I’m a recovered Social Justice Warrior (SJW). I think that makes me very well placed to take on the SJW mindset; few of the vocal SJW opponents strike me as having fallen into that particular blind spot, and often demonstrate lack insight into the condition by their polarised responses to it. I suggest that if you were not ever trapped in SJW immaturity you should not automatically assume some kind of superiority; plenty of bigoted, narrow-minded individuals never consider matters of social justice at all, and without historically applied ‘social justice’ many lives in the world now would be significantly impoverished, particularly here in the West.
But I see the contemporary SJW as a shallow, anachronistic, regressive reflection of this positive influence, demonstrating a narrow-minded self-righteous superiority that has nothing to do with improving the world at large, and everything to do with self-soothing, projection of personal issues, and scapegoating. We obviously all start from immaturity, and hopefully we get the chance to grow up. If you think yourself an SJW, and your instinct is to stop reading this now – pause, consider what you have to lose if you are right, and I am just a reactionary (probably misogynist) gasbag with no insight to offer? If your attitude and position is secure you have nothing to lose and potentially much to gain by reading me – you can see where I went wrong and lost the plot, and avoid making the same mistake I did when I thought I was ‘growing up’. You may even be able to help me recover. The SJW mindset embodies a range of attitudes – on race, identity, culture, gender, etc. For focus I will examine gender here – my journey from feminism to sanity. I think I can start my story at primary school:
“Hands up who thinks boys are better than girls?”
This is the question my teacher asked our class when I was 8-years-old. My instinct was immediate – ‘stupid question, of course not, we’re the same’. Then I noticed that all the other boys had put their hands in the air, along with 3 girls – half the girls in the class! I put my hand up, not wanting to stand out or be teased. The resistant girls were sullen and defiant.
“Who thinks boys and girls are the same?”
No hands in the air… My hand should have been... I felt ashamed, and cowardly.
I think I spent many years with that bubbling away in the back of my awareness, and the effect of it was to radicalise me somewhat. I grew up sharply aware of the feminist critique of patriarchal society, and fully endorsing it. I remember an argument I had with someone at Sixth Form College, where I bluntly stated that I thought that all repeat rape offenders should be castrated... I didn’t really understand his horror. To be fair on myself, I was being somewhat utilitarian about it back then, and rather disregarding the question of physically mutilating people as a solution or punishment, as well as the deeper (and surely actually pertinent) question of how rooted in sexual function rape actually is anyway.
As a teenager, women represented to me the idealised ‘other’ – they were compassionate where men were emotionally absent. They were considerate, where men were selfish. They were sociable, where men were unreliable. I witnessed a world driven to a precarious edge with masculine destructive values of war, aggression, profiteering, brutality, oppression, cruelty and exploitation. Women represented to me the soft, gentle, quiet and beautiful victims, whilst men were the harsh, violent, noisy and ugly perpetrators. As I now understand it, all I saw was the dark shadow of masculinity, and the creative light of the feminine. I consciously recognised little of the dark shadow of femininity, or the creative light of the masculine. This may have at least as much to do with my identity then as a heterosexual teenager as it reflected my personal environment and experiences. Hindsight and life experience now also informs me that all of these ideas were being framed and buttressed by how the world was being presented to me publicly – in media, books, and general culture.
At some point in my early twenties my understanding began to shift. I remember a discussion I had with a girlfriend at the time, in which I was complaining about Margaret Thatcher, and arguing that Thatcher was basically a woman dressed up in a whole range of stupid male ideas, attitudes and postures, and that she didn’t represent a breakthrough for women in politics at all… To my great surprise my girlfriend completely disagreed with me. She argued that Thatcher was indeed a woman in every sense, and that she actually embodied a whole range of stupid female ideas, attitudes and postures that needed little reference to men. I began to get the uncomfortable feeling that a subtle sexism in me was being uncovered – that my ‘protection’ of women was generic and impersonal, and ironically somewhat patronising; at the expense of grasping a deeper, more complex reality. My girlfriend persuaded me (thanks Anna)... and my opinions began to subtly shift.
My current position on these issues began to crystallise by my early thirties. At 31 I was studying for a Degree on Human Rights, and during one particular seminar this gender issue arose once more. This was a class that was dominated by women, and on this particular day the subject of our session was some aspect of Women’s Rights. I asked the group (in honesty, I was initially cautiously indirect, but what follows is accurate :) Why it was that we were having yet another session on Women’s issues, when looking through the syllabus it was clear that we had no time set aside for Men? Similarly, the UN declaration on Human Rights, and many of the subsidiary documents, had sections devoted to Women, amongst other identities, but nothing on Men. I pointed out that we were studying Human Rights – not Men’s Rights, Women’s Rights, Children’s Rights – but Human – and Human covers us all. If we’re going to look at subsets of this, it surely should be balanced, not discriminatory? …
These views were not 100% popular… There followed a somewhat heated exchange. I was ‘reminded’ by several of my colleagues that ‘we live in a patriarchal society where women suffer discrimination all the time precisely because they are women’. Sound familiar? Replace ‘women’ with your favourite victim identity… This is of course a very common and familiar theme repeated ad nauseum by feminists in our contemporary ‘culture wars’. I countered that so-called patriarchal society actually affects everyone in it, men and women alike, and that both genders have difficult consequences that are specific to them. I asked the group;
“In all the wars of this twentieth century, how many men have been killed, and how many women…?”
