Sorry in advance if I spill many, many pages of my guts out onto all you poor folk, but intersectional theory and all the other Tumblr SJ beliefs that have become popular over the last few years is something that just splits me in two. On one hand, most of what 'SJW's say is true and correct. The majority can always hurt the minority worse than the other way around, bigotry is ingrained in society rather than confined to isolated incidents etc. But there's always been an element of bad faith, of sectarianism, of spitefulness that's always kept me leery. Like, of course the Nation of Islam making inroads into the mainstream wouldn't be as bad as a resurrection of the Klan would be, but isn't giving minorities a moral blank check to be as nasty as they want to be both a) an admission that social groups can't be held to the same standard and b) a recipe for disaster if they actually do gain power?
There's other issues I have too, like the conflation of everyone in the oppressor class as a monolith who thinks, acts, and brutalizes as a single mass of grinning malevolence. Or the blind obedience demanded of those higher on the intersectionality scale towards those lower. Or the endless circular firing squads. Or the relentless negativity. Or the creeping influence of the genuinely hateful fringe. Or the unquestionable dogma and the smug, sneering tone with which it's enforced. I mean, don't shoot the message and all, but goddamn the messengers need to sort their shit out.
Of course, the new right wing forming in places like the Manosphere is both more vile and more dangerous. And since I'm positioned pretty high on the social hierarchy (barring class and maybe religion), I'm kind of a speedbump on the road to progress just by existing*. But I'm not sure I like what this new left is turning into.
* Which leads me to the crux of my dilemma. Women have an endless catalogue of the horrors men have inflicted on them. Likewise, the centuries of European imperialism and it's aftershocks read like a competition to see who can inflict the most vicious torture on non-whites possible. Maybe we are beyond redemption. Maybe the extremists are right to want us dead. And yet, both whites and men have been creative, selfless and noble just as readily, past and present. Should the son hang for the father's crime, even if he has an element of the father within him? Did the father deserve to hang in the first place? I can't say I agree - but then, I'm biased :P.
