pokadotsocks asked: What's your take on, for lack of a better term, "anti-SJW" reactions? I mean, what do you think drives it, what do you think is broader political or social character of the people that express that sentiment? And what do you think the response to the people that express that sentiment should be?

Here’s what I think…these ideas about how words have deep and sometimes hidden impacts on people…they developed in isolation at academic institutions. They sat around in the collective consciousness of liberal-arts educated folks like myself for a long time before finally leaking out as the internet brought over-educated people together with people who had never been exposed to these ideas.

When that started happening, it mostly resulted in harmless frustration as people who were 10 steps deep into these issues expressed frustration at people who were busy living lives that did not include feminist critique (and vice versa).

But the internet doesn’t amplify harmless frustration, it amplifies the voices of the most outraged. And the outrage pulls useless, angry, poorly-reasoned arguments out of both sides. Then one side shares the worst of the responses from the other side. And the other side responds in kind.

The anti-SJW side never actually got exposed to the original arguments, they were either exposed to the worst reactions of angry feminists or to the imagined, inflamed, and even impersonated versions that have popped up over the last few years.

After having been been exposed to those judgements (or the imagined versions of them) people feel as if they’ve been told that they are evil or bad or whatever and MUST BEAHVE DIFFERENTLY. And the response of young people, especially young men, when they think someone is trying to control them with what sounds like adversarial and made-up bullshit tends to be frustration and anger. This isn’t just young people and it’s not just men, but it tends to be young men because there’s a tendency among both young people and men to chafe at people attempting to control them.

And, yes, it tends to be young white men, because white people are, on average, less used to people attempting to control them. And, yes, it gets worse if the person attempting to do the controlling is a woman because, well…maybe let’s not go there right now. And there’s nothing like a person who is unused to feeling persecuted, and is maybe also feeling insecure and searching for a way to identify with strength and masculinity (and, in the most severe cases, might even be feeling very lost and lonely and rejected for other reasons), for spending a lot of time getting really angry really publicly.

So that’s what I think it’s about. And I think both sides participated handily in fucking it up. Because this was all supposed to be about empathy, and yet so many people’s first exposure to these theories was being shouted at for being in the world incorrectly. And as much as young white men do not sound like the group of people that needs the most empathy in the world, I think there has been a lot of damage done to the world by belittling their frustrations and calling them unimportant. Even if those frustrations are comparatively unimportant, shouting “ YOUR FRUSTRATIONS ARE COMPARATIVELY UNIMPORTANT” at them is not how to make a better world.