A female colleague riposted – “How many men have been raped, and how many women…?”
At that point the Professor facilitating the group – a Man I should point out – said,
“I don’t want to get into a debate about whether rape is worse than murder; I think we should move on...”
I sat there, incredulous, resisting the temptation to rudely laugh out loud. Perhaps it is because I am male, but I have to say that though I have no desire to be either raped or murdered, I know which one I would resign myself to if forced, and I wouldn’t take too much time working it out either... The point, of course, is that social imbalance impacts everyone in that society, and cherry-picking ‘issues’ and ignoring problems suffered by the now labelled ‘perpetrators’ is unfair, inaccurate, and fundamentally dishonest.
Now, anyone interested enough to have read this far will be beginning to get a flavour of where my development was going. Here is the gist of the issue as I assessed it seven years ago (in a formal presentation to a group - again, mostly women), and I think this largely still holds:
‘It has seemed to me, for the past 15 years or so, that what has been described as patriarchal society is not a system of social organisation that specifically favours one gender at the expense of the other – rather – it is a system of fairly rigid social roles, which favours one gender over the other depending on the role in question, largely dictated by environmental context. For example, patriarchy largely emphasises that men have more power and influence in social leadership roles –instances being head of the family, head of the tribe, and head of local/national/international government. However patriarchy consequently emphasises that women have more power and influence in internal family roles – specifically, in the quality and nature of child rearing and education. Women also often have emphasised network roles between families and wider groups. To put this bluntly, men may well control current social policy, but those same men’s attitudes, opinions and personalities have been largely determined through their upbringing by women. In temporal terms; patriarchy has men controlling the present, and women controlling the future, and seen from either perspective, the other may seem to hold all the advantages. As Marie Maguire describes it:
‘In our society each sex has access to different forms of power and control which arouse intense envy in those who lack them.’
My perspective on this is largely the same argument as that adopted by Warren Farrell in ‘The Myth of Male Power’. On the subject of power and influence Farrell notes that the first few years of life are acknowledged to be of critical psychological importance in developing personalities. The traditional role of women gives them an overwhelming influence in this sense on the next generation. Farrell writes:
“Almost every woman had a primary role in the “female-dominated” family structure; only a small percentage of men had a primary role in the “male-dominated” governmental and religious structures.”
So by any measure, this leaves the overwhelming majority of men without power or influence…’
Where I live feminism has achieved wonderful things in the past century. Sanity must recognise that the real battle – the intellectual war that has resulted in full equality of opportunity in principle and law in our society – was won many decades ago. Attitudes in the wider community take longer, in some instances generations – and attitudes in the individual are a matter of personal growth, and cannot (and should not) be legislated – or hammered in by blame, or shrieking shame. But the consensus views enshrined in legal and social arrangements were settled a long time ago. In other parts of the world this does not hold of course – my critique is directed at the SJW feminists, both male and female, who are screaming their divisive and accusatory identity politics here in the West. Power and opportunity Imbalance between groups, and genders, and especially individuals - hurts everyone, especially individuals – only superficiality and immaturity reads into these issues ‘group winner/loser dichotomies’, and we are all superficial and immature in many, many areas, at some time, by default. By even considering themselves an SJW, the immature (in this way at least) individual is demonstrating the same error – a fixed identity created in the mind, rather than the reality of a fluid process of being which, when unshackled from crude belief traps, can begin to grow, expand, and perhaps grow up.
So I travelled, in a couple of decades, from an idealisation and fragmented comprehension of ‘women’, which I consider fundamental to the contemporary SJW stance, to considering the possibility that men, in many important instances, may actually be significantly disempowered and disadvantaged in modern society. I do not pretend that this ‘gender’ issue covers the breadth of SJW posturing, but I do argue that a similar trajectory of thought development applies. If SJW theorising and justification rests in anything, it rests on the notion that certain ‘identities’ – women, minorities, etc. – are victims of certain other ‘identities’ – men, whites, the rich, etc. Some opponents of SJW’s simply invert this ‘identitarian’ model, and accuse other ‘identities’ of being the real problem – SJW’s themselves as a ‘group’ are the problem for instance, or liberals, or socialists, or Marxists, or Zionists, or Jews, or psychopaths, or the rich, or… … ! I reject all of this utterly, for the same reasons. It is crude. Each human being is unique, and our complexity far outstrips our capacity to create descriptive stories, beliefs and theories about each other, however much those stories comfort us as knowing who we are, and are not. This immature position drastically overestimates the human capacity to accurately mentally model the reality we find ourselves living in – it is fundamentally arrogant and brimming with hubris and the injection of a little humility, maturity and inclusive perspective is suggested.
So identifying ‘groups’ as though any individual, unique, experiential human being can be simply pegged into such a slot, and then all becomes clear about them… is crude, immature, and leads to dramatic errors of judgement, regardless of the ever present good intentions. There are uncountable tensions and unanswered questions raised by this summary of course, but that is inevitable, and this is not the space to address them. If anyone reads this, and actually wants me to develop one or more of these strands I will consider doing that. But for now, I hope this has been of some value, and prompted some useful thought. Love to SJW’s and feminists alike. Db
