of Marxist feminism, which sees the genders as classes engaged in a class struggle (ergo “male privilege,” “the Patriarchy,” the “wealth gap” myth, etc). This is because their values are fundamentally collectivist, and “social justice” is just a nice but vague term that they use to disguise their real purpose: to divide everyone by race/gender/sexuality, and steal from one group in order to give to the others.
So yeah, that’s a fascinating take on the rise of socialial justice in SF&F, but I do think we can trace the roots even deeper, to the days before the Cold War and the Red Scare. Marxism was at the root of Communism, and it’s at the root of today’s toxic identity politics as well. We may have defeated the Soviet Union, but we didn’t defeat its underlying ideology—not yet.
I disagree these people are Marxists or anything even faintly resembling them. Two opposing ideologies is one thing, pretending an ethnic or sexual group is an ideology – or is a “class” of “oppressors” and “oppressed” – and then opposing and “critiquing” it is another. But one does not “critique” Arabs or Asians or “whites”; they are demographies, not ideologies. SJWs are not opposing an ideology but male heterosexual ethnic Europeans as an entire group – globally and throughout history. That’s because the orthodoxy of SJWs is the anti-white lesbian liberation ideology known as Third Wave Feminism. These people do not use “capitalist tears” as a slur but “white tears” and “mansplaining.” Anita Sarkeesian does not critique video games, she critiques men.
The most common buzzwords in SFF SJWdom are rape culture, the Bechdel Test, patriarchy, misogyny, reproductive heterosexuality as a fictional social construct, white privilege, white saviors, heteronormative (compulsory heterosexuality), its cure, genderblindness and gender pronouns, toxic masculinity and all the rest. Those themes are endlessly repeated over and over again and there is only one ideological source for them: lesbian feminism. This is a league of race (intersectionality) and gender which is viciously anti-white, anti-male and anti-heterosexual. Were the KKK to have a literary SFF arm it would in principle look much like Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed and to a certain extent Clarkesworld.
Analogies to a “class” are false. I can then say any disagreement by two parties is a “class struggle” and declare its origins “Marxist.” “Class” has a specific meaning within a 19th century European Marxist ideology emerging from centuries of monarchies. Asserting it is generic basically makes anything and everything in the world “Marxist,” even major vs. minor league baseball or rap vs. country music. Separatist and segregationist “safer-spaces” do not arise from Marxism but from supremacism and calling them “consciousness groups” does not change that. Are the KKK “Marxists”?
When Judith Butler wrote her famous 1990 book Gender Trouble she did not address proto gender feminist Simone de Beauvoir’s obvious Marxism but led off with the most famous of Beauvoir’s quotes: “One is not born a woman but becomes one.” That cherry-picking is typical of Third Wave Feminism which takes what it wants from Lecan, Foulcault, Levi-Strauss, Freud and Derrida and throws the rest away. De Beauvoir herself maintained “the class struggle and the sex struggle intertwine.” Butler, the most famous and influential queer feminist of our time and the originator of the “performative feminism” of the SFF community threw half that out.
For me, the final nail in the coffin is how stunningly unsophisticated our crusaders are. They claim to champion law and anti-defamation but have no concept of what those things actually are, and they are routinely ignorant of (or simply lie about) history, another subject they claim a heightened awareness of. Hate is easy to understand and those who are fooled by that hate as promoting social justice are not “useful intellects” but “useful idiots.” Didn’t Hitler declare Jews Marxists and then say “Let’s get rid of the Marxists”? Hannah Arendt declared that “the most efficient fiction of Nazi propaganda.” Don’t for one minute be fooled by what these people in SFF are and what they are selling. They have declared straight white men to be “homophobes,” “misogynists” and “racists” and say “Let’s get rid of homophobia, misogyny and racism.”
Sargon of Akkad has an excellent video where he analyzes Anita Sarkeesian’s influences and demonstrates a clear connection between Anita’s feminism and Marxism:
Dennis Prager also has an excellent video where he demonstrates that social justice is inherently redistributionist. While there might not be a formal connection between organizations that self-identify as Marxist and today’s SJWs, Marxist ideology of class struggle and redistribution of capital certainly informs their beliefs.
…except that there is evidence of a formal connection between overt Marxism and second- and third-wave feminism. In his interview with Erin Pizzey, founder of the woman’s shelter movement, Sargon of Akkad again uncovers this connection. During the Cold War, modern feminists were essentially “useful idiots” that were used by Communists and Marxists to subvert social institutions in the West and destabilize the society. They succeeded in many of their goals, and today’s SJWs are an offshoot of that subversion effort.
I agree with you that it makes no logical sense to categorize people by culture and race in Marx’s original framework of class struggle. But that’s exactly what these people are doing. Things like “cultural appropriation” only make sense if you view culture in a collectivist way, very similar to how Marx divided society according to class. Sarkeesian herself has said that “feminism is about the collective liberation of women as a social class.” And she means it.
I’ve seen the video and I’m aware of the influence of bell hooks on Sarkeesian and in turn hook’s disdain for capitalism. All I can say is look at what it is Sarkeesian actually does and all she actually does is attack men. Other than vague comments in Sydney, Australia (where she made that comment about “choice feminism”) about not wanting equality with “these systems,” neither Sarkeesian nor the rest of them ever offer concrete solutions.
If you’re really interested in this then read Gayle Rubin’s 1975 essay “The Traffic in Sex,” Adrienne Rich’s 1980 essay about “compulsory heterosexuality” and Judith Butler’s 1990 Gender Trouble and all the rest. Elsewhere such people sometimes use Marxism as an analogy about how to frame these issues but reject it per se. That’s not surprising since the whole affair is nothing more than plausible nonsense used to mask an irrational fear of men and use fake science and history to reconcile their own lesbianism as a back to nature movement and heterosexuality being the fake, the artificial, the variance from the norm. Your merry-go-round with Foz Meadows should convince you nothing these people say makes any sense. The only consistency is a hatred of men and a phobia of heterosexuality. Meadows has been having an ongoing mental breakdown on Twitter for months. In Meadow’s case, it’s pretty clear her claim to be “genderqueer” is just slumming in oppression to gain rewards points with her cult since she is a married mother of a baby. It’s like Rachel Dolezal being transblack. No one who fears “oppression” is going to volunteer themselves to be “oppressed.” There is a reason people used to pass for white; there is no reason for them to do that now. Instead they pass for black, gay or even boast of their mental illness. See: the Strange Horizon piece about “diverse” editors. Each tries to outdo the other in how many oppressions they have which “intersect.”