Hate Goggles

It's a strange thing to be a progressive. Whilst the conservative-minded are working to retain the Old Ways, we progressives have to fight centuries of history and tradition to introduce changes we know to be better for us in the long run. This kind of effort tends to beget strong opponents, and at times even fierce enemies, the kind of people who work bitterly to block your efforts, making this whole process all the more difficult to maintain.

In the activist world, we call it "burnout" or just "fatigue", but the result is always the same: good people with good ideas about how to make the world better are beaten down by "haters" (for lack of a better term), and eventually give up and join the apathetic masses we progressives work daily to bring over to our side.

The worst part of this, the really damning part, is that the people that bite, and claw, and vehemently oppose many of these progressive voices are progressives themselves, and it's time we recognise this and take a step back to ask if we're really accomplishing what we've set out to do, or if we're actually part of the problem.

You've probably seen this before: the executive who chooses a hybrid over a hummer is criticised for being not a real environmentalist because she drives at all. The people who commute by bike are criticised because their bike parts aren't fair trade, and the fair-trade, off-grid super-hippie types are criticised for eating meat. Nothing is good enough for us. Everyone is, at best, a failure, at worst, a hypocrite, and this is kind of crab-barrel thinking is knee-capping all of our efforts for a better future.

Nowhere is this sort of piety contest more prominent than in the feminist blogosphere (yes, I just used that word unironically). Political positions are taken in areas like motherhood, pornography, or prostitution, and people are regularly ostracised from "the community" for holding dissenting views.

When you start considering privilege, things get even more absurd. Honest conversations about white/cis-gendered/cis-sexual/male/whatever privilege are all too often highjacked by people clamouring to be better than other participants. Attacks resembling "you don't understand because you aren't X" are far too common and undermine the whole purpose of the conversation.

This all became painfully apparent this past week with the very public mental breakdown of Hugo Schwyzer on Twitter. Here we had a prominent male feminist, one of the rare few in the world flipping out because he is quite literally mentally ill, and he was met with enthusiastic condemnation and calls for his suicide.

This post is not a defence of Hugo Schwyzer. I think it's safe to say that he has some serious mental problems that have both driven his career and directed some deplorable acts. This post is about our goals as a progressive majority, and how they're consistently thwarted by should-be allies.

Schwyzer is far from a model citizen, but his goals were (mostly) the same as you and me: a more equal and just society. Many of his detractors though would make completely unjustified statements about his writing because they saw what they wanted to read in his articles. Posts about the complex process of consent were re-cast as "capitalising on sexually assaulting one of his partners by writing articles about her blaming her for not saying no to him enough", and another one about cross-cultural biases around feminism was actually "insulting and mocking his own POC [people of colour] students".

Try reading those articles without first considering the author (if that's even possible). You may find that your opinion of the piece will change when you take off the hate goggles and just accept that much of what he says is worthy of note.

This kind of thing is poison to any attempt at progress, and at the root of much of it is pure unadulterated ego. Just watching the Mikki Kendall interview about her hashtag #solidarityisforwhitewomen will tell you everything you need to know about how toxic this environment is. The self-important aggrandising, the she-said-she-said of it all, it's really all just petty infighting. Couple this with the remarkable assumption that what this one person, a blogger syndicated on a few other blogs is so important as to warrant so much attention for directing her army of followers to berate someone having a mental breakdown, and you have the orgy of ego and mob mentality that is the blogosphere.

This is more than just unhelpful, it's approaching a level of public masturbation that's downright creepy. If we have any interest in actually making progress in the areas we all claim to care about, we need to take a moment to pause, reflect, and perhaps check our egos and possibly step away from the keyboard for a while.

And no, comments won't be enabled on this post. I've no interest in wading into this mess. I just felt like I needed to say my piece